Dip Painting

This is the technique that get me back to painting. Because I had a limited amount of time to allocate for painting, I wanted an efficient way of going through a large amount of minis.

What interests me the most is to have a large collection of minis that I can use in various skirmish and roleplay games. I’m not interested in having highly detailed ones. Actually, my eyesight is also quite poor and I don’t think I could manage to paint anything too detailed.

That’s how I discovered the Dip Painting Technique online. The original idea involved you “dipping” your minis in wood varnish to have the varnish go into all recesses and create natural shadows and highlights.

I personally did not dip the minis, but instead apply the varnish with a brush to each minis. I didn’t bought the official Quick Shade Army Painter at first, but went with a small can of varnish I found in a home store. It gave nice results already so I didn’t bother to go further with an official can.

It can be hard to pick the correct varnish because you need to have one that is as light as possible. Deep wood varnish will be too dark and your minis will felt like they are coated in coal.

If your varnish is too light, don’t forget to stir the content of the can as the pigment will usually stay at the bottom. On the other end, if your varnish is too strong, let it rest for a few days (weeks?) and the top of the can will get all the lighter and runnier part.

In my case I one day decided to stir my can because I hadn’t done it in a long time and… I ended up with a very thick and dark varnish instead of the runny and brown one I was used to have. So really, the same can of varnish can yield very different results depending if you stir the content or not.

Other thing to take into account is that every brush you’ll use with the varnish will be dead after your usage. So only use cheap brushes you don’t really care about and wait until you have a large amount of minis to shade if possible (I usually do them by batch of 30)

Recently I decided to buy an official Quick Shade can to see the difference. I’ll keep you posted.