A friend of mine bought the Space Hulk re-release last year and I volunteered to assemble and paint the figures. Assembling them took me about a week and a half, but they’ve been sitting in my garage since October last year waiting for paint.
I’ve finally stopped playing XBox 360 games long enough to experiment with a few paint schemes and come up with one I think I can use to speed dip the whole set of twenty three Space Hulk Genestealers in the box. This scheme is designed for use with a slightly darker version of my earlier homemade green Zombie dip.
Why green dip them? Well, I plan to brown dip the Blood Angels Space Marines and thought if the Genestealers were also brown dipped all the figures would look quite similar in tone on the game board. Green dipped Genestealers should contrast nicely with the red/brown Blood Angel Terminators during play. I’m also not really a fan of the default purple/blue scheme Genestealers are portrayed in.
The Genestealers were washed and then primed with GW Skull White spray which covered their purple plastic surprisingly well. The skin was painted with Rotting Flesh, while the armor, claws and teeth are Scaly Green (which I’ve since discovered is since out of production – oops). The base was painted in a couple of metallic tones – Chainmail and Gold. The whole figure was then dipped in the custom mix, flicked off and left to dry. Once completely dry a decent matt spray varnish was dusted over the figure and the teeth, tongue and claws were retouched with a gloss varnish, although that’s a little hard to see in the photos.
Overall I’m pretty happy with this first experimental Genestealer and think a Space Hulk board covered in the little buggers should look quite good. The green dip textures the lighter and darker parts of the figure nicely with zero effort and I particularly like the way it’s fallen into the ‘venting’ on the arms and legs. Now I have to crack on and finish painting the first clutch of five Genestealers, which I’ll post next week so stay tuned. Happy New Year too btw!
/dances with joyness
The green dipped area ist really stunning. to be honest it looks far more better than a lot of layered miniatures out there. Somehow its a little bit shocking how good that works. I need to look at your instructions for the dip again.
Looks so good. I love the way the green has shaded the red on the helmet, I have read somewhere that adding green to red shading is some kinda artist trick. I would love to see the 3 armed stealer on the terminator armour in the first clutch just to see a bigger area of red with the green dip.
Tankred, dipping is great and in effort vs result it will win every time. I have all but given up on ‘real’ painting though I never realy liked the gw layered propaganda anyway. Its too hard to get right and if you dont it looks rubbish next to a dipped model. but its ok cause you can just dip it and it will look alot better ;)
Tankred – dipping is a great way to bulk paint figures. In my opinion the real key to a good looking dipped figure is really just finding an excellent matt varnish to take the shine off the dried dip. Then the translucent nature of the dip can be seen and it really works wonders on the figure.
Dustan – I aim to please, the three armed Genestealer on Terminator torso is already half base coated as part of the first clutch…!
Looks great!
We’ll need to actually play the game at some point before Griff loses all patience and asks for the game back!
I think it would benefit from painting the tongue though.