Recently Goobertown Hobbies on YouTube posted a video of The Army Painter’s paint factory in Denmark.
It’s an incredible factory, with some incredible automation and watching the shots of the machines is like some of the good stuff from r/mechanical_gifs.
By contrast, Duncan Rhoades’ Two Thin Coats line of paints factory also had a factory tour video posted by MS Paints on YouTube.
This factory uses hand tools to mix and fill the paints, and uses handmade machines for all of the automation.
I thought these videos were absolutely unmissable for any wargaming painter so I just had to post them here. The contrast between the two operations is amazing, as well as the general competency shown in both factories.
Good to see miniature paint companies becoming ever so slightly more transparent. Now please, start labelling what pigments you have inside like every decent paint manufacturer and I would be happy.
What surprised me a bit is that they get these pigment slurries from their suppliers instead of dry pigments which would then get mixed with medium and additives. It makes sense though when thinking a bit about it: This is a highly horizontal production line: chemical companies produce the dry pigments which get further processed by paint and lacquer companies doing the heavy lifting by making these precursor paints more consistent (by adding dispersion, anti-foaming, anti-caking agents etc.). The last step is the dilution with more medium and bottling what we see in these videos.
Being a pure paint company, Vallejo may actually incorporate the last two steps under one roof which could explain why there are comparatively few ‘bad’ products in their range as they can simply go back and fix things instead of arguing with a supplier.
As someone who has previously worked in automation, to me these machines are incredibly ingenious and frightening at the same time.
Excellent! Thanks for pointing this out. I had already seen Brent’s video and when I saw MS Paints’ thought “Well I’ve just seen this” and wouldn’t have watched it. Oh boy!
