Army Painter QuickShade trial

A tin of Army Painter Quickshade arrived this morning, bright and early.
Just in time to crack it open and give it a quick try before work!

It smells like what it is - a spirit based varnish with coloured pigments. I'd read on the 'net that it' just brand-x walnut varnish, someone else said it was floor cleaner with ink in it, someone else said it was something else... but from the tutorials I've seen using genuine Army Painter Quickshade, everyone has been quite positive about it. So why trying to make up something similar on the cheap, when the real thing is tried and tested and known to work? It's not actually that bad (compared to, say, spirit-based gloss paint) but it does have a definite scent.

It takes 24 hours to cure properly, so it made sense to whack some on sooner rather than later, and have some miniatures ready for painting early tomorrow.

Here's a Tyranid coated with Quickshade. There's no point being gentle with this stuff. It's designed as a dip (you literally dip the miniatures into the pot) but a lot of people recommend "splashing it on" with a brush. If you're timid, you'll just end up tinting all your colours a dark brown: this stuff really needs to be whacked on generously.

Here's the same model painted in just two colours of base coat, so you can see the dramatic difference Quickshade has made already:

Of course, where it settles in pools (you can see on the end of one of the claws in the photo above) you can lift it off with the paintbrush - but to get the best results, just chuck it on!

note how the Quickshade brings out the individual digits on the hands of this soldier - much quicker and easier than painting each digit over a darker base colour (although we'll probably go back and highlight the digits later, to get a really cool finish)

So far, so promising. I got a Tyranid and four soldiers shaded in less than ten minutes. The models are much darker now than before shading as even where it's not settled into the crevices, it still tints the original base colour: something to bear in mind in future, and perhaps move the entire colour scheme "up" a shade when base-coating (e.g. paint with white -not bone- then shade, for a bone effect or paint with mid-green and shade instead of dark green for the base-coat on Orksies).

It's going to be tomorrow before I can try out the anti-shine matt varnish and get some details painted onto these models, but already they're looking quite encouraging. More to follow. In the meantime, we've some board game sections to solder up for testing...