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!
Oh Wow , you are on a roll they are looking good .
You got my Brets all sorted out yet? ;-)
Oh man, looking good Stu!
I can tell you’ve really nailed this dipping thing.
About the highlights: The other day when I found this store near me that sells the Army Painter dip I talked to a couple of guys that were painting their models ready for a dip after seeing very impressive results on some of their just finished models and what they did, instead of going for hard highlights, was to blend colours instead. So they started with their original colour, then progressively lightened it up as they came towards the raised areas – using only 2 or 3 blends without paying too much attention applying them. This left a very bright model, very ugly pre-dip I might add, but the result after using the darkest dip was really really good.
Anyway, good luck with your armies. Looking forward to seeing more.
Mike.
I think double or triple dipping models models might acheive a similar effect though without seeing the results of their dipped blending and indeed the consistency and opacity of the Army Painter stuff its hard to tell.
Did you happen to see how watery the Army Painter stuff is ?
Heya Dustan!
Well the Army painter stuff is quite thick actually… The guys in the store I found it were thinning it down with paint-thinner to make it easier appliable by brush and to make it run around the model a bit smoother.
I still have not had a change to experiment with it myself because I am first making my own gaming table before getting into painting.