Two armies in nine days - part 9

Well .......I did it and managed to finish both 1000 pt armies in the nine days (even left myself time to do a bit of gardening and listen the the Southampton game on the radio today)

I'll post up pictures of the two armies in separate posts. A few musings on army painter dip.

1) individually the figures look a bit ..Meh. I can paint to a pretty decent standard and given enough time can produce some decent miniatures. The thing is army painter is just that a tool for painting armies it's all about the massed effect and painting up an army quickly. This took me a little while to get my head around.

2) basing is really important. Good basing really helps to lift the effect.

3) I still need to practice applying the dip you need a lot less than you first think and in my first efforts I applied much to thickly. I was applying a lot less to the last figures I did. You also need to go back and clean up any pooling of dip with a brush and white spirit after about an hour to avoid unsightly blobs.

4) Base colours are important I chose colours I would normally paint with and some of these were to dark (browns especially) meaning the army painter dip didn't really show up which kind of defeats the object.

5) block painting large numbers of miniatures really isn't much fun and mistakes start to happen when you are painting large numbers of minis on a deadline late at night.

Overall I think Army painter dip could be a really useful tool to reduce my lead/plastic pile but I still have some work to do refining my technique. For a first stab on a tight timescale I think my first attempts aren't to bad but there is room for improvement.

Cheers Jon