Editing The Army Painter (section)

== Quickshade, and miniature dipping in general ==
Miniature "dipping" has been around for awhile as a concept, usually by those turbonerd [[Chainmail|boomer]]s who aren't painting Orks with chain-axes or skeleton wizards. The idea is that you can get around the arduous process of painting and washing the details of a model using the right pigmented varnish, but it has always been a bit of a mixed bag; historically it used stuff like shoe polish or floor varnish, which is very difficult to use, noxious, took days to dry, and can absolutely fuck your model right up if you weren't attending to it constantly. The Army Painter decided they would take this age-old concept and make something actively designed for miniatures, creating what they call "Quickshade", a specific type of varnish in various strengths and shades of brown to black designed to be used in miniature painting. When it came out, it damn near revolutionized painting dozens, if not hundreds, of models at once that will never need any sort of upkeep as it's been varnished already, since the only thing you'd really need is to keep it from pooling outside of details you wanted highlighted and took a process that could be close to hours and turned it into minutes. However, [[skub|it was and has always been very contentious]] as it enables a technique that is a quick, dirty, and honestly kind of "cheaty" way to highlight the details of a model without putting in a lot of the real work, skill, and love that using washes and inks would. This also completely ignores the fact that a lot more of those 'Eavy Metal type painters you see here and there might use more of this stuff than you might think, but alas.

Of course, one of the reasons it's largely fallen out of favor with most painters is that while it has it's numerous advantages, that shit has but one minor problem: It is a fucking ''nightmare'' to use properly. It has a long drying time, has a lot of hassle in getting all that gunk out of areas you don't want it pooling, requires a lot of work on your part to keep them from looking like they just fell out of the back of a gas truck, and, if you didn't want everything to have an unusual glossy finish, it requires a quick spray of matte coating to keep everything looking good. It's also got the unfortunate drawback of needing a specific brush to move that stuff around because using your good brushes on this shit will wear them out badly.

Then they made quickshade washes, which does roughly the same shit but way, WAY better and doesn't require you to shake your model off or get a brush you're never gonna use for anything else to get the right coverage and you won't have paint pedants greentexting you about using a dip so for chrissake just use those instead.