 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today it's finally time for the 300th video we are going to do the ultimate metal paint showdown. If you know me, you know I love true metallic metals. I use it for my armies, I use it for competition pieces. I love the power, the shine, the look, the finish of true metallic metals and so today we're going to take 22 different steel metallic paints and put them in a head-to-head competition. Here is a quick overview of all the steel paints we will be looking at today. Is it every single steel paint on the market? No I'm sure there's a few I missed but darn it it's a heck of a lot of them and we're going to put them up in a head-to-head competition looking at sort of visible pigment, their shine and finish and ultimately their metaliness and see who comes out on top. So here we go. We have 22 identical shields, 22 different metallic paints and 22 little things of paint. We begin with a lead belcher. Round 1 is all about visible pigment and how easy it is to paint with it. So we start with lead belcher. It goes on pretty smooth. So looking pretty nice, decent enough sheen. Storm host silver is next up. Brighter opacity is one of the things I'm looking for in this first pass. With applying one coat am I going to get a clean application and am I going to get visible pigment showing? How hard is it? How smoothly does the paint flow? How effective does it cover the area? Now one of the reasons I want to test for all of these things right up front is because I don't have time to go two, three, five layers of metallics to get a metal shine. I've never understood why we put up with that. Metal paints should be better than that. There are plenty of metal paints on the market with an opacity that they will cover in one clean go that you can do one layer of it and get a nice solid coverage. No streakiness, no primer showing through. So let's see which ones stand up to the test. It should be fairly obvious to you just from watching this. Some of these are clearly at this initial test far superior. You can see how smooth and easy they go on and you can see how opaque they cover. An important thing to recognize here is that some of these paints are made from metal. So they have aluminum powder in them. Some of them are made from mica. Most cheap metal paints we use have mica pigments and mica is never going to look as reflective as metal. That's going to come into effect later when we look at shine and finish and metaliness. The other important thing to recognize here is that some of these are what we would think of as sort of traditional model paints. Whereas some of these are air paints meaning they've been pre-thinned and they're in some kind of balance where they're more ready to go through an airbrush. Now the important part about that for our purposes, most of the time when you buy air paints you're just getting less pigment and it's kind of a worse paint. Not always, but most of the time. However, with metallics, because it's such a heavy pigment, whether mica or aluminum, the reality is those pigments are very large. They don't grind down as small as other types of pigments. And so when they need to go through an airbrush, the airbrush paints usually have a much finer ground pigment. This means that for our purposes they're going to look a lot better because smaller, finer ground pigment is actually what makes for a better looking finish. It allows you to distribute the pigment load more evenly across the miniature. It also allows for a more even coverage. When you have larger pigment in a bad suspension it can't as easily lock into the chemical bonds that the acrylic medium is creating and it looks splotchy like this speed metal that just let me down here so hard. Just terrible coverage. As you can see from each one of them I'm trying to apply them under the same light with the same brush on the same surface so we get as close as possible to a real head to head test. This one by the way is from Badger Minitair. It's kind of hidden here but it's their metal look pure silver. So there you go. Another one from Badger in Gun Alloy. This one is another one that's just bad. It just fails right out of the gate. All of these paints were mixed and shaken on a vortex mixer before this paint was dumped, each evenly all with agitators in them to try to make sure that they were all ready to go and it would be a nice, fair, even test with well shook metal paints. So as you can see a whole lot of different metals here and right away just from the initial coverage you can see some of these going so much smoother and some of these cover so much more. So right away we're going to produce a couple winners and have our first cuts in this first round. We're going to see who are our semi finalists because some of these paints not even worth picking up no farther. I needed one test with them to know I never wanted to paint with them again. So who are our semi finalists? I cut it down to basically 13. We're going to do a little fly by here and then we're going to look at these are all the losers by the way. Everybody that I struck out in round one. So those are the losers. Now it's the winners. Leadbelcher solid coverage, a little bit of visible pigment, but went on easy enough. Good base tone all in all, not too bad. Stormhost silver, brighter, better actually as a layer paint, maybe because the nature of the thinning than the base. Still some visible pigment, but we'll evaluate that in a moment. The