Skip to main content

Valhallan Blizzard texture paint review

It seems I owe Gee-Dubz an apology. When their textured paint range first came out, one of the smurfs at my FLGS let me try them out and I was… less than impressed. “You can just paint it on!” he boasted (you can’t).

Celhelas keeping it frosty

Cut to several years later, and I tried applying that stuff with their texture spreader (which, I think, they released some time after the texture paints came out). It's like a tiny spatula. Suddenly, everything made more sense. Shovel it on with the wide end, do some fine tuning with the pointy end.

You have to be so careful when applying the texture paint around the feet of a painted model that I think it's probably quicker  to use sand and glue if you’re doing a big batches of bases, but I've taken to using this stuff when I just want to base one or two dudes and can't be arsed to fetch the PVA and sand… and then sit through three long drying times.

Of particular charm is the snow effect, Valhallan Blizzard. You don't have to fart about mixing baking soda, PVA and white paint, you just take the stuff straight out of the pot and get, I think, a better result. That said, it's a lot more expensive than baking soda. I used damn near an entire pot on this scenery piece, and while I'm happy with the results you might need to budget carefully if you're planning a load of scenery. For your minis, though, this would cover a fair bit of an army.



To break things down to bullet points:

The good

  • Easy to apply of you have the texture spreader.
  • Has finer texture than sand, so looks better in terms of scale.
  • Snow needs no mixing/preparation, unlike other snow methods.
  • For your underlying base textures, there's only one stretch of drying time compared to PVA → PVA seal → basecoat colour.
  • With the spreader you’ve got pretty fine control over the finished results.


The bad

  • Possibly prohibitively expensive for lots of scenery, depending on your budget.
  • If you're going for melting snow, the final look is inferior to Secret Weapon’s crushed glass snow effect (much safer to work with though!).


Hopefully that's helpful to someone. If nothing else, I’m just pleased that I finally have some snowy scenery for my winter board besides the trees. I’ll need more scatter scenery if I want that board to be more serviceable, though.


Comments

  1. Very nice effect in, i'm thinking it would look good on my nid bases, never tried snow before.

    Keep it up, bud!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dooo eeeeet!

      I'm always nervous about giving an army a snow base as they look weird to me on anything other than a snowy board. Of course when playing Frostgrave or similar I have no such reservations!

      Delete
  2. Thanks for the review, it was precisely what I was looking for.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I just stumbled upon you review, almost three years later. I am about to use Valhallan Blizzard on space wolves bases and I just did a test on a spare base I had. The paste dried to an unpleasant yellow in some place. Did you ever experience this? Three years on, how is the scenery piece shown in this article? Have you seen any yellowing?

    Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ooof, I'm sorry to hear that. This terrain piece remains as white as the day I applied it, so I can only assume you had a bad batch. That's worrying, though, as I was planning to use more of this stuff later!

      Delete
    2. Thanks for the reply. That’s encouraging.

      I have googled the subject and while some people seemed to have experienced yellowing, most have had your experience (i.e. VB still as white as the first day). I will get another pot and do another test.

      Delete
    3. Also, I guess you do not need to worry if yours is still white after three years. Mine yellowed shortly after (or during) drying.

      Delete
    4. Ah, good, that's reassuring! I guess with my text pot I'll do a small test area on my palette to check it's from a good batch, so that's helpful knowledge :)

      Delete
  4. I would imagine using this paint as a surface finishing touch that it would flake, rub, break off after some amount of movement of miniatures across it. Are you sealing it in any way afterwards or just putting it on and doing touchups?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Admittedly this terrain piece hasn't seen heavy use, but I didn't seal it, and it's still fine; no touch-ups needed. That said, any snow texture (or anything bright white) will inevitably need touch ups if it's seeing heavy use.

      Delete

Post a Comment