Turbo Dork, LLC

Make Your Gray World COLORFUL

by Meredith Placko,

CEO, Turbo Dork

In 2018, photographer Greg De Stefano had a radical idea: a metallic purple paint for his heretic marine army. As a commercial and fashion photographer, dealing in color was his mainstay. For paint, like in his photographs, he wanted colors that popped. Something that would make a miniature stand out on the gaming table. He set about a year of researching and formulation, digging deep into color theory and polymer chemistry. During this quest to make the perfect metallic purple, Greg developed 15 other core paints that would become the foundation of Turbo Dork.

Greg wanted to share these colors he created with his local gaming community. At best, he hoped for a little extra cash to fund his gray horde. One hopeful August day, he put those 16 colors online and announced them to the world with a Tweet. What happened next was nothing short of a paint revolution.

He didn’t anticipate how many mini painters across the world were craving vivid metallics. Within hours of launching on social media, Turbo Dork paints were picked up for distribution. An entire new market was created from painters who hungered for these eye-catching colors, and Turbo Dork was happy to provide.

Cut to four years later and Expansion 5 is about to drop, bringing the line up to 80 colors. Ten new paints consisting of four iconic Metallics, three intense Turboshifts, and three insane Zenishifts are coming this October. An often requested bright green will make its debut in Appleseed. The Turboshifts reach out to the cosmos with all new blue and purple combinations in Cyberia and Galaxia. We’ve also expanded our Zenishift line with some wild new colors. Top among them is Hemogoblin, an orange to green combo that promises to make the most out of your putrid and rotting fallen armies.

Heading into our fifth year, Greg and Turbo Dork have learned a lot about being a small paint manufacturer on a global scale. Every batch of paint is handmade and bottled in our warehouse outside of Austin, Texas. Having control over our formulation, and producing our paints here in the US, has helped us weather the global shipping crisis better than most. We were making and shipping paint every day of the pandemic. It has also let us tweak our formula as we go along, adding better freeze protection and brushability.

Research and development is ever ongoing in the Turbo Dork lab. Rest assured that many more colorful concepts, accessories, and hobby innovations will be coming down the line.

For more information on our paints and upcoming products, head on over to turbodork.com. Check out our Instagram @TurboDork, or the hashtag #turbodork to see how our customers have been using our paints. There are literally thousands of amazing photos from across the hobby world on there. Let your gray world be colorful.