I saw one video where some paint company the pigment had separated so much they had to mash it with a stick to get it to mix properly. I'm guessing it was sat on a shelf for years.
There's also a problem that can occur in transit where if the acrylic paint has simply frozen it can basically destroy the paint. Kinda like if you freeze a bottle of booze, the water will freeze and force the alcohol to one side(also known as freeze distillation) but with paint it can get so messed up in one freeze/thaw cycle you'll never get it mixed back up(also assumes the medium itself didn't start to polymerize). Goobertown did a video on it recently(as much of a creepy faggot as he is, he does occasionally post interesting videos) where one of the paints he tried it with was basically dead after the first one, and some didn't have an issue at all. It's probably not color specific so much as it is formulation specific as I've run into this with some paints over the years.
Modern cadmiums/chromiums are really not nearly as toxic as the old stuff though and this is especially true for the tiny amounts we use for minis. Do not mistake me as permitting brush lickers to be allowed anything but finger paints and crayons.
This is true, but they also don't have the same opacity as their original formulations(especially regarding cadmium there's cadmium free substitutes used by paint manufacturers now). Additionally not every version of cobalt or chromium oxide is as toxic as the stuff sold up through the 50s and even 80s either. But also because new pigments have come into use over time like bismuth yellow, and YInMn blue will eventually come down in cost and replace things. But some of the "good stuff" even in the form used as a pigment was absolutely toxic as fuck(there's some artsy fartsy youtube channels these days that go over some of them like this one
https://www.youtube.com/@bekahart/videos and their shorts page).
That said, there's other problems with licking brushes even for pigments that aren't just heavy metals. You've got flow improvers, pH balancers, biocides, etc. in paint even though it's "non-toxic" it's still not meant to be ingested. An example of this would be if you look at a Citadel paint pot on the back of the label in incredibly tiny fucking text you'll see CMIT/MIT(I don't believe it's on the washes and contrast paints) and that's a warning that it contains ChloroMethylIsoThiazolinone and MethylIsoThiazolinone to keep mold and bacteria from growing in the paint pots. There was a very early run of citadel technical paints I recall being discussed ages ago (mordant earth and shit like that) which didn't have them and they turned rancid on people in transit(which is a different potential toxicity problem).
So yes, stop licking brushes people.
Great respect for seeing someone else also taking up the cause of weaning hobbyists off the hobby tax and distribution of information on how pigments themselves actually work. Even if most hobbyists don't want to move to enamels and oils even just real artists acrylics is a huge step up.
Fuck cheap enamels(apparently Testors is finally done, but there's still so much inventory sitting around... that's a different topic), but that said the various laquer based paints people have used for scale miniatures for years(tanks, planes, gundams, etc.) and oils are simply more tools for the miniature painting toolbox.
And yes, I like spreading knowledge about other shit that can be used, because why the hell not. I don't make money off of some mini painting company selling an overpriced teaspoon of paint. I'd rather see people learn, improve over time, and see the results. Then there's also other shit like most people relying on the basic color wheel... that's actually been obsolete for the past 80 or so years with the Munsell system doing a better job(it represents color in a 3d space using hue, value, and chroma to define them) and gets used by pigment and paint companies, and so on(it also does a better job of predicting the mixing of single pigment paints, but it isn't as simple and requires math to do but there's tools for that if you actually want to get that deep into it, then there's digital color spaces for monitors, TVs, it keeps on going).
It really is just contemporary Mordheim, which isn't a bad thing but the game is trendy, forgettable slop that will be held up by a few diehards. With all the shooting in the game it benefits from a crowded, ideally urban table. It really is a shame, years and years of build up totally nuked by hot headed social media managers and the original discord mods.
Apparently they announced a couple weeks back that they hired Jervis Johnson to write rules for a new faction, and people cheered. I see it as the team not being creative enough to figure out interesting rules. Not to disparage Johnson, Chambers, etc. but when I see their names attached to projects these days I see it as one of three things:
- They're getting paid out the ass as consultants. Great for them, potentially dumb for your business
- They aren't actually doing anything and are just being used for marketing(again, good for them getting paid)
- You're getting their leftover notes from 20 years ago that they couldn't sell to someone else previously(which again, good for them getting paid for not having to do much work)
None of these are things that would get me excited about a game, but rather laugh at how sad the industry is, that while it's massive with a global reach now people are so uncreative they
need to go back to these guys to come up with anything that might be worth a shit.
