Speed Painting

An Article by beast_a_la_mode

Do you love modeling? Do you love taking hours upon hours to craft each model into a perfect work of art? if so stop reading right now.  This article is for those that recognize painting as a necessary evil in order to play these wonderful games.

I paint with two basic methods, army painter dipping and Power Washing with citadel washes.

This picture was taken at 3:00 p.m. on Monday, its a fully unpainted Cygnar force with 16 unpainted models of various sizes.

I want the jacks and gun mages to have a really deep blue so I'm going to dip them.

I've spray primed the hunter Navy Blue, making sure to cover every inch of the model, I picked blue obviously because that's the color the majority of the model will be.


Here I've base coated everything that isn't going stay blue.  One tip is to paint these pieces brighter colors than you want them to end up because the dip is going to shade them heavily, I do mithril silver for the metals and skull white for the whites.

This is the finished product after the dip and the matte coat. I like to brush the dip on because it's a lot cleaner.  The basic technique is to literally glob dip onto the model and completely cover it, then slowly brush the excess dip down the model. Two warnings, use brushes you don't care about because the dip more or less ruins them, and once the dip starts to dry don't touch it or you will leave unnatural lines on the model.

Another thing to note is my varnish made a weird web like effect across the model.  I'm not sure what caused it but it really pissed me off.  However, I was able to scratch and remove most of it at the cost of some paint on the mini.

Here is my power wash method.


I'm going to wash the Black 13th and Reinholdt because they have a lot of nooks and crannies and black is a really hard color for people who suck at painting to try and paint. Now, the main difference between washing and dipping is that the dip shades the colors on the model already while washing leaves whatever color you're washing on the model as well, so when power washing you want to prime your models white this makes it so the color that you wash with shows through and the raised areas of the model remain white for a pseudo highlight.

So same deal with the washes glob it all over the model making sure it doesn't pool up to much anywhere, then add in the other colors you are going to put on the model.

Here's a back shot of Watts showing what black Wash over white makes.



This pic was taken at 11:00 P.M. I finished painting at around 8 and then went out to dinner to let the models dry. So 16 models in 5 to 7 hours, I'm not saying they look great but they look good enough to get you most of the painting points at any tournament you go to.

Editor's note:  I just played against this force last night, and though the picture doesn't show a ton of detail, I have to say, this is a great method of painting models to a good tabletop standard in a very short amount of time.  It looks as good or better than a ton of forces that clearly took hours and hours to paint.  Hopefully we'll be seeing more of these sorts of articles from Beast in the future :)