Lethal Shadows Fluorescent Paints Review — Bright Lights

When I started painting in 2015, there weren’t too many brands out there. As I mentioned in my review of the Army Painter Fanatic line, I was lost in a sea of tools and brands, but paint wise, there were just a handful of companies offering paint. Nearly ten years later, there are at least fifteen brands I can name off the top of my head. Personally, I own twelve different brands in my paint collection, and I don’t even use all of them!

We’ve reached a classic problem in branding and product development: a saturated market with a lot of similar products. Look at the hair dye industry, and the only way to tell companies apart is to get into the nitty gritty details of each product that exists on the shelf. For the hobby painter or gamer, this can lead to a lot of confusion about what to buy and why.

For paints, I try to break it down into several areas of quality:

– How much pigment is in the paint
– How thick or thin is the paint
– How easy is it to use the paint
– Bottle/Cap Design

Considering these markers of quality, I find the Fluorescent line of paints from Lethal Shadows Miniatures to be hit or miss, and I’ll make some specific recommendations on which paints I definitely think you should try out.

Fluorescent paints are certainly their own tricky product themselves. Typically you’re looking at paints that are bright, poppy colors. They are best at creating magical effects, object source lighting (OSL), fire, and weapon glow, but they do have other uses, most notably UV interactions. You can use fluors sparingly if you want to boost a highlight, and help create a transition from a mid tone to a bright highlight. Don’t look at painting a model only with fluors, or else you’re going to have a bad time with weird coverage, and you won’t get the brightness you desire.  So both in my tests and recommendations to you, keep that in mind.

Let’s dive into the paint.  These paints are a great balance of thick and thin, which is great. I love being able to thin down a paint to the consistency I need, and they retain their pigmentation as you thin it down. For my tests, I used a normal wet palette as you can see below, and a dry palette, using some Warpaints Retarder to thin my paint down (the retarder also has additives which help slow down the paint drying process, meaning better blending abilities.

 

Looking at each paint, they are highly pigmented, which is great for a fluor. The yellow, green, pink, and magenta are the standouts here. The green and yellow mix extremely well to get that warpstone magical feeling on a model. The magenta and pink work together very well, so if you’re looking for bright magenta plasma coils on your space marines, this is great.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, I’m not so hot on the oranges, reds, and blues. The blue can mix very well with the green, resulting in a pleasant teal color, perhaps for a subtle magical effect for a druid or cleric focused model, but blue on its own isn’t a very fluorescent color, and while this is a bright blue, it’s not really doing anything that I couldn’t get out of other blues.

The red and oranges are fine, but if you have a good orange and red in your collection, I don’t see what these really add to the party. As you can see in my tests, the yellows/greens really outshine the rest of the range, and remember, less is more.

Ease of use for these paints is pretty solid. In my tests, I painted them from the bottle, thinned down, and on a dry palette, all of which provided similar results. I will point out that these paints are wonderful when drybrushed, as they can easily add that light, airbrush feel a good drybrushing can achieve. Because these paints pour at a great consistency, they’re extremely versatile, and this makes me want to look into some of their other paints.

 

 

Now, the last point I’d like to touch on about these paints is the most unfortunate, and it’s the bottle design. The paint is served up in 20ml dropper bottles, which is a great deal, but the cap system is extremely finicky. There is a locking mechanism on the bottles, which is intended for making a solid seal, but on two bottles it broke, which means air gets into the bottles, which means I have to use a poke tool in order to get to the paint. Also, if the cap breaks, it can and will come off the bottle as you’re pouring paint.  At other times, the entire cap assembly comes off.  I imagine this will get fixed over time, and it’s not really a deal breaker for a seasoned painter like myself.

To bring it back to the top of this article, brand saturation is a problem in the painting industry, and it will come to a head eventually, so enjoy it while it lasts. We are so lucky to have lots of options and brands to choose from, at a wide range of price points. As painters, we should try other brands, especially small ones that are trying to beat out the big guys, because if you look closely, you’ll find something you’ll love.  For me, the green, yellow, and magenta are taking a permanent slot in my collection

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