Shtop! Shtop! Thish palette are not ready yet.

With the preparation of my Skaven Warband taking a bit longer to get to the undercoating stage than expected I thought I'd test out my colour scheme on some unsuspecting GW Empire Militia that were lying around. If you recall from a few posts ago, I announced that the fashionable colours for Skaven this season were brown, brown, dark red and dip (actually looking back I only said dirty and dip, so you'll have to take my word this is what I meant...). So I broken out all my browns, a red, a white for comparison and got going.

The problem with painting with a mostly brown palette and then dipping a in diluted brown varnish dip is that, unsurprisingly in hindsight, the dip doesn't really work as well. Really you'd have thought I'd have realised that, wouldn't you.

There was only one thing - strengthen up the dip and go again.

Now I can tell even from this distance that you're mightily impressed by the improvements. No? Well let me at least try to convince you there IS a difference. The shadows in the face are better and at least the darker dip shows in the folds of the clothes. The crossbow figure on the right was actually dipped in the neat varnish as I was convinced that full power was needed to do something with his brown coat & boot combo. As a result of this little exercise I have altered my Skaven paint scheme away from all browns. I'll just have to decide where to go from here - adding greys probably.

Anyway the point of this post is not just to demonstrate my colour selection buffoonery, but to throw into the ring the idea of trying out your paint scheme before starting a squad and not just launching straight in. As shown, it may be a good idea.