61 one-coat paints that lay down color and shading in a single pass.
How the Contrast range works
Contrast is Citadel's one-coat system, 61 colors designed to basecoat and shade at the same time when applied over a light primer. The paint flows away from raised areas and pools in recesses, so a single application gives you a shaded model far faster than the base, shade, highlight routine. It is the same idea as Army Painter Speedpaint, formulated differently.
The color spread is genuinely even here: teals, yellows, blues, reds, and greens are all well represented, because the range was built to cover whole schemes on its own rather than support another range. That balance is unusual in this catalog and reflects what Contrast is for, painting an army to a tidy tabletop standard quickly.
The honest limits are worth stating. Contrast depends on a light undercoat; over dark primer the effect collapses. Coverage varies by color, with some lighter tones needing care. And like all one-coat paints it converts poorly to opaque ranges, since a color match from a normal paint will not behave the same way on the model.
One-coat colors worth knowing
- Black Templara deep near-black that shades armor in one coat
- Blood Angels Reda rich red for one-coat crimson schemes
- Apothecary Whitea light contrast for bone, cloth, and white
- Basilicanum Greya cool grey for shading stone and steel