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Paint like a Heretic! Okay, we are all taught, or think we are taught, how to paint. You get a very small brush and start thinning your paint and building up layers and trying to get those tiny details. We see the models from the 'Eavy Metal team and the Golden Daemon winners, and we hear about painters spending hours and hours on a single model. We start to despair that our army will ever be painted. There is another way. Throw off your chains and paint like a heretic, you have nothing to lose but your unpainted models! Well, sort of... I have been working for a while on improving my painting, and it has improved quite a bit. Along the way, however, I've become frustrated by trying to paint large numbers of models and still spend more time and attention on each one. While picking up a couple of extra tips the other day, it struck me that I actually do know how to paint fast and paint well. Although I have a couple of painting articles already and a few of the techniques and tips are listed there, I want to go over all of them briefly. The real key is doing all (or most) of the techniques. Each one by itself will save you a little bit of time and make the model look good, but they work much better as a team, much like the units in your army. I'll begin in the beginning and work my way toward the end of the painting process, to make it easy to follow. First off, take the model from the sprue and go over it for flash, the little mold lines and bits of molding material that are left on it from the casting process. Take a hobby knife (files tend to cause damage to the models, IMO) and, holding it perpendicular to the surface, scrape gently back and forth to remove the lines and bits of flash. The time-saving step here is to do all of the same kind of model at once. Once you've done one or two of a particular kind of model, you'll know where to look for the lines and flash, so you don't have to inspect each one. Conversions. This article is primarily about painting effectively and quickly, and major conversion work will slow you down. On the other hand, by simply adjusting the facing of the head of a model, or the angle of a weapon, you can make a model more dramatic, or simply just different from the others. I would shy away from anything that requires putty work or cutting the model, but simple re-posing is quick and effective. Priming and Basecoating. There are great lines of spray paint out there, make use of them. Spray in short bursts, coating the model gradually by letting the dots collect and connect to each other to form a solid, but thin coat. For large areas of a single color (that are a different color than your sprayed coat) use a large brush. The other day I was watching a friend paint and he was using a tank brush! (it had a "point" about the thickness of my little finger) he held the model steady and put a small, even coat over the large areas of the model that he wanted that color. With a brush that large, each section only took one pass, so it went quickly. Remember that the easiest way to keep it steady is to link your hands together and place your elbows on the table, creating a stable triangle from which to paint the model. My friend was also using an assembly-line technique, where he did all the coats of the same color at the same time. Much like cleaning up the model, the assembly line procedure saves time through repetition of small parts. If you do the same step over and over again, you'll begin to do it automatically, making it faster. Some time between any spraying you do and brush painting is the best time to base your model. If you do it after finishing painting, you run the risk of getting flock or other basing material on your model and having a harder time getting it off without damaging your work. Basing is a quick, easy step that really makes the model look complete and helps give the army a cohesive look, giving them a "common ground" as it were. The simplest way is to brush a thinned mix of white glue onto the base, then dip it in the sand or green flock. If you paint the base a similar color to what will coat it (green for the green flock, for example) that will help to make sure that you don't miss any areas. An additional quick step is to paint a black ring around the edges of the base (not the top, just the sides.) This helps them stand out visually and looks classy. Thinning your paint. Almost all painting guides comment about thinning your paint. While thinned paint is very effective for subtle effects and shading, that's not what we're after here. We want to get paint on the model quickly and effectively. While we don't want to obscure details, even the thickest GW paint I've worked with can flow around them instead of caking them over. The main concern here is to not put too much paint on the model at once. If you rub the tip of the brush against the side of the paint lid or on your painting tile or even on a bit of paper towel, you can keep the large blobs from forming. Without thinning the paint, it typically is the color I'm looking for and the coverage I need with a single coat. A single coat means less brush strokes per model, and hence less time for the whole army. Washes. Whether you use ink or paint or something else, a wash can be a very effective way of darkening the recesses of the model. By darkening the recesses, you make the higher points stand out more, giving more definition to the model and bringing out more detail. Whatever medium you use, make sure that this is well-thinned. As thin as those inks are, they are still way too dark to put directly on your model, unless you are planning on coloring the whole model with them. Thinning them 3 or 4 to 1 (more water than pigment) is about right, and adding a bit of Future Floor Wax will help them go to the right place better, by reducing their surface tension. Highlights and Drybrushes. The opposite of Shading (what washes do, among other things) is Highlighting, and the opposite of Washing is Drybrushing. Hightlighting brings out the high points of the model, again creating more definition. Instead of putting really thin paint on the brush and letting it run down into the crevices of the model, Drybrushing is wiping most of the paint off the brush, then running it across the model so that only the raised areas receive any pigment at all. Although highlighting, like shading, can be done by hand, painting individual areas, it is a slower procedure, not what we are talking about here. However, one possibility is to highlight an area that has already been washed. The wash will darken the color you originally used. Then draw a thin line of the original color on the raised areas of the model. In general, however, drybrushing is a faster technique. If you wanted to make characters stand out, however, this might be a good way of doing it. Finally, detail work. This is a step that (strangely enough) brings out some of the details of the model, making it seem more realistic. This step can be done before or after washing and drybrushing. Currently, the wash I am using on my Tyranids is rather dark, so it drowns out my detail color, meaning I need to do the details last. Pick a color, cool if your other colors are warm, warm if they are cool. Then apply that color to various appropriate insignias, marks, pieces of kit or details as appropriate. (For example, my Tyranids are getting Jade Green eyes and biomorphs, as well as a few vents and such on their carapaces.) Okay, so to sum it all up, we've got an assembly-line method going to speed up individual tasks through repetition. We've sprayed the model with the Primer and the main Base coat color. We've quickly based the model in green flock and painted the sides of the base black. We've used a larger brush and steady hands to paint larger areas, and we've painted them in one go by using paint at it's normal thickness. After washing the model with a similar color to the main basecoat, we've also highlighted it using a drybrush technique. Finally, we've picked a detail color that stands out from the other colors and used it to pick out some of the details. The result? a fairly well-painted model that doesn't take hours to do, leaving more time for playing the game. Oh, and if the Inquisitor asks, you didn't get this from me! If you enjoyed this, email me and let me know |