Dipping wee naked men!

As many of you know, 40k and Fantasy are not my only gaming hobbies. In the last few months many of us at Ordo Ineptus have gotten in to Ancient wargaming using Warlord Games' "Hail Caesar!" rules. Great game...simply, light, fun, cinematic. I dropped a few bills on a big army of Gauls, and am finally getting down to painting them...speed painting with The Army Painter!

The army will hopefully look really fun. Few wear armor...hell, few wear shirts...and in fact, I have a whole unit of guys that prefer to go in to battle wearing nothing but the hair on their heads! Well, that's not entirely true...some have belts, a few have helmets, and one pansy wore a cloak. What a tool! Speaking of tools...have you ever painted pubic hair? I have now!

My first unit, something of a test run, was some skirmishers armed with Javelins. I did a quick basecoat on them, trying to use lots of different 'earth-tone' colors for most of their clothes, but some lively colors thrown in too to keep it from being bland...not to mention the books say they were a colorful lot. I didn't want to use too many reds or blues...I think those dyes would have been a bit more scarce, but not completely non-existant. I threw in some stripes and tried my hand at a plaid (I suck, but it gets the idea across).

After that, they got a quick dip in the Quickshade. Sadly, I didn't read the instructions first...I'm a man, what can I say?!...first step being to shake the can well. They got a lot of shiny and not a lot of shade, but came out decent enough...on to the big tamale...the Naked Fanatics!

Now keep in mind I'm not attempting to win any prizes here, I just want guys that look pretty on the table. With that in mind, I started off with a black primer on the fanatics, then slathered on the Tallarn Flesh. A bunch of different hair colors (including some Fire Crotches for Kevin!). Belts, weapons, and shields were done the same way...quick and sloppy, mostly in small increments as I could find time here or there, though had a few good sitdown and paint sessions while on skype an/or vassal!

I did some water-slide transfers on the shields, and got all ready to dip on Saturday night...and found it was cold as hell and snowing! But, I'm an American, I demand immediate gratification, so I dipped in the snow!

This wasn't a great idea. I learned the obvious...the Quickshade gets thicker when it's cold, and didn't drip/shake off as much as it normally would. Not a huge deal, just a bit gloppier than I had in mind.

The Quickshade takes a long time to dry, at least 12 hours before doing more work with them. Got up the next day and started basing them (in between attempts to fix my leaking kitchen sink...said attempts resulting in it leaking far worse than before I touched it. I surrender!) with a mix of railroad ballast sizes and a mix of green and yellow turf, with some tufts stuck on here and there for a bit more texture.

The final step then after all that was dry, a Matte Spray to take away the super-shiney-sheen of the Quickshade. I did something very rare for me, I did this spraying during daylight hours! Usually my priming and such is done after kids are in bed under a porchlight with the moths only seeing about half of what I'm doing!

The spray went on easy and fast. I sprayed once, let it dry for 30 mins, then went back over it to make sure I hit any spots that were still shiny...the end result:



"Daddy, I can see their butts!"




General Dumnorix, holding aloft his most recent prize!




All dressed up and no place to go!


I'm quite pleased with the results. One thing I wish I'd tried was some woad tattoos, but maybe I'll try that next time I paint naked guys!

So, that's 30ish guys done...almost 400 to go. Next up, one of SEVEN big units of dudes!

It's really imposing how many guys I have to paint...this is less than 10% of the whole army!

With the proper application of enough Mt. Dew, anything is possible! Skin is done, pants tonight, shirts (what few there are!) tomorrow, hair on thurs, belts, shoes, and weapons on Friday, then off to the dip on Saturday!