Painting Update - AWI Continentals and GW Contrast paints

So my current enthusiasm for painting seems to be on a bit of a roll at the moment and I have worked my way through my first batch of Warlord AWI Continental Army Infantry.  These seemed much easier to put together than the Militia that I painted the other week (or maybe I was better at following the instructions...)

I've painted up 12 figures...this seems to be the best way for me to work on figures,  More than that and I lose interest quite quickly whereas a dozen or so seems manageable and I feel like I'm getting somewhere.  I can't seem to work well with the assembly line approach that I know others use.

This was also my first attempt at using the new Games Workshop Contrast paints which all the cool kids are talking about.  These are meant to work as both a base coat and a wash, creating shaded areas without the need to use a wash or inks.  The Contrast paints are designed to be used with special GW spray undercoats (of course) but being tight I stuck to my usual Halfords Grey with a white highlight.  As one of the GW sprays is a light grey I figured this wouldn't make any great difference (apart from saving me some money).  I then painted the whole unit using the Ultramarine Blue Contrast paint on the jackets but as an experiment I didn't use a wash on the front rank of the unit (with rifles pointed).  These were given a wash on the face and trousers using my (now very old) set of Citadel Washes but nothing was applied to the blue jackets, only a lighter highlight.

The rear rank figures were also painted with the blue Contrast paint but the figure was highlighted and then shaded with Army Painter Quickshade which is my normal approach

To be honest I'm not sure there's an appreciable difference...I can see that the Contrast paints might be useful if you were working through a large batch of figures in one go but given that I prefer to work in small numbers, using washes etc doesn't really take much time.  I also have a pot of the red Contrast so I will give that a go when I work on the British.