Bloodmoon Red is a rich red Speedpaint from The Army Painter's John Blanche Masterclass, designed to create fast colour, strong shading and natural highlights in a single coat. This 18ml. Speedpaint works best over a light primer and is ideal for red cloth, skin, armour, heraldry and striking grimdark details.
What is Bloodmoon Red? Unlike the Warpaints Fanatic colours in the same John Blanche range, this is a Speedpaint: a more transparent, highly flowing type of paint designed to distribute itself across the surface. More pigment settles into recesses while raised areas remain lighter. This allows a single application to produce a red base colour, shadows and visually lighter areas at the same time.
Bloodmoon Red originally appeared in the John Blanche Masterclass Volume 1 Paint Set and is now also available individually. The paint was developed in collaboration with John Blanche as part of a collection focused on expressive, gritty and gothic miniatures. Its rich red character works particularly well in this context. Red creates a powerful focal point among dark metals, browns, dirty greens, black and weathered earth tones without requiring a large portion of the miniature to be painted red.
Why use Bloodmoon Red? Its main advantage is speed combined with natural colour variation. On a surface with sufficient texture, the flowing formula performs much of the shading automatically. Cloaks, robes, textured skin, scales, hair, straps and other organic or folded surfaces can therefore gain depth very quickly. This makes the paint useful for individual character models as well as complete units and larger batches of miniatures.
How do you use Bloodmoon Red? Apply one generous but controlled coat over a white or similarly light primer. Work on one defined area at a time and guide excess paint towards the deepest recesses with your brush. Avoid allowing large pools to collect on flat surfaces, and do not repeatedly brush over sections that have already started drying. Giving the Speedpaint room to settle helps create its characteristic contrast between lighter raised areas and deeper shadows.
The undercoat can dramatically change the finished appearance. Over white, Bloodmoon Red produces a clear and vibrant red result. A zenithal or slapchop-style preparation using dark shadows, grey midtones and bright highlights establishes additional contrast before the Speedpaint is applied. Because the red layer remains transparent, much of that underlying value structure remains visible. This provides a practical route towards a rougher and more atmospheric finish. Hobby painters also use Bloodmoon Red over this type of underpainting for red skin and large organic surfaces.
For grimdark miniatures, Bloodmoon Red does not have to be the final painting stage. Once dry, you can continue with conventional acrylic paints. Add small brighter red or orange highlights to selected folds, or use Ivory White very sparingly on the strongest points of light. Dark brown can create chips and damage, while metallics, rust and dirty earth tones can weather red armour further. This combines the speed of Speedpaint with the control of traditional miniature painting.
Bloodmoon Red is equally useful for organic subjects. Red daemonic skin, monsters, wings, tentacles and other strongly textured surfaces benefit from its natural shading behaviour. On sculpted skin, more of the red settles around muscles, folds and recesses while raised areas remain lighter. For a Blanchitsu-inspired finish, selected areas can then be worked back with pale, brown or earthy highlights to make the red appear less clean and more weathered.
The Speedpaint formula uses pigments suspended in a specialised flowing resin medium designed to move across the miniature and create contrast. The Army Painter positions Speedpaint as a solution for beginners and experienced painters who want to establish base colour, shading and highlights more quickly. Once the layer has dried, the miniature can be developed further with other paints and conventional techniques.
For beginners, Bloodmoon Red provides an accessible way to create convincing contrast on a miniature quickly. Advanced painters can explore different underpaintings, controlled pigment accumulation and additional highlighting and weathering to push the effect much further.
The strength of Bloodmoon Red is therefore not simply its speed. Its transparent, contrast-building behaviour immediately introduces variation and depth into red surfaces. This makes the John Blanche Speedpaint equally useful for fast tabletop miniatures and more elaborate grimdark projects where a rich red accent helps strengthen the atmosphere and visual story of the model.
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