A question on Painting Priority.

[Inquisitor Balor]

Ok so i play gaurdsmen so i have a litteral mountain of Dude with las gun. They are the emperors finest surely but im wondering on the best way to go about painting them. Basicly i have two trains of thought. One i paint one batch of guys at a time to completion, this could be a squad at a time or all my sergents or all my vox casters how ever i wanna do it. The second line of thinking is rapidly going through the entire army doing my four base Colors Tan clothes, Green armor, fleshy flesh, and black leather and put the first wash of earthshade on them.

 

So assembly line i get a squad done at a time and i get to watch as chunk by chunk its completed. It might also be faster in the long run as i wont be picking up every model twice to paint it essentially but im not sure how thatll work out. Mean while doing all base colors first will ensure that im not fielding vast seas of grey plastic for the forseeable future and i can just go back and do all the highlighting stuff later. What are your thoughts on this? Experience painting in either style? Personal prefrences ill take it all!

[Marshal Vespasian]

My preference is 5 guys at a time. You will finish them and dont have to touch them anymore afterwards.

You could always paint towards a list E.g. 500/1000/1500/2000 points

[Grotsmasha]

Back in the day when I painted 60 Guardsmen, I did them 10 man batches. By the fourth squad I was assembling, painting and basing a full squad in a single sitting. When batch painting your Troop choices, remember that the don't need all of the details, faces for example, base, wash, single highlight is plenty.

[Cleon]

For me it'd depend on the purpose of the army. If it's a hobby project then I'd do it one squad at a time (although I do each squad in two 5 man batches) and watch the army grow to completion - it's what I've been doing with my Death guard (although I've been doing three models at a time as they are covered in so much stuff), but I haven't actually played with it at all (I have about 40 guys and 5 drones done now). If it's a force I plan on  playing with regularly then I'd write out a single list at local game size (for us usually 1500) and get them all done to a base level, then mix between going back and uprating them to fully pained and painting new units to fully done depending if I want to tweak the list.

[Inquisitor Balor]

I appreciate the words of advice gentlemen. My problem is i wanna get back into playing competitively but i suppose realalistlcly i have a long ways to go learning 8th before i can think about a tournament. I think i might do as Marshal Vespasian suggested. I only have a 2k list written up but im gonna sit down and right list at 500 point intervals and then start working a squad at a time towards the 500 point list until its done and then working towards a thousand points. I havent even begun to think about basing.....

[Kinstryfe]

I've painted over 250 of the little guardsdudes, and my best success was biting the bullet and painting them 20-40 at a time. They won't turn out looking amazeballs but after the first 100 it was more about table top fieldability than perfection. For your "top quality" guys, you may want to work on 10 or so at a time, so you have your "core" of well painted guardsdudes and then the rest are extra bodies for when you need them. I do recommend doing them by model type, in my experience it helps with keeping everything matching so all your plasma guns will match, voxes will match, etc. Unless you're giving each unit unique markings it'll be much easier to setup when you don't have to worry about Sergeant A not matching Unit B and so on.

 

This can of course depend on the colors. Tan and Green would probably work well with it (mine were red and brown). White and Gold or something else delicate would probably benefit from more individual attention.

[Imren]

If saving time is a concern of yours then I recommend getting into airbrushing (if you run imp. guard you will paint bunch of tanks and for those you really want airbrush, faster and looks better).

 

Advantages with airbrushing:

• You save up om primer paint, (less waste on overspray)
• You prime with more control, less risk of drowning the details.
• You get thinner smoother basecoats.

 

So if I were you, I'd get a cheap starter airbrush set, and prime all of them with airbrush (wait 24h for primer to cure before painting further) and then figure out what colour will be the most prevalent on the models, and airbrush that colour on them as well. That will save you probably two full time working days of time doing the same on your whole army with a paintbrush.

 

Yes, airbrush has a relatively high invenstment cost in the beginning, but in the long run you save lot of valuable time base coating (and with developing skill) highlighting your models.

[FelipeFlops]

I production lined 150 guardsmen and 50 Tempestus last year. I'm with Kinstryfe that large clumps is the best strategy. I did a single colour at a time, probably the fastest way to do it, and you will get better results and will become much faster by the end.

 

 

These were done super quick by the end.

[OnboardG1]

Making your basecoats work for you helps a lot. As an example for speed painting Catachans I base them green (Usually Vallejo RLM82) and then wash everything with Athonian Camoshade and a drybrush of Straken green or Loren Forest depending on the green I want. Then I do the fleshtones in Bugman’s Glow with a Reikland wash and a quick highlight of Cadian Fleshtone. At this point you’re basically done. I tend to leave the gun casings the same colour as the armour and then just do a few metal spot highlights and a bit of black leather. If you want you can add some little dark camo splotches to the guns or trousers to break the base up a bit. Your basecoat does almost all the work here.

 

This works best with large batches of 10-20 minis. I’m willing to bet when the contrast paints come out this will get even faster.