Necrons Rebooted -- Tests and comparison with Fluorescent Paints

Hey all you special effect lovers out there!

One of the new things that will make the rebooted Necrons superior is the usage of fluorescent paints!

I first learned about the existence of these interesting paints, adding another level to your miniatures over at Massive Voodoo, quite some years ago actually! They called them Dayglow colours, mixed them up themselves, made some experiments and created some fantastic paintjobs with those (I particularly love the demon on the linked page above).

Anyway, in 2011, I was (apparently) not ready for these but now I saw that you can buy fluorescent paints not only over at Vallejo but also at GreenStuffWorld -- these are like normal acrylic paints and can be used in exactly the same way. The difference to normal paints become however obvious when you shine some ultraviolet (UV) light onto them, which makes them glow intensively.

My hope with these colours was that they would appear a bit more intense than normal colours even in normal light, and thus would be perfect for glowing effects like plasma or gauss weapons and so on.

I bought some colours from both companies (Vallejo Model Color Fluorescent Blue not shown):

And if you shine an UV torch onto them...

... they glow really bright! The camera is in fact not able to capture this glow properly.

OK, let's first compare the hues in "normal" white LED light:

In the above photo you can see two relatively thick layers of each colour applied by brush onto white paper. The following becomes obvious:

• None of the colours is really opaque  even after two layers --> need a clean white underground
• In terms of hue, the GreenStuffWorld Lime and Red are in between the Vallejo Green and Yellow and Orange and Magenta, respectively.

In addition, I noticed the following other things:

• The colours have a slightly funny smell (might bother some people).
• The GreenStuffWorld colours are thinner on average than the Vallejo paints but have the same opaqueness. 
• Both the GreenStuffWorld and Vallejo paints had some hard fallout at the bottom of the bottles that I could only get activated by mechanical mixing with a little metal rod 
• The Vallejo paints seem to be a bit more "slimy", i.e., a bit like glue.
• The Vallejo paints are a bit glossy when they are dry.

The above things together make me  prefer the GreenStuffWorld fluorescent paints slightly.

Next, you might wonder about mixing the fluorescent paints:

• Mixing with other fluorescent paints is not problem. The photo below shows for example that if you mix the Vallejo Green and Yellow, you basically get the GreenStuffWorld Lime.
• Mixing with non-fluorescent paints is not a good idea. The photo below shows two examples, where I mixed the Vallejo Green and Blue each with Skull White from GW

So how do the paints appear when one adds some UV light to the white LED light:

It is a bit hard to see in the above photo again but the colours start to glow intensely even with the tinniest amount of UV light.

And here, how it look with UV light only:

Hard to capture the glow properly but maybe you get an idea. Otherwise, you have to take my word for it that:

• Both the Vallejo and GreenStuffWorld paints glow at similar intensity
• Exception is the Vallejo Blue whose glow is very faint
• The mixtures with Skull White glow much less

As a funny side effect, you get really cool looking cleaning papers:

And finally, and example of these paints on a miniature, i.e., the classic Necron Warrior that I showed you a few posts ago. This time in UV light: