Warlord's Quick Shade

Spurred by Phil's great blog, I decide it was about time I try the Quick Shade technique. So I ordered some Strong Shade from theWarStore.com. While Phil brushes his Quick Shade on the miniatures, I decided to try the dip method. I looked around to see what figures were "expendible" and found these GW Bowmen which I had primed some time ago.

So...I painted them in solid colors with no attempt at shading.

The colors used were very simple; all paints were from the Reaper Master Series.

Flesh - Fair Skin 09047, bows and arrow shafts - Green Ochre 09128, tunics - Blood Red 09003/Leaf Green 09011/Sandy Yellow 09192, hoods - Blood Red 09003/Sandy Yellow 09192, leggings - Aged Bone 09059, leather belts/bags/shoes - Mahogany Brown 09037, metal bits - Pure Black 09037 (undercoat) and Tarnished Steel 09206, arrow fletching - Polished Bone 09060. If you were counting, that was only eight colors per figure.

Here are the figures after dipping and drying for a couple of hours.

Following the directions, I let these cure overnight before I painted (Field Green 09167), flock the bases and Dull Coat the figures.

Well, I Dull Coated the figures this morning and, for the second time, was disappointed with the results. The first time was a few years ago when I sprayed a bunch of LotR figures and they came out looking like they were dipped in flour. Same thing happened this morning. The only thing I can think of is that Dull Coat works in a very narrow band of temperature and humidity. Anyhow, I saved them the same way I did before. I used bottled Testors Gloss and Semi-gloss to coat the figures. The results are satisfactory. Here are the finished figures.

In real life the figures are no where near as shiny as they appear in the photo (miniature photography isn’t the point of this article so I didn’t spend time on getting really good pictures).

In the end analysis, I am satisfied that the Quick Shade product and the dip technique is a very efficient way to get a lot of figures on the table PDQ. Actual painting time, minus drying time and other delays, was about 20 minutes. However, I was painting one-offs. It wouldn’t have taken much longer to paint twenty in a production line manner. Make no mistake, I’m certainly not going to win any Golden Demon awards with this technique, but the rapidity of figure painting from box to table may get my piles of LotR and WHFB plastics out of storage.

My main goal with this experiment was not to write this article, rather, it was to see whether this would be a good way to quickly paint the vast amount of Warlord romans I’ve acquired. I have to say that the answer is a firm “Yes” to that question.