Vallejo metal color steel, one of the all time bests, went on like a dream, easily, easily covered everything. No problems whatsoever. Vallejo metal color silver, even brighter, even more opaque, really has a nice shine to it as we'll see and evaluate. Gun gray, which is the Vallejo model air. Again, pretty solid coverage, not quite as good, but not as much visible pigment because of the smaller round. The steel, however, is the far superior Vallejo model air metallic. As you can see, you get this unbelievably smooth application of it. Looks great. Game air chainmail silver. You can see some of the streakiness that happened there. That's one of the problems. I don't know if maybe the games have a different mix, but you could see how that one had it. Now, the game air silver looked much more like the steel, so it was much better coverage, much brighter overall. I liked it better. Army painter plate mail did better than I expected, honestly, but still you can see that streakiness in the metal and there is some visible pigment. Next up, natural steel from AK3rd Gen. This is probably one of the lowest in the batch. It just barely made the cut. You can really see the streaks and there's still some primer showing through. Warcolors Nostalgia 88 chainmail. This blew my socks off. I was super surprised by how good this was. It really harkens back to the metallic paints of old. Now, a new paint, Green Stuff World Anthrax metal. Great coverage, nice even layers, no streaking. Really nice paint. Quicksilver, again, this was down at the bottom with the natural steel. It did cover, but look at all that unbelievable streakiness that just did not settle at all. So now it was time to cut to the semi-finals based on shine and finish. We're gonna fly over all of these and you can really see that there are distinct differences. Some of these look very faded with their streaky or they just have a lot of heavy visible pigment or they just didn't cover well or really just don't have a high metallic shine. Like when the light moves over them, as you can see here, the specular lighting fails. So time for the finalists. So this is our five finalists. Chainmail from nostalgia 88. As you can see as I rotate that, look at that metal shine just travel across it. Look how deep dark the shadows get. It's not just about the light, it's about the shadows as well. Vallejo Metal Color Silver, which was just so bright and reflective, just this highest white light that really, really has a strong reflection. Vallejo Metal Color Steel, which I've long been a fan of, especially as a base coat. I think it just, you look at this and look how strong and even and smooth that is. It's like painting with liquid metal. Both of the Vallejo Metal Colors use aluminum powder so you get a much more metallic shine. This steel is really strong, but it's really flat. It's such a strong shiny thing, but look at how little shadow is created. That's because it actually has a very low shine. So it's not reflecting the shadow colors. I turn it towards the black. Finally, the Anthrax Metal, pretty nice. I would call it middle to pack, but it did a lot better than I expected for a new metal paint. All in all, I was pretty impressed, but it was time to put these five in the head-to-head final showdown. So I primed up this black plastic card with just black. This is primed and I wanted to just get a nice solid sweep of it. All five of them right next to each other to see how they work. What's fascinating is how well the steel color covers, and I assume that's why people love it so much in Vallejo Model Air. My problem is it doesn't look like metal. It has a huge, huge opacity, but has a very poor shine and reflection. You can see there's just no shadow to it. The Vallejo Metal Colors both cover really, really well and have that shine, but also the chain mail. I was really impressed by how it does. It went on there nice and smooth, not getting a huge amount of streakiness on the flat surface. And here you can see all five of them with their appropriate shields. And as I rotate it around, look at how much some of these reflect, you know, super bright or create shadows. Look at both the shield and the streak. And you can really see the difference in the shine. Don't just look at the light. Look at the shadows that are cast as I move it around. Those shadows are what creates the illusion of real metal. When something's flat and just bright, it doesn't look metallic. So here is our final five in order. Vallejo Metal Colors Silver, Steel, Anthrax Metal, Nostalgia 88, Chain Mail, and then Vallejo Model Air Steel. Those are the winners. So there we go. Vallejo Metal Colors Silver and Steel were at the top because in the end they had the least visible pigment. They had the highest opacity, the most shine, and the most metal look largely due to their pigment. But all of these, all five of these were really nice. And I think you could use any of them on your miniatures to success. But if you have the chance to pick it up, the Vallejo Metal Colors Silver range, the Steel range, the Vallejo Metal in general, really proved itself as a cut above in this completely scientific and objective test. But I do hope everybody enjoyed this little showdown of metal paints and hopefully gave you something to think about when you're making your purchases. If you liked it, give it a like, subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. But as always, we thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.