Kickin it Old School: Speed painting

[Ironworker]

I've been playing with some speed painting techniques today.  I've noticed that it's takeing me a long time to finish minis these days.  At the height of my speed painting insanity I could paint a mini in a half hour to a decent tabletop standard.  Now that was 12 or so years ago and what a tabletop standard is has come up.  There's no way I'm going to used my old hackjob techniques but I gotta get faster.  I have a lot of minis to paint and a lot of games to play and I can't afford to spend two days to a week working on one miniature unless it's a very special and most of my minis ain't that special.
 
So there I was cruising the net looking at some mini painting pages when I found a tutorial that brought some older techniques back into my mind.  This guy was painting 30-40 minis or more in a couple days.  It reminded me of the caffine induced frenzy I went into back in the early 90s when i painted over 150 miniatures in a single week.  They were mostly Tyranids and Chaos Warriors.  Oh I was a drybrushing fool.  For shame for shame I said drybrush.  :rolleyes:   Anyhow this guy was basically painting in all the colors at one time.  No highlights or shadows just the base colors.  Then he washed the entire mini in a dark brown wash.  Oh this is just the dip method but no.  Wait.  He then highlighted using the same colors and a couple lighter tints and BAM just like that he had the mini looking pretty finished.  No it wasn't award winning but it was better than my old speed painting methods.  I thought here is a technique I could use.  After all I had been using a lot of washes lately.  Why not one big wash instead of a lot of fancy complementry color washes on ever single detail.  Now this is nothing new.  I've seen it done before.  I just needed something to jar my priorities back into order.  

I'm not a display painter.  I'm a miniature gamer.  I paint to play games not just to stick my minis in a glass case or to win overglorified paperweights.  Considering I almost never enter any kind of contest I started to wonder why I'm trying to paint like I am.  It's like hopeing to win the lottery but not actually buying the ticket.  All this careful and pretensious work I've been doing lately takeing hours just to do skin alone just so I can spend a couple hours a week rolling dice?  Now I like a nice looking army but do my troopers really need hours of skin work on each mini?  Perhaps my heros or important PCs or NPCs for roleplaying but mooks and trooper?  Nope of course they don't.  They need to get into the fight and there is nothing I hate worse than fielding unfinished troops.  It's bad for their moral.  Little guys have feeling too.  I look at my shelf of shame and I'm ashamed.  I never use to let it get that full.  I never use to spend days on characters and weeks on units.  I was an army painter yet there were armies of half painted little heros stareing me down.  My heart sank.  I had let my troops down.  I had been beguiled by the siren call of the artiste de miniature, the display painters, the collectors.  All those battles my troops either sat the bench or were pressed into service before they were fully prepaired.  No more!  

My guilt turned to anger then my anger turned to resolve.  I would learn to paint armies again.  I would learn to paint more quickly.  I would learn to simplify my designs and limit my highlighting.  And just to be a jerk I would paint with cheap craft paints again until I deserved to paint with better stuff again.  

So here we go:


This nasty little sucker had been rideing my shelf for the better part of a decade.  He still wore the semi gloss basecote that I used to use to get a smoother finish using faster methods.  I reached past my citadel, vallejo, and reaper paints and grasp my bottles of delta cermacote and folk art paints I have been using only to paint terrain projects.  Then with brush in hand I laid down the base colors.  Oh that looks ugly.  I think I spent between 45 minutes and a hour doing this.


Now the wash.  I mixed burnt umber with a touch of navy blue and a drop of black.  I added a few drops of future flor wax and a lot of water.   Perhaps too much water as the wash seemed a bit weak.  The wash took an hour to dry completly.  That was annoying but it would explain why it's been takeing me so long to finis minis lately as I've been washing just about every color seperately.  





Then I highlighted each color with the origional color and a couple highlights.  the wash over the armor was a bit weak and I ended up using some delta silver I had never used over my old tried and true folk art paints.  I did use folk art on the bronze bits and I think they look better.  Had this not been a speed painting test I would have gone back and worked the steel areas a bit more with washes and more careful highlights but that wasn't the point of this exercise.  I think I spent about a half hour on the highlights.



Then I mask out the gaps in the base with masking tape.  Another hack technique from back in the day but I didn't want to wait 8 hours for putty to fully cure.  I painted the base and added some turf and black balast.  That's it.  I did not do a shield because I didn't have a Chaos shield at my studio.  I haven't painted chaos in a while and my shields were back at my house.  Tomorrow I'll paint one up and finish the model.  Up to this point I have about a hour and a half to two hours of actual painting.  Mission acomplished?  I would say so.  I think he looks a bit rough, especially the armor, but that's to be expected since it's been a long time since I put speed above everything else.  Another thing that makes a big difference in this piece is that I had a lot of fun doing it.  It's been a while since I could say that.    

Don't worry my little troopers.  I'm getting back in the game.    

 :mrgreen:

[Prof.Witchheimer]

nice story, was lot of fun to read, thanks for that! Yes, i think your outcome look not bad though that's metallic and metallic was always more easy to use it for speedy painting/brushing/etc. The question is if the working with non-metallic colors will also give you such nice outcome? However, my greetings to your little troopers

[Ironworker]

I'm going to do some today with less metalic.  I've got quite a few "Shelf Queens" I intent to clear using this technique and several of them have less metalic parts than this.

[kalebdaark]

Whenever I do speed painting, I use inks.  I prefer Windsor Newton Peat brown ink for this almost exclusively.   Basically, it goes a little something like this:

1) Prime the figure.  Smooth primer is preferred

2) Paint "within the lines"  and let dry.  If you're in a hurry, have an old blow drier there and just go over the wet paint and watch it dry fast Fast FAST.



3) Evenly coat with the ink.   If you're in a real rush, use the blow drier again.  Don't get right up to the figure because you don't want to blow the ink around too much.



This gives a "gaming quality" acceptable result.  Works great over metallic colors too.

My painting tutorials:

http://www.skankgame.com/Painting1a.html
http://www.skankgame.com/Painting1b.html
http://www.skankgame.com/Painting101.html

Enjoy!