Guess the Dipped Goblins - And win a fully painted Battle for Skull Pass

A small contest: can you guess which, and how many, of these six minis have been dipped, and which haven't? Guess right and there's something in it for you (see end of article).

As you may have just realized, we're now offering dipped miniature painting, which come in at half the cost of our standard painting rates. Painting starts as low as 99 cents per figure. You can check out our dipped pricing here on our prices page: http://www.paintedfigs.com/prices.html

One of our clients asked us to look into dipping as a way of offering painted Wargames Factory historicals at low rates. Assemble, basecoat, dip in Army Painter or Minwax, treat with matte varnish, and voila. In our search for the 99 cent Roman, we found first that we could do night goblins, gretchin and gnoblars for 99 cents, and most other infantry for $1.65.  

Compare and Contrast: Dipped gobbos vs. Standard gobbos

You can see the results of our dipping tests here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/paintedfigs/NightGoblinsComparedDippedVsStandardQuality#

This is a gallery of night goblins comparing dipped (no grass on their bases) with standard paint job night goblins (grass on their bases). Here are some standard quality chaps:

Now here are some dipped night goblins:

Now here is a close up. This shows two dipped goblins on the left, and two standard quality goblins on the right:

Once we add grass to them, I will not be able to tell them apart without checking quite closely, which works fine for me. Now please note, these are just night goblins. Results are going to vary based on the figures and the paint jobs, but we can safely say that while they won't have the polish or standard or showcase quality work, they'll still come together quite nicely as far as dipping results go. 

Tac Marines for just over Retail: A Games Workshop Example

When you combine this with buying miniatures through us at wholesale rates, this can make for quite the saving. A box of ten tactical marines that retails for $35, we can buy, custom assemble, and dip paint, ALL for $39.25 . That's an extra $4.25, plus shipping. 

Metal Minis: Fully Painted and Cheaper than Retail

It gets more insane when you look at miniatures by companies that do mostly metal. Warcaster Dawnlord Vyros from the new Retribution line for Warmachine, costs $14.99 at retail. At standard painting rates we can offer him, model and paint job combined, for $15.20. With dipping, we can offer him painted for $11.35 -- cheaper than retail.  

There's a lot we'd like to do with dipping (prepainted historicals, shopping cart convenience for stock painting scheme warmachine orders), but we're starting just with extending it as a normal, commission-based painting service for Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Fantasy first. 

Have you guessed exactly which (and how many) minis in the first picture are dipped and which are undipped? If you've figured it out, email me at navin@paintedfigs.com, and put "Skull Pass Dipped Challenge" in the email title. One correct winner, selected at random, will receive the goblin part of the Battle for Skull Pass, fully painted and in his mail box. 

The reaction from our clients who were informed about it last week has been quite positive, and we're proud to be able to offer this highly affordable solution to the community. 

Navin

Visit from the Sunday Times to Paintedfigs.com

I've always felt Paintedfigs.com made for a good human interest feature story, especially in Sri Lanka where there is so little exposure to the larger world of gaming, let alone miniatures (they do video and PC, but everything else is unheard of except for Risk which everyone owns but no one ever plays). It has all the hallmarks: oddity, quirkiness, pretty visuals, human interest. I even pitched the story to one magazine, but they didn't seem to think it was something worth writing about (they also went out of business a couple of years ago, so look who's laughing now, eh? EH?). 

The Sunday Times of Sri Lanka is quite an old paper out here, and has a strong leisure and human interest following. My friend Smriti Daniel (who got me to do some writing for a children's zine she edits) it turned out also writes for the Times, and she set up an interview with us over the weekend. 


What is wargaming? Why did you pick it? How long have you been a gamer for? Where do your staff come from? Had they ever seen anything like this before? Who buys these? She asked a good range of questions, perhaps with a slant towards doing a story focused on a person (me!) rather than miniature painting or the industry of miniature painting in general (not that I'm complaining). 


The end of the interview caught me off guard: Pushpa the photographer took a great many pictures of me with miniatures -- I guess I know a playboy model feels - just with minis. And pants. They also insisted I couldn't make ridiculous faces, and its hard for me to make a normal face when a picture is being taken (check me out on facebook -- there's almost no images where I'm not trying to look like a five year old).  


 I think there is good scope for a general story of Asian miniature painting, from Sri Lanka to Hong Kong, where it's a very real business creating full time employment. You've got Sanath Fernando only half an hours' drive from me who started full time professional miniature painting in the first place (last I heard he had 80 painters), newer companies like Reinforcements by Post (Bangladesh) and DJD Minis (Thailand), and then late entrants like us specializing in fantasy. 


Us being covered in the local media doesn't really touch a lot of people interested in miniatures or painting, but it is nice for the staff to be able to show the article to friends and such and be asked about it at parties. Further, it might help build interest in our fledgling gaming community out here. 


You can see more pictures of their visit on our facebook page here. We'll be updating this gallery with the pics of the article and link to it online. 


Navin