Every brand sells a starter set, and most reviews of them read like unboxings. The more useful question is structural: what does a set need to contain so you are painting models — not shopping again — in week one? Judge any set, from any brand, against this list.
The eight jobs a starter set must cover
- The primaries plus green — a red, a blue, a yellow, a green, each in a mid tone you can darken or lighten.
- Two browns — one warm (leather), one dark (wood, rims). Brown does more work on miniatures than any primary.
- Bone or off-white — for highlights that don't go pastel, and for skeletons, cloth, and teeth.
- True black and white — mixing anchors more than painting colors.
- One silver and one gold metallic — weapons and trim are unavoidable.
- A dark wash — the shading step in a bottle. A set without a wash is a set that produces flat models.
- A fleshtone — faces are the first thing anyone looks at.
- Workable count: 10 to 20 paints. Under 10 and you are mixing everything; the 50-paint mega sets cost real money and half the colors wait a year for their first use.
A set that covers those eight is a good set, whatever the logo. The differences that remain between brands — pot versus dropper, matte versus satin, how each range's triads are organized — are covered in our seven-brand comparison, and the Army Painter's Fanatic starter box gets a dedicated breakdown.
The trap: buying a second brand's set to fill gaps
The expensive mistake is treating ranges as incompatible — owning Citadel, then buying a full Vallejo set because a tutorial named Vallejo colors. Paint converts: every color in every major range is charted on this site with its measured match in eleven other brands, starting from the Citadel paint chart. Fill gaps one bottle at a time using the conversion, not a box at a time using brand anxiety.
What no set includes (and you will need)
A primer — sets almost never include one, and nothing sticks without it (see the primer guide). A brush better than the freebie bundled in starter boxes. And the cheap infrastructure from the supplies guide: a wet palette and a lamp do more for your results than ten more paints.
If you already know your first project
Buy backwards from the models instead: pick the five or six colors the scheme needs, add a wash, a bone, and the two metallics, and you have a personal starter set with zero dead bottles — the color scheme generator builds exactly that list from any starting color.