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Hey,

I have slowly been building up a new blood angel army, I am pretty pleased with the miniatures I have painted so far, but one thing I haven’t done is varnish them, or any models I own for that matter. I know I should do this to protect them but am worried about ruining them in the process. I have read a number of posts about varnishing but there are a few things I am still a little unsure about that’s why I thought it would be best to start this thread to see if anybody could help. The first thing I want to check, I have based my miniatures, nothing very complicated just a bit of sand and static grass, is it ok to varnish once the base is done, or should I have done the base after varnishing ? I wasn’t sure how varnish would work once the grass had been added. Also what is the best varnish to use? I would prefer my marines to be non shiny and have read quite a bit about Testors dull coat could I just apply this or will I need to apply another type of varnish first to get a non shiny effect? I live in the UK so I am not sure how easy it will be to get unless anybody could advise me on something different. One more thing, should I definitely avoid GW’s purity seal? My friend wants to know if I want to go halves on a can as a test, but most of the stuff I have read about it seems pretty negative, I thought GW had sorted this stuff out.

Any help on the above would be most appreciated

Spray matt varnish on your models.

This way you protect them as well as avoid the shiny gloss effect.

Hope this helps,
Jack.

Thanks, is that ok to spray over bases that are allready flocked ?

Yes and the varnish helps hold down the flocking as well as protecting the paint.

Just take the time and spray a test fig, which is not too dear to you. If the spray is not working as you would like then no harm done.

Generally gloss varnish protects the paint jobs better than matte, but the you will do fine with just matte.

Thanks for the help guys, i will try and get some varnish this week, iv got plenty of old badly painted marines so i will do a few tests on them first.

You can also do more than one coat, gloss first then matte to have the best of both worlds.

Right, iv just bought 2 humbrol varnishes not sure what these are like, its all they had in the shop. I decided to buy both gloss and matt to test which is best, iv just sprayed some old marines il also have a go at doing both coats as mentioned above. Thanks for the advice.