Economy of Scale
Originally posted by supervike
I use them alot for terrain or whatever also, but I haven\'t had much success using them on figs.
They are much thicker and like vincegamer said, don\'t cover quite as well.
But, I love the price, the easy to use flip top lids and the quanity you get in a single bottle (are you listening mini paint manufacturers?)
lol
Specialty manufacturers may not be able to do much about the price because of the principal of \"Economy of Scale\". The more of a product you produce and sell, the cheaper prices you can negotiate on your raw materials, meaning the cheaper you can sell the product and still make a profit.
Since model manufacturers have a very limited audience and few outlets, they can\'t negotiate the substantial discounts on raw materials that a big manufacturer can. Plaid, which sells its products for a wide variety of uses through huge outlets, can make much better deals for its raw materials since they operate on a much larger scale.
They probably don\'t produce paint with quality standars as high as, say, Valejo, which would also ad to the price of the product.
Now, if we can convince the untold millions who paint up all kinds of crappy wooden dreck to switch to modeling instead, then economies of scale would work for us and we\'d get our stuff cheap at Walmart, too.
BTW: as far as using the stuff, I\'ve got a bottle of thier pearlescent paint, some paint on-gloss varnish, and brush cleaner. I\'ve also tried a couple of thier brushes. And a co-worker who knew I painted figs gave me a set of thier paints in little pots, which I do use on occasion.
I shy away from using a lot of the paints on my minis. I find it hard to believe that something costing $0.84 is going to hold up the the beating that tabletop minis take.
If I want a less pricey alternative to modeling paints, I use Liquitex Basics. I had left-over tube paints from art classes. Though I might use the tubes of black or white in the future, I\'ll be getting the Basics in the squeeze bottles for any future purchases. Tube paint is pretty thick, and I end up spending too much time mixing it down to the right consistency for modling.
