Smelly Primer: Is It Worth Collecting Old School Paint?

I wasn't lucky enough to live near a Games Workshop store in the 1980s. My experiences with the old retail philosophy were sadly limited to a few exhilarating hours during family holidays to York or Edinburgh. Wonderworld was my 'local store', situated a few minutes walk from one of my father's favourite haunts - the Model Railway Shop. Once the humble Model Railway Shop was a slightly shabby fixture in (nearly) every English town, and no doubt a fair few Scottish, Welsh and Irish towns too. Now, much like Wonderworld (and perhaps GW stores in the not too distant future!) those shops are largely gone.

Now Wonderworld wasn't a pure Games Workshop store. It sold a lot more besides and to an impressionable youth the combination of blister wall, sticky carpets and the cornucopia of fantasy/sci-fi games available there was mind-shattering. I can recall wandering the cramped shelving and uncovering large plastic statues of Freddy Kruger, off-air recordings of lost Doctor Who episodes and even several editions of Car Wars. 

But it was the paint racking that fascinated me the most!

I cannot recall exactly when I got hold of my first paints. It must have been around the time I was bought my first figures by my father. These were either The Nightmare Legion, some Paranoia robots or the Tinman and Oxy. I am pretty certain that I had the Citadel Colour set and the Creature set first, with the Monster and Space Marine sets coming later. Despite this, I always loved browsing through the paint range in store. This was largely due to the fact that these pots had actual labels on, while the paints that I had received in my boxsets were always blank. 

Now most of the paints were instantly recognisable, save one - the now infamous 'Smelly Primer'. 

I can remember pausing when I first came across the pot. It was at the end of the aisle of paints and for a while I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, that was until I picked up the pot and realised it was certainly part of the GW range. I pondered what on earth the paint was for. My father had explained the process of undercoating, and it remained something he did in the garage for me. The idea of painting a special primer over my lead models had not yet dawned on me, though shortly after I started painting my lead models Skull White rather than waiting for dad to be ready to spray them. 

A couple of boys in my class, Tom Dames and Russell Parsons, later bought pots of Smelly Primer, and it was then that I had my first experience with the stuff, once I had uncovered the stuff in their collections. I can recall opening the pots (with my teeth) and sniffing the contents - I was rather disappointed that the stuff wasn't really THAT smelly. I am not sure what I was expecting.

I have written about the old 1980s paint range several times. The best article on the subject can be found here if you are interested.

So what has my ramble got to do with the question I posed in the title to this post? To be honest, not very much at all but it does set a scene that will be familiar to many young gamers hooked on Citadel and all it entailed back in the later part of the 1980s. You could barely afford to pick up a few miniatures a month, let alone the paint you needed to prepare them for the table top, so many colours remained forever out of your league. 

Today, I speak to quite a few people keen to achieve that '80s' look with their own painting. In fact, its a question that I am often asked during Oldhammer events and when I post my figures online. Questions about the paints I use rapidly follow and I do my best to answer them, however it isn't necessary to track down all the original paint sets to achieve the style. A quick search online will quickly direct you towards one of the many charts that tell you how to source similar colours in the 21st century.

Have a look here at the chart I use the most. You will notice from this resource that Coat d'Arms paints are mentioned. Despite the growing popularity of the Oldhammer Movement, hardly a week goes by without someone discovering that practically all of the old range of '80s paints are still available from Black Hat. A major bummer if you have just shelled out a small fortune on an original paint set! And the prices of the old paint sets often concern me. It would be justifiable forking out over £40 for the Creature or Monster paint sets if you were desperate to hold them in your collection, but doing so to get your hands on colours that can be acquired at the fraction of the cost is foolish.

But there are a few colours that are considerably rarer than others. And Smelly Primer is definately one of them, especially in the old Citadel labelling. They are so rare in fact, that the only image I could find of a pot of Smelly Primer was from the later hexagonal range. Still, if you are a completist, like me, its very likely that owning all of the paints, with the original labels is going to be a priority at some point.

If you are interested in collecting the more numerous colours, to be honest it is very hard to tell the difference between a mint original and a modern pot of Coat d'Arms. You could easily just wash off the new labels, bung the colours in an old Citadel Colour box and post the set online for £35 and watch the punters come. For reference at this point, each pot of Coat d'Arms can be picked up for about £2 each. And £2 multipled by 9 (that is how many paints came in each set) equals £18. So shifting a box at £35 (as I have seen recently) is a healthy profit.

As you can see, collecting the old paints is a risky buisness. And that is before you consider how many of the paints might be unusual when you get hold of them. I find that many of the metallics do not survive well, especially those found in the Ork and Eldar paintset. But this isn't always the case. One thing I have learnt is that the older paints seem to last much, much longer than the more modern ones. I have bought Blood Reds from GW stores that dried out in a year but I have a couple of pots of the same colour from the mid-'80s going strong. Some people have commented that this was probably a deliberate way of increasing paint sales. But there is no direct evidence for this.

Some of the boxes in my collection. If I was dishonest, it would be easy to snap up the Coat d'Arms paints, wash off the labels and sell them on (doubling my money) so be careful if you are trying to hunt these originals down.

So is it actually worth hunting down the original colours? I think tha answer to that is yes and no. Owning the original boxes is fantastic from a collecting point of view, as they looks and feel great. But with many of the colours available elsewhere, I see no reason to get hold of them just to paint your models, not when other versions are still online for purcahse.

However, there are several '80s colours that are very hard to get matches for, at least I have found it much harder to get decent matches for them. These are Titlillating Pink and Bilious Green.

Titillating Pink is probably, in my experience, the hardest colour to get hold now. I have tried matching my original pots against many other ranges and I have found that they seem to lack the 'neon '80s' quality that original colour has. I have heard a story, probably apocryphful, that something in the original paint mix has been since banned in the EU, hence the lack of a match in modern paint ranges. Its a great colour for Slaanesh models obviously. If you see a point of this stuff for sale online, its really worth picking one up for your collection. Post '92, probably due to the name, the colour was withdrawn and though Tentical Pink followed shortly after, it was a lighter shade and lacked the 'dayglo' feel of its older cousin. 

Like Titilating Pink, Bilious Green was found in the Monster Paint Set and had a similar 'dayglo' feel. In fact, the two colours could be said to have been inspired by those bright '80s socks in pink and green that so many of us wore. Remember them? It had a longer lifespan, and was still available during the 'screwtop' relaunch of the paints in the later 1990s. It disappeared after this, though Scorpion Green was a close second and the best match I ever found for this classic colour. Again, if you see a pot of this colour its well worth adding to your collection.

By the tail end of the Ansell years, and moving through the earliest days on the the post-Ansell period, there were a great number of other paints that were added to the range. Who can forget the hideous mettalics that came a little later? In producing this article I found a useful site that lists the original set of paints, and also documents the later hexagonal versions. I have included it here for your reference.



So, what are your views on the older paints? Are they something that you collect and use to this day or are you a believer in the proxy versions that are still available. Is there a colour out there that you really miss from days gone by and that you struggle to find a modern shade for?

It will be interesting to hear your thoughts.

Orlygg