Like a lot of people, I don't seem to have time anymore to spend hours painstakingly painting my miniatures, especially if I want to indulge in gaming with these same mini's and also spend some time doing my other hobbies...and the there is full time work and family/domestic stuff too :)
So I do quick paint jobs these days, aiming to get a decent tabletop paint job done...so I use the Army Painter Dip. I know there are other quick methods of shading, but what I prefer about the Army Painter stuff is that it gives me both the shading effect and an incredibly durable finish to the mini so it stands up brilliantly to gaming, transporting and storage.
Instead of "flicking" the mini or using a brush on the mini to remove excess dip...I just dunk the entire thing in the pot, fully submerge the miniature and then let a power drill do all the work for me...put the mini into a small box with a hole in the top and spin that drill at Warp Factor 12 for 3-5 seconds...the box catches all the spin-off dip so you don't spray it all over the house...this method is super quick and does a better job than I can manage by flicking or brushing the mini.
I have 4 x Wolverines, 2 each from the Beginner Box Set and the AGoAC Box Set...and so I decided to start my plastic-work on 2 of the Wolverines. These mini's have two different colours, mimicking the super cool box art from the Beginner Box Set...on top of a white undercoat, I airbrushed the top half with two quick coats of red and brushed-on a single coat of black grey on the bottom half and also on a couple of weapon bits, all of which took less than 10 minutes for each mini...then I spent a few minutes more on each mini working on the cockpit windows, and once the paint was dry I then spent less than a minute on dipping and spinning up each mini on the drill. If you use a fast spinning drill you don't need to do any extra clean up of excess dip.
After 1 day of the dip drying, do your base work, and after 2 days of the dip drying lay down 2 x light coats of Testor's Dullcote to remove the shine of the dried dip and protect the base work...and that's it.
If you want to add decals, do it before you put the Testor's Dullcote on.
The bases are 2mm thick laser cut black acrylic with a hex size of 50mm from flat edge to flat edge. I like having the bases this big as it provides more stability for the miniature and also allows you to do some more interesting base work...I'll probably do a little more to the bases below once I have all 10 mini's painted.
I mostly play Alpha Strike, but sometimes CBT with the Miniature Rules, so having large hex bases doesn't matter as they don't have to fit inside the Map Hexes.
So between the 4 x Box Sets, I have 20 x IS plastic mini's and I think I will do 10 in this colour scheme and 10 in another, yet to be determined colour scheme.
