Mu52 - BrokenToad, Pigments

Hello Jungle Painters,

time for another review on brand new hobby material
via Miniatures/Material-Unpacked.

This time we are taking a closer look on a big set of pigments
from a young company called "BrokenToad".

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The-BrokenToad-Pigment-Pyramid

BrokenToad offers a big range of different colours in pigment form. As you can see above, really a lot,which is a very good point and we shall have a closer look on them now. This is what the young company of BrokenToad says:

"The ethos behind BrokenToad is high quality products at very affordable prices, to achieve this we try to go the extra mile and undertake a lot of the ‘legwork’ ourselves to ultimately save the consumer money. We are still a very new brand and very artisan in our approach but with over 20 years’ experience in the miniature hobby world we feel we have the first-hand experience to know what a hobbyist expects and deserves from a product. We are not here to dictate what people should be buying but rather to listen to what they need & lack and try to make it available for them. We love our little niche community of hobbyists and hope we that we can help to make it a slightly more pleasant place to spend time doing what we all love.

Pigments

Currently we have 20 pigments in our range spanning a wide array of colours to help simulates multiple naturally occurring effects, these are all completely non-toxic, very finely ground natural mineral pigments suitable for either dusting straight onto a model or mixing with any liquid medium such as matt medium, glaze medium, varnish, white spirit or acrylic resin. All the pigments come in short, wide 30ml pots and retail for £3 each"


Massive Voodoo is well known for their honest reviews, our frankly look and this review won't be any different. So a honest thought that comes to our monkey heads is: "What is so different on these Pigments compared to any other pigments outthere?" - "On the first look not much, but let's look deeper!"

Everybody knows that working with pigments can lead to different results, depending on the quality of your pigments. That leads us to what pigments are to understand better. You can read the Wikipedia article here or follow the more simpler describtion by just reading on.  

Pigments are the essential of colours

Let's start from the beginning: Our all ancestors, the cavemen and cavewomen created paintings on their sweethome-cavewalls with ... yes, pigments. Simple ones. They used dirt, charcoal from burned wood, dried and powdered berries and so on to recieve ... yes, pigments. Dust that has different colours. They painted them at the stone of their caves, but wait ... if they just use the pigments they can easily be removed and won't last many thousand years. Well, we are pretty sure that the cavepeople did not have this intention, but let's follow another story. Maybe that guy Umbak, always dressed in too much fur removed some of the coolest mammoth drawings his wife, Rokka artisticly created and you know how this ends: Umbak is in trouble. One day their clan was in need to find something to hold the pigments together, some kind of binding material. The first simple colours were born as Umbak sat down used spit, blood, poo, the content of an opened eagle egg and much more ... Pigments + binder = colour.

Allright, let's leave Umbak and Rokka behind. During the evolution of mankind people learnt to create different pigments from different materials and used them to paint walls, stain fabrics and today all those many colours you see did start their travel as a pigment. If you buy a red, plastic hair dryer, during the process the plastic was coloured with red pigments. Easy as that. So enough of the blabla about pigments. Why is it so important to know about them anyways? 

You can achieve different goals with the use of pigments in miniature painting
For example using them as rust, dust, dirt and so on. You can even create your own rust pigments if you feel like. You can place them dry, like described in this article. You can place them wet, thinned with water and they will dry out completly again. If you are just using them without a binder, they are always in danger of being removed. If you are using them with a binder, for example matt varnish, they become a colour again and you might loose the dust effect. If you want to keep the dusty look you have to use a pigment fixer ... this pigment fixer also fixes rough dirt. Umbak would be happy if he had this one back in those days.

Now we come to the main message all this blabla is about:
The quality of the pigments you use is important.

Maybe you have already encountered and tested many different pigments from different hobby companies or even art stores. We did. If you do you find some which work good and some who won't bring you the results you want. We don't say any names here, but you might have encountered what we are talking about. Some good pigments do exactly what you want:

- they stay in place where you put them
- they colour the area in a dusty effect that you want to achieve

Others don't, no matter how big the amount you throw on your project. This depends of the production process of the pigments. You can already spot this quality while opening up a cup of pigments. The good ones look solid, they form small "pigment stones" and look like a massive unit when put togehter in such a cup. The annoying ones look like flock.

Now back to the pigments of BrokenToad - what makes them different too any other brands outthere? Honestly not much. Their biggest plus is that they are all from the good sort of pigments, they are high quality pigments and BrokenToad offers a truely wide range of different colours for different results on your basework.

What also comes as a big plus is the form of their container. Sounds strange on the first glance, but if you ever dropped an opened container of pigments because you were not able to get a good grip on them and all those pigments are your floor and your body you might know what trouble this can cause. The containers from BrokenToad Pigments have a nice ergonomic shape that allows you a good grip while opening them, while working with them and while closing them.

We already used the BrokenToad Pigments on our painting classes during the last months and they work really well. Nothing revolutionary, but a good, solid product that holds what BrokenToad promises without any awkward surprise moments while you work with pigments. They come with a fair price for a fair amount of a wide variety of pigments. Well done, BrokenToad.

BrokenToad does not have a own web store, they work with retailers and I bet they are looking forward to get in contact with new ones. If you want to stock them in your store or you want to see the list of their retailers check their homepage for the information required.

A little example on how Roman used the pigments for testing on a GW's Demonette he painted as a gift for an austrian friend. As said, they do what they suppose to do, making a desert base and the ones legs who is walking there dusty:

The wide variety of colours you can choose from BrokenToads grants you that you will definatly find the perfect match for your project. Another plus are the names of the pigments. No funny alien ones you can't combine with the result they might achieve, no - straight names that already tell you where your journey of dust will go.


We hope you enjoyed the review. Umbak would have we guess.

Keep on happy painting!
Best Wishes
Your MV-Team