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Hello,

I've just finished painting my first ever minis, and I'm OK with the results even though they look a bit sloppy.
My big issues however is that I'm not really enjoying painting, and as an extension of that, I feel it takes a bit too long.

So I would like to cut the process down a bit.
I learned a few things from painting these guys:
+ Dont bother at all with details during when applying the Base Coat, I had to re-apply the same little bolts a couple of times, because I decided to add them during the Base Coat.
+ Take care with the Wash, don't expect decent results if you slobber with it.
+ I just don't get how highlighting works (I felt like I just applied the paint to the entire area not just the protruding parts.

And therefore I believe I would be able to cut the time/work a bit by just doing :
Base --> Adding the Details --> Wash (applied with care) --> Pinstripe highlights

Could this work (And by "work" i mean result in tabletop-quality minis)?
Is there a commonly know method for painting quicker (by this I don't mean "I want skills without practice, but rather if there is a certain order of doing things that you feel makes the work flow) without loosing out on to much of the results?

Looking good for starters, actually! Really solid cloth in particular.

If you're looking for a relatively quick way to paint that still provides good tabletop quality, you're on the right track. You could even swap to:

Base coat -> Wash -> Highlighting + Details