Is the Contrast method an Option?

After being out of action with Covid, I was reading to get hobbying again. I’d really wanted to paint my Bobbies for my Super Simple Universal Skirmish Game:

All the figures are from Irregular Miniature’s Very British Civil War range.

These same figures have appeared before in monochrome, doing battle with tree folk:

https://deathzap.co.uk/2022/03/23/the-forest-vs-the-bobbies/

Not wanting to take ages before getting my Bobbies back to the table, I opted to use the ‘contrast’ method, wondering if it ever really was an option, other than its use in Slapchop.

I started with a white prime, and then blocked in all my colours:

It was at this point that I had decided ‘no’, contrast is not really a good method for painting. Sure you can get stuff done quickly, but I’d much rather encourage slapchop, or base coat, wash and drybrush. Either won’t take much longer, requires equal levels of skill and will give far better results.

I suspect, the straight contrast method is in fact designed for cheap army men:

But if you have contrasted, what can you do to improve the look?

I tried black lining to ironically up the contrast. That’s where you put thinned black paint in between the details, especially where two colours meet. It was a subtle difference and helped a little, but wasn’t getting me there:

So I went around the houses a second time, a white drybrush, followed up by a second round of contrast:

Things looked better, especially after a matt varnish, but I still wasn’t 100% happy with the look. As I said, I think contrast paints are best used for Slapchop. Of course this is just my opinion, so if you are a fan of the look go for it.

As a hobby tip, if your matt varnish has gone bad, you may experience some fogging, white splotches especially in your recesses:

Don’t despair, you can fix this by going back over with a gloss varnish which will make those patches disappear, and then you can come back in with a better matt varnish.

Although I wasn’t happy with their look, the Bobbies got to work in the tabletop quickly, gunning down a Troll and wining against that as yet undefeated warband, the also did well against the Dragon Temple.