Dipping

Hey guys, i am relatively new to things at the moment, and a friend of mine when asked how he painted some of his models said that one thing he did was "dipped" them. Whats dipping?

 

Its a technique similar to washing a model with ink or wash, except faster. It literally involves dipping the entire model in some form of shading/stain. There are special dip paints available (by The Army Painter) or often a certain type of wood floor stain is used, it can also work with wash or ink. The entire models basically gets shaded in one very simple step, and it can look rather good considering how easy it is. Very easy to leave too much thick stain on the model and flood it though.

 

Girlpainting on Youtube has a good tutorial on how to do this technique. It's good for mass painting if you don't really care about the details of the miniature. Myself, I enjoy the process of painting too much for this, but if you just want to field an army, it may work for you.

 

I paint like this all the time. I neither have the time or the money to make A fancy model. I personally like dipping. Dipping allows me to come back to my models even if it's several months later. Check out my signature if you want to get an idea of how it will look. I have to warn you, like others, this style isn't for everyone.

 

Before you consider dipping you should have a look at the washes, particularly Devlan Mud for a full-model wash, or the coloured washes if you have a model which is predominantly a single colour.

If you use a big arse brush you can apply an wash to an entire model in under a minute (I use a 10mm wide flat brush for skinks and saurus, and a 20mm wide one for larger models like Salamanders and larger).

Then before the paint starts to dry, swap to a regular brush (size 1 brush, or maybe stick with the 10mm brush if you're careful) and you can manipulate the wash to stop it pooling on flat areas and help guide it into crevices. Dipping and washing works great in areas of high detail like on scales, but tends to pool in some areas where you might not want it.

I recently timed myself painting a unit of skinks and the wash stage took less than 1 minute per model to apply the wash, then about 1 minute to manipulate the wash to give better definition on muscles and stop unnatural pooling, which really isn't much slower than dipping the models when you consider the additional preparation time and hassle required when dipping. All up it took me 15 minutes to do a purple wash on 10 skinks.

Skinks (skin: white undercoat, light purple basecoat (mostly bleached bone + touch of liche purple), scales: same, except dark purple instead of light purple basecoat. Then give the entire model a wash of Leviathan Purple as I described above.




Salamanders (skin: white undercoat, blood red basecoat. Scales: white undercoat, mechrite red base. Finally give the entire model a Baal Red wash as described above, wait for it to dry, then Devlan Mud wash in the way I described above).