Okay 17 Days!!

Well its been 17 days and no updates, what gives? Well I could go on & on about being busy with real life stuff, but I will not bore you. but I have been painting and the dwarfs are just about done, so lets get to it!


The last time we saw the dwarfs they were primed black with a dry brush of an off white color. Now I go back in & paint the basic colors in, some call this block painting I call it paint by numbers, here is a shot of the archers after they were blocked in.




There is nothing fancy just straight colors painted on, what you can't see in the picture is the highlighting I did stands out a bit on the white spots as opposed to the black areas. I painted the whole force this way and basically did an assembly line sort of painting. Once I had them all base painted I moved onto the next section, dipping!


Now there are many online articles out there about the speed method of "Dipping" so I will not go into all that, but a quick explanation is that you are washing the figure or dipping the figure in a urethane stain to give you instant shading. Here is what I use:

Now Minwax Polyshades makes a variety of colors but what I found that works well is the Tudor Satin color which is a blackish color. You will also notice I use Mineral Spirits as well, this is for clean up as well as controlling how much "Dip" I put on a figure. You see I really don't dip the figure in (That's were the term comes from) I brush on the stain. I just slop it on with the brush & set aside. I do use the mineral spirits to take away any extra stain I don't want on the figure, like pooling of the stain in low spots. I just dip the brush into some mineral spirits and touch on the figure, pretty easy really. Now once the dipped figure has dried, I shoot it with Testors Dullcoate, the nice thing about dipping is that you get three things out of it, one is the instant shading, two is a hard protective coating & thirdly you get a shiny model. Hence the reason for the Dullcoate. Here is a shot of a figure blocked in (on the left) and a dipped figure after Dullcoate (on the right).

Here is another shot of the dipped Axeman after Dullcoate.

Now once all the figures were painted I needed to texture the base, I use Liquitex Ceramic Stucco and I put it on the base.

The nice thing is it dries white and gives you a nice ground effect. Now Liquitex does make other pastes and I have tried some of these but I always go back to the Ceramic Stucco. here is the whole 350 point force textured.Next up will be painting the base & flocking them, my biggest issue at this point is what color to use. I can go with a grey color simulating rock underground, or I can go with browns to represent being outdoors, I still have not decided yet, that will be in the next post.

Now also besides the Dwarfs, I painted up a few Giant Spiders, a couple of Bat Swarms and the Spider queen in the last few days, here they are.

Here is the GW LotR Spider Queen, you will notice that I converted the model by cutting the legs apart & bending them to look more realistic. The GW one shown below has its front & rear legs molded together, it really looks terrible and not vary lifelike, so all I did was cut them apart, I think it looks better now & as a side note, my wife will not pick up the model!




TK