Best Paints for Bolt Action - Vallejo vs Army Painter vs AK

Painting Bolt Action is a different problem from painting Warhammer, and the paint range you want reflects that. You are painting uniforms: the same colour, repeated across twenty or thirty figures, in a shade that has a real-world name and a real-world argument attached to it. Nothing needs to glow. Almost everything needs to be matt.

Three ranges dominate the table, and they are not competing for the same job.

The short version

• Vallejo Model Color - the widest historical range, named for the uniform rather than for a colour. The default answer, and the one most published WW2 recipes are written in.
• The Army Painter Historical - the fastest route to a finished force, because the sets ship the highlight ladder already mixed.
• AK Interactive - the accuracy-and-vehicles range, with RAL and FS references on the label.

Start with Army Painter Historical if you want a painted army; start with Vallejo Model Color if you want a paint collection.

Vallejo Model Color: the reference range

Model Color is what the hobby's WW2 recipes are written in, and the naming is the reason. A bottle called German Fieldgrey WWII tells you what it is for; a bottle called Ash Grey does not. The other uniform bases you will reach for constantly:

• English Uniform - British battledress
• US Olive Drab and US Field Drab
• Russian Uniform WWII
• Japanese Uniform WWII
• Khaki and Dark Yellow for desert and late-war German armour
• Oily Steel and Natural Steel for weapons

17ml dropper bottles, very matt out of the bottle, and heavily pigmented - Model Color wants thinning more than the other two do. The Model Color WWII Allies Set is sixteen bottles covering British, American and Soviet infantry in one box, which is unusually good coverage for a single set.

The catch: Model Color gives you the base colour and leaves the highlighting to you. That is fine for a squad and tedious across an army.

The Army Painter Historical sets: the ladder is pre-mixed

This is the range most Bolt Action guides overlook, and for a 28mm wargamer it is the most practical of the three. The three WWII sets are twenty paints each, built around a specific national palette, and crucially they ship the three-step ladder already mixed:

• WWII German set - Dark, Mid and Light Feldgrau, plus Camo Brown, German Camo Green, Camo Sand, Tanker Grey, Strap Grey and Rifle Brown.
• WWII British set - Dark, Mid and Light Battle Dress, plus British Camo Green, Webbing Green, Webbing Khaki, Beret Maroon and Mud Spatter.
• WWII American set - Dark, Medium and Light Drab, plus Dark Olive, Boot Brown, Canvas, Paratrooper Tan and Ensign Blue.

Each set also carries Matt Black, Matt White, Rust, Steel, a skin tone and the washes. Painting a squad becomes: base with the dark, layer the mid, edge the light, wash with Military Shade, done. Nobody is mixing a highlight on a palette at eleven at night, which is the actual reason armies stall.

18ml droppers, and buying the whole national palette in one box is the cheapest way into a nation - check the current figure on our set value ranking, which lists these with their exact contents.

The catch: the Historical colours are currently in our catalogue through those three sets rather than as loose singles, so topping up one empty bottle is harder than with Vallejo.

AK Interactive: accuracy, and everything with tracks

AK come at this from scale modelling rather than wargaming, and it shows in the labelling. German Field Grey and British Khaki sit in the 18ml 3rd Gen line; the Real Colors line goes further and puts the actual specification on the bottle - Feldgrau RAL 6006, Dunkelgelb RAL 7028.

Where AK genuinely wins is vehicles. A Bolt Action tank is a large, flat, single-colour surface - which is exactly the surface a thin, airbrush-friendly, modulation-minded paint is designed for, and exactly where a heavily pigmented brush paint shows every stroke. AK also carry the weathering side of the job (rust, streaking, pigments) that the other two treat as an afterthought.

There are AK figure sets built for this too: WWII British uniform colours, Soviet WWII uniform colours and WWII US Army soldier uniform colours, each six paints.

The catch: AK's naming is a specification, not a recommendation. Three bottles can all be honestly labelled Dunkelgelb and look meaningfully different, because the historical paint did too. That is a feature if you enjoy the argument and a nuisance if you just want a tank finished.

Finish matters more here than in fantasy

A WW2 wool uniform is dead flat, and satin sheen is the single thing that makes 28mm historicals look like toys. All three ranges are matt acrylics, but nothing survives a gloss varnish - if you gloss to protect decals or to apply an oil wash, matt varnish the whole model afterwards. Metals are the exception: leave the rifle barrel with its sheen.

Contrast and speedpaint ranges do work on WW2 infantry, and they work best on the webbing, leather and wood rather than on the uniform itself, where the pooling reads as staining rather than as shadow. See best contrast paints and, for the batch route, slapchop.

Which to buy first

• Painting your first starter army? Buy the Army Painter Historical set for your nation. It is one purchase, it contains the primer colours, the ladder and the shade, and it maps onto boxes like Cross of Iron, For King & Country or Stars and Stripes without further shopping.
• Painting several nations over time? Build a Vallejo Model Color collection. The naming makes recipes portable, and you will find every published recipe written in it.
• Painting vehicles, or painting for the display case? AK, and an airbrush eventually.

Mixing the three is normal and nothing bad happens - they are all matt acrylics of similar consistency. Our own nation-by-nation recipes name specific pots: Germany, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, Italy, France, Poland, Hungary and Belgium.