I haven’t posted for a while, because I’ve been slowly assembling the various bits and pieces from my Imperial Games Warhammer order, and while I enjoy making GW plastic figures, it doesn’t make for very interesting blogging. To date I’ve built most of a Warhammer Giant, a box of 20 Night Goblins, three Fanatics, an Orc Boss and around 20 Orc Arrer boyz (from my original battalion boxes). I’ve also cleaned up and reprimed a bunch of stuff too – 20 Zombies are ready for painting, which would take the me up to 40 in total. I’ve also got the final five Orc Boyz primed too which would take my first Orc unit to 30, and I’m half way through painting the second Boar Chariot.

Anyway, while assembling the plastic Goblin Fanatics I was disappointed by the bland look of the straight chains their balls of whirling death are on. It doesn’t really match the fluff, so I thought I’d try heat bending the thermoplastic GW figures are molded from. Searching on the internet it seems people use all sorts of methods to reshape GW plastics. I didn’t fancy hair driers, heat guns or open flames so resorted to boiling water. Bringing a pot to the boil on the stove I held the Fanatics in for a minute using cooking chopsticks. The plastic chains became easily bendable so I put gentle curves into all of them, although I wonder if I shouldn’t have gone more extreme and tried for a spiral or u-bend?

It was so easy I wonder why I haven’t tried this years ago with other GW plastics. I discovered something else too – GW black plastic bases are made of an awful cheap and crappy thermoplastic. I made the mistake of leaving the round bases on the Fanatics while I was boiling them and the bases shrunk and warped considerably in the process. Oh well, I’ve got plenty of square bases to spare so just replaced them, since basing makes no difference as they move randomly with scatter dice.

I’ve dipped another ten Zombies since I mixed my own green dip and I’ve added in the five Zombies I painted slowly years ago to create this small unit. Can you spot the hand painted vs the dipped Zombies? It’s not that hard to do, but I’m happy to see they blend in nicely with the newer dipped figures, which really goes to show the strength of the dipping technique. Individually the figures aren’t that great, but overall the unit looks quite nicely foetid which is exactly the effect I was hoping green dip would have.

The custom movement tray is just a standard GW movement try that’s had some resin cast details from a Hirst Arts mold pinned to it and painted. It looks quite nice but frankly can be a bit of a hassle to place figures into as they tend to snag on the details. Looking at it again, I wonder if I shouldn’t brush a little dip on that bronze as well.

I’ve got a bunch more Zombies taking a stripping bath at the moment to remove some incomplete paint jobs, and I’ve got another handful to patch up and prime. In fact I’m considering salvaging my original Vampire Counts Border Patrol Force from 2004 and getting them finally finished using dip. To complete them wouldn’t take much effort once the Zombies are done. From memory I think I had a handful of metal Grave Guard to finish as well, and they can certainly go through the green dip. In fact I might try a little highlighting over the base coat prior to dipping, rather than the simple flat base colours I’ve been doing so far.

For reference here’s close-ups of the two extra ranks of five Zombies I’ve painted. You can see I’ve been experimenting with a variety of skin tones, from a lighter green to a lighter turqouise to a slightly over the top dark turqouise tone. Dip gives your figures quite a natural range of tones even if you base them with the same colour (thinned GW Camo Green in this case) but I thought I’d mix it up a little and see how it works. The blue skin tones came out fairly well, giving the figures a drowned or maybe frostbitten appearance. I wanted to experiment with some purple skin tones as well, but couldn’t find any purple paint in my collection – and frankly couldn’t be bothered mixing a custom tone for a couple of figures. Ah well, maybe a few in the next batch!