At Adepticon I sweet-talked the team at Goblin Hobbies into giving me a review sample of their entire Stampin' Plate system, a painting tool that combines thick paint, squishy stamps, and etched metal plates to let you apply fine details like army badges and squad markings to your Warhammer 40k armies and other miniatures. It's technology taken from the world of nail art, marketed as an alternative to stencils or waterslide transfers; and it's so much damn fun that I'm beginning to see why people like painting their nails.
The tech behind Goblin Hobbies Stamping Plates has existed for years as a tool for making exciting nail art designs. The difference is in the designs themselves. Instead of floral patterns, mandalas, and goth cobwebs, these etched plates have designs that are useful for painting miniatures; Space Marine chapter icons and squad markings, go faster flames for Ork bikes, marks of Chaos, positional names for the bases of Blood Bowl players, and so on.
The video below captures the essence of using the plates. You apply nail polish to a design on the plate, scrape off the excess using a plastic scraper held at a 45 degree angle, roll a squishy stamper gently across it, look through the opposite end of the stamper to line it up on the target area, then press down to apply the design. It is instantly dry, and if you've got it right you'll feel like a genius.
In some ways this is a massive upgrade over water-slide transfers. The process is quicker; you don't need to use any extra chemicals or varnishes to get the design to stick to the surface permanently; critically, the squishy stamp can flex around a curved surface and apply the design neatly, unlike the geometric impossibility of getting a 2D transfer to fold perfectly around a 3D Space Marine shoulder pad.
But the experience is different, not strictly easier. In warm conditions the nail polish can dry on the stamping plate or on the stamp before you can apply a design, and even in cooler conditions you don't have long to work, which makes it much harder to line the stamp up exactly where you want it. Once a design is down, it's down for good: I have a number of off-centre squad markings as a result.
When attempting to get a design up to the edge of an area it's a good idea to mask off any adjacent parts of the model you don't want to get painted. Stamping plates also require cleaning with acetone, so you're not free of chemicals.
It's more art than science, and getting good with stamping plates takes practise. I'm not good yet. But here's the thing - getting a stamp right feels incredible. You can see immediately whether you've transferred a clean design from the plate onto the stamper, and that's so satisfying. Getting it onto the model in exactly the right spot? The feeling is indecent.
You can also do things that aren't easy with transfer or even stencils. As each stamped design dries instantly, it's trivial to combine several of them and overlay them (just bear in mind that bright colors go down better over whites, as usual).
I've had a go at making some custom Knight livery. It's not very good, to be clear, but you get the picture: I can repeat this design as many times as I like. Want a Space Marine chapter logo with an etruscan boar superimposed over a lightning bolt? Go for it!
Because this is an established craft tool in the world of nail art, there are lots of tutorials with troubleshooting advice that's been helpful in learning how to get designs to stick to the stamper. There are plenty of advanced techniques I haven't explored yet, including ways to reactivate a design that has dried on the stamp.
There are also a lot of nail art plates on the market. Goblin Hobbies' range is full of useful designs for wargamers, but the plates are roughly three times the cost of ordering from an anonymous Chinese retailer. I can't compare the quality, so perhaps it's money well spent, but I suspect that most of the price is because the designs are being sold in smaller quantities directly to the wargamer market.
Even with the amateurish results I'm currently getting, I keep looking for ways to add more of these stamped designs to my minis. Small designs add so much to the look of a model it's almost a cheat code, and getting it right with one of these stamps is just incredibly good fun.
So here's my advice - ask a friend or family member who uses nail stamps to teach you how to do it, and then decide if you want to take the plunge. Heck, if you don't want to mess up any of your miniatures, you can always practise your designs on your nails.
Have you got a sure-fire technique for applying squad markings, shield logos, or character names onto miniatures? Share your ideas - and some pictures of your work - in the Wargamer Discord community.