Citadel Colour Spray Stick Review

Straightforward to assemble and easy to operate, the Citadel Colour Spray Stick is the next in the new line of November 2021-released Citadel Colour hobby tools.

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Citadel Colour Spray Stick Review – Summary

Whilst owning a Citadel Colour Spray Stick is far from vital to your painting experience, then it does indeed make the process of priming your figures somewhat quicker and easier. The shape of the stick allows you to get underneath and around all your figures to your heart’s content and will make batch-priming a quick and painless process. However, the Citadel Colour Spray Stick doesn’t hold up so well under the furious, high-pressure glare of an airbrush, as the elastic bands that hold your figures in place may not have the tensile strength to keep hold of your figures.

Citadel Colour Spray Stick Review – Introduction

I imagine the announcement of the new Citadel Colour Spray Stick was greeted with the same amount of guffawing and eye-rolling as the last one was. Cynics will have scoffed and slated it for being a ridiculous contraption, a cash-grabbing rubber band gun that only GW fanboys will buy.

But I was quite interested in seeing how this thing performed.

I’ve made no secret of it in the however-many reviews I’ve done for FH over the last year-and-a-bit, but not only am I a relatively inexperienced hobbyist, but I do not have the ideal painting setup. Far from it, in fact. I live in a rented house with a far from ideal floorplan and have to shoehorn my hobby in around the rest of the setup of the house. I don’t have much space to set things up: I have to hobby in my conservatory on evenings and weekends around a makeshift working from home setup that has been in place there since March 2020, and I frequently have to sacrifice hobby space in the name of simply finding more room to live.

So, anything that is designed to make my hobby life quicker, easier, and take up less space has my undivided attention. And that is the point of the Citadel Colour Spray Stick.

In fact, I was so excited to receive the Spray Stick it was the first thing I pulled out of the box it arrived in – looking straight past Kill Team: Chalnath, the new Assembly Stand and the Painting Handle XL on the morning of Saturday 6th November. In a box of urgent reviews that needed doing as soon as possible, it was the first thing I went for.

So, what did I do with it?

Did I crack on and make the most, using my time wisely to prioritise my workload and ensure I’d get everything done quickly? Of course I didn’t. I made this dumb TikTok instead.

I was up until 11:30PM on Saturday reviewing stuff. That’ll teach me.

Citadel Colour Spray Stick Review – Design

The Citadel Colour Spray Stick is very easy to use. You simply string up ten of the elastic bands that come with the Stick between the pegs on the stick like so:

Then, you insert your figures into the spaces between the elastic bands, making sure the edges of the bands grip the bases of your figures. This keeps them held in place and ensures they don’t go flying off when placed under the direct fire of a spray can.

Once that’s done, take hold of the Spray Stick via the gun-like handle at the rear of the stick and spray away!

The new Spray Stick has three big design differences compared to its predecessor. The first, as you can see in the image above, is its far sleeker, more paired-down design. This has been done to allow you better access at the figures from below, which ensures you are able to get a thorough, even coat of whatever spray primer you use across all of your figure.

the second feature is that it also rotates!

This helps keep paint away from your hand, and saves you having to wave the Spray Stick around in order to try and get the right angle you need to catch that tricky patch on your figures that you just can’t seem to quite get.

The third and final big change are those little holes you can see in the tops of the pegs the elastic bands are wrapped around. Those are designed to be used in tandem with Citadel Colour’s new Sub Assembly Holders. The basic idea behind these is that you can attach your sub assembly to your Spray Stick and prime it at the same time as the rest of your models.

And that is basically it. It’s a very simple, straightforward piece of kit designed to save you time and make the process of priming batches of figures easier.

So, how does it shape up?

Citadel Colour Spray Stick Review – Testing

The T’au Pathfinder Kill Team that arrived on the same day as the Citadel Colour Spray Stick volunteered themselves for this daring mission. First off, I strung them all up between the elastic bands, ensuring that the bands were only in contact with the rims of their bases.

This was a little more difficult to do that I would have first expected. Sometimes the elastic bands will slip off and would instead wrap themselves around the model’s ankles. You want to avoid this where possible, as if the elastic band is covering any part of the model it’s stop any primer from applying to it.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I decided I was going to spray-prime my figures white and thus set myself up for a really difficult end result photograph. I used a can of Citadel’s Corax White spray to do this.

And that was that. The Spray Handle is no longer its nice sleek black, but my figures are primed all over and very evenly.

The rotating arm made it easier for me to adjust the positioning of the models and ensure that the spray can caught absolutely all of their surface area, and the slimmer underside of the Spray Stick meant I found it easy to get to the underneath-sides of the figures.

I could also do it away from anything I didn’t want to damage. I know a lot of people prime their figures outside on a garden table, often covered in bits of cardboard of newspaper. Well, get rid of your grimy bits of old card and paper: with the Spray Stick there’s no need for this, as you can simply stand away from anything you don’t want to get paint on and spray away.

I do, however, have a warning.

I’m not sure this thing will hold up so well against an airbrush.

Because the pressure on an airbrush is that much higher than coming out of your bog-standard spray can, I have visions of figures being plucked out of the elastic bands around their bases and cast across my garage and being damaged in the process – or worse, never to be seen again, lost forever in some crevice between the old suitcases and cardboard boxes we never threw out after moving here.

Just how secure a figure will be in the spray stick’s elastic bands depends entirely on the size of the base and the pressure setting on your compressor. My T’au Pathfinder squad on their diddy little 25mm round bases felt a little bit loose, but the Spray Stick held them. Under the blast of an airbrush, though, I’m not sure they would have survived. if they were on larger bases – say 40mm – they would probably be fine, as the elastic band would hold them that much tighter.

Still, if you airbrush at a lower pressure, or you are a fan of rattle can priming, you can’t really go far wrong with the Citadel Colour Spray Stick.

Will Citadel Colour Spray Stick Improve my Hobby?

This depends entirely on how you like to paint. If you’re the sort of person who takes pleasure in doing single figures one at a time then this isn’t a purchase for you.

If, however, you’re the kind of person collecting an army, or who batch paints and needs to get a decent primed coat down on top of a whole group of minis nice and quick, then the Citadel Colour Spray Stick could save you a fair bit of time and effort.

Citadel Colour Spray Stick Review – Price and Availability

At only £14/$23/€17, the Citadel Colour Spray Stick isn’t exactly a splashy purchase straight from GW’s webstore. A ever, we always recommend you check your local hobby hangout to see if they can offer you the product at any kind of discount.

To be honest, even if you do pay full price for the Spray Stick and decide it isn’t for you, it’s not like you’ve bankrupted yourself in the process.

Citadel Colour Spray Stick Review – Final Thoughts

The Citadel Colour Spray Stick is one of those products you don’t need in order to hobby, but once you have tried it you will likely wonder how you ever managed without it.

As I said above, it might not be so good with a high-pressure airbrush, but as far as getting a whole buch of figures spray-primed in one go, it’s an incredibly useful time- and space-saving tool.

Give it a go. See what you think.

Please Note: This site uses affiliate links. Our Affiliate Partners are shown below
(Affiliate links will result in compensation to the site on qualifying purchases)

Click this link & buy your hobby stuff from Element Games for the UK & Europe to support FauxHammer.com – Use Code “FAUX2768” at the checkout for double reward points.

Our Affiliates / Hobby Stores

• UK: Element Games, The Outpost, Wayland Games, Mighty Lancer, Goblin Gaming, Forbidden Planet, Model Scenery Supplies, eBay, Amazon
• US/Canada: MTechCave, GameKastle, eBay (US), eBay (CA), Amazon
• Germany: Taschengelddieb
• Europe: eBay (DE), eBay (FR), eBay (ES), eBay (IT), Amazon
• Australia: eBay, Amazon
• Global: RedGrass Games, Warcolours

• 3D Printers: Phrozen 3D, Elegoo, Anycubic

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Summary

Reviewer

Rob Hebblethwaite

Review Date

Reviewed Item

Citadel Colour Spray Stick

Author Rating

4

Product Name

Citadel Colour Spray Stick