Sealing Your Paint Job

Having invested so much time and effort into painting your miniatures, you'll want to do something to protect your masterpieces from the normal wear and tear associated with gaming. The typical solution is to coat your miniatures with a protectant sealer. Sealers are available as both sprays and brush-on varieties. You also can choose between a gloss and a flat or matte finish. Which you choose is a matter of personal preference. There is one train of thought that holds a gloss finish is harder, and so practitioners coat first with gloss and then finish with a final matte coat to tone down the glossiness.

You can buy fairly expensive gloss and matte sealers from hobby sources such as the Armory and Games Workshop. Others have experimented and found that the regular commercial sprays (e.g. Krylon) and canned polyurethene sealers (e.g. Minwax) sold at home improvement stores do the trick just fine and will save you a few pennies.

Testor's GlossKote and DullKote brush-on sealers (and related Floquil products) are popular choices, but many gamers report that the finishes are not sufficiently hard on their own to protect your figures. Also, solvents in these sealers will smudge any fancy detail added to your figure with ink pens. However, DullKote does a good job as a final coat to dull down a harder glossy undercoat.

When using spray sealants, be sure to wear a suitable mask and work in a well ventilated area since polyurethene can damage the lungs or eyes if it comes in contact. If outdoors, be careful of winds that can blow spray back into your face. If indoors, spray figures in a large box to reduce the drift. The standard advice when applying a spray sealer is to put on several thin coats, being careful to let each coat dry thoroughly before applying the next. This not only promotes adhesion but also eliminates a tendancy for tiny air bubbles to form in the finish if too much wet sealant is allowed to build up. Holding the can at the recommended distance, start your spray slightly to the left or right of your line of miniatures and then spray quickly across. You will need to make front, back and top-down passes to ensure full coverage. When using a brush on or dipping technique, check each figure and use a brush to remove excess sealant and eliminate any bubbling.

Dipping is a popular option and David Kuijt has developed his own variation dubbed the "Miracle Dip," which involves dipping or brushing the painted mini in the hard to find Minwax Polyshade Satin Tutor finish. This particular dark stain and finish has the double-benefit of highlighting the folds and crevices of the figure, eliminating the need for an ink wash or other shading technique. This picture of "dipped" Pirates by Bob Beattie illustrates how nice a shading effect can be achieved even on bare metal. Other (lighter) shades of Minwax or other commercial finishes apparently are okay for protection and/or for shading lighter colored figures (e.g. Arabs in white robes), but the consensus seems to be that only the Satin Tutor is sufficiently dark to provide the desired shading effect on armor and darker colored miniatures.

Here is how David Kuijt's describes his technique:

The Miracle Dip: Take the unpainted, unprimed miniature; clean off flash and glue it to a nail head (my normal method). Paint whatever is not mail or metal armour. Since the fig isn't primed, this may take an extra coat for some colours, and you have to be careful not to rub off anything. Dip the fig into Miracle Dip. Shake off excess (somewhere you won't get in trouble for splattering polyurethane stain), then take a beat-up old miniatures brush and remove any further glops at bottom of shield edges, around the neck, between legs, and so on. Let dry 24 hours, then it is done.

I use the same Dip method on a lot of my Dark Ages figures, although there I prime the fig first (as the fig is mostly NOT metal armour).

MinWax Polyshades is combined one-coat polyurethane and stain; the Tudor is the darkest stain in their repertoire. Satin coat is because the Gloss is way too glossy. If the result is still too glossy even with Satin coat, you can spray a coat of matte sealer overtop to take off the gloss.

The stain acts as a beautiful wash, bringing out every tiny pockmark of chainmail and line of plate armour; plus folds of cloth etc. The polyurethane part gives a tremendously durable topcoat to the fig.

It takes a little guts to do this the first time, thrusting your painted fig into the black goopy maw of a paint can. But I now use it on almost all my figs, and my painting speed has nearly doubled; for mostly-mail and mostly-armour figs my painting speed is probably four times as fast as it was (and I wasn't slow before).

Other Techniques

Christopher Fielitz: Now that I can no longer seem to find my favorite figure staining inks called Dragonstains, I have been on a quest to find a substitute. I wanted to use the Miracle Dip technique, but I canšt seem to find Minwax Polyshade Satin Tutor at my local hardware stores. I think, however, I have hit upon a reasonable alternative. I use a mixture of Future Floor Acrylic and black paint. Future is relatively inexpensive for the size of bottle available, and is very watery. I mix about 3 parts Future to1 part black acrylic paint. You have to mix the two fairly fast and use it right away because it starts hardening quickly. I apply it to several figurines at once with an old brush. While wet, it cleans up with water. Like the polyurethane stain, it avoid the problems associated with water surface tension, but you donšt have to deal with organic solvents, etc. It also dries a lot faster. It is extremely glossy when dry, but I just go over the non-metallic parts of the figures with a flat sealer.

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Last Updated: December 13, 1999

Comments, suggestions and questions welcome. Send you feedback to Chris Brantley at brant@erols.com.