Dan Becker's Vallejo Xpress Color Swatches

This article describes a new line of paints from Vallejo Acrylicos called Vallejo Xpress Colors. This article shows both the original line of 24 XPress paints and the 36 Xpress paint expansion for a total of 60 Vallejo Xpress colors.

Xpress paints are a new type of acrylic paint that are becoming very popular in the miniature painting hobby world. They are thin paints, similar to inks or washes, that have a very strong medium that pulls the pigment off the high spots and into the low spots. The result is a quick paint job that automatically highlights and lowlights the surface. Similar paints include Citadel Contrast Colors, ArmyPainter Speed Paints, Dr. Ph. Martens inks, or Liquitex inks.

I love to try out new paints, so one of the first things I do when I get a new set is to make a paint swatch board. This lets me test the paint and allows me to arrange the swatches in a way that makes sense to me. It also let's me reference the colors and quickly find a light or darker variation or warmer or cooler similar color.

Scroll to read the story and see smaller photos. Click on the photos for a gallery of all the larger images.

This photo shows the array of all 36 of the new Vallejo Xpress Color paints. The paint bottles come with a black top, but I have painted them with a white primer spray so I can apply color samples directly to the bottle tops.

In front of the array of paints, I have textured Plastistruct patterned styrene sheets (code PS-39) that I use for my color samples.

As I crack open each bottle, I put a color sample on each bottle top and each color swatch sample. In this photo I have sampled about two thirds of all the bottles.

These styrene plastic sheets have 1/8 inch grooves and come in sheets of 12 by 7 inches (300x175mm).

The textures sheets show the pooling effect of the Xpress colors. You can see the grooves are darker and more saturated. The high spots on the sheet are lighter and less saturated.

If it appears the paint looks a bit pooled on some of the samples, that is by my choice. I purposely pool some extra paint to see how well it levels out. It also shows the range of light and dark by using extra paint. One of the behaviors of these types of inks/washes are that textured areas look great, but sometimes smooth surfaces can have pooling. You can either spray or use your brush to control pooling, but you have to know the limits of your paints.

Vallejo Xpress Color paint completed samples

And here all 36 of the new Vallejo Xpress XP samples. I have carefully positioned all samples in the grid of my hobby work mat so that I don't forget or mix up the sample.

Wow, my hobby mat looks really old with lots of battle scars and paint and glue spills. Thousands of warriors have readied here on their journey to immortality. It might be time to get a new mat.

Even the paint palette looked beautiful with a range of 36 gorgeuous colors.

Here I show the Vallejo Xpress Color paints stored away in their racks on my hobby desk. The new Xpress paints are in the foreground in the first 3 racks with their white primed caps and still wet colors. The next two racks (with black caps and partially primed white) are the original 24 Vallejo Xpress paints. The final rack with the gray caps are the ArmyPainter Speed Painter 1.0 starter set paints. (I did buy the 2.0 mega set as well, not shown here.) One empty rack is in the back.

These racks are my own design and handmade racks to hold twelve typical 17-20 mL paint bottles. The racks are made from commonly available basswood sheets and square beams. The design of the racks has a few nice features.

The racks stack vertically or horizontally. When stacked weight is supported by the rack, not the bottles.
The open side and top allow your to read the labels and caps easily. The disadvantage it that if you lean one way, they might fall out. You can block this with an extra panel or empty rack.
The rack size of 12 bottles allow for easy sorting and movement of the bottles. Have you been working with one color group or maybe metallics? Pull the rack for use and put it back into your archive.
Shuffling paints around does not require plucking one bottle at a time. Grab as many as fits into your hand.
They are cheap. The two basswood sheet sizes and one square beam and are cheap, allowing you to make six racks for about $10.

This photo show how I make a paint swatch sheet. I figure out how many samples I have and I make a grid to glue the samples to. You can see I make a grid of lines in which I will place the samples and the names. In the past I have purchased some premade swatch sheets but they always seem to be the wrong size or they are made from cheap paper. So I make my own.

Completed Vallejo Xpress Color XP paint samples

Here is my final product, my sample sheet for the 36 Vallejo Xpress Color XP paints. The "intense" branded bottles are underlined and fit into the rest of the colors. I have roughly organized them starting and ending with near-white and near black, and in the middle the colors are roughly red, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, and purples.

Sometimes you make some samples, and you shuffle them around, and you see the final photo you have some new ideas. Painting on plastic tiles glued with tacky white glue lets you rearrange.

Here I wished I put Greasy Black closer to the Hospitalier Black. The Viking, Iceberg, and Starhip grays are very cool blues: I wish I grouped them with the blues. Other than than, you can see the Vallejo expansion has lots of great historical colors. Lots of yellows, browns, greeans, and skin tones.

Bonus! Here is my sample sheet for the Vallejo Xpress Color original 24 paint samples which came out early in 2023. Very good color spread here, perhaps weighted towards reds, blues and purples. Probably the kind of things fantasy painters want.

Bonus! Here is my sample sheet for the Army Painter Speedpaint 1.0 paints This was a good starter set. I still use them. However I need to share the samples I made for the follow-on Speedpaint 2.0 mega set. Both are good sets. However they are slightly skewed towards more fantasy colors rather than historical miniatures which is what I paint.

Finally, here is my last bonus. Here is my sample swatch for Dr. Ph. Martin's Bombay India Inks. They are extraordinary inks for painting miniature figures. They are shared here for the beautiful color range. Lots of great green-blues and red-purples. They also have great yellows and browns.

They are painted here on water color paper which shows their versatility. They don't work well on naked plastic, however, they are great on white-primed plastic. I like them much better than the Liquitex inks I have tried.

I wish more companies used standard art color terms such as ochre, sienna, umber, sepia, and such. Part of the reason why I make these color swatch samples, is I don't know what you mean by zombie flesh or wizard cloak.

I hope you enjoyed seeing the details of these paint swatches. In summary this Vallejo Xpress Color XP expansion range of 36 colors of 2024 is the perfect extensiont to their original line of 24 colors of 2023. I would say if you are a fantasy minis painter or an accomplished paint mixer, the original set will do well, but if you want the variety and convenience of more historical colors pick up the entire set or new variations in the XP line. Thanks for reading about my latest miniature painting hobby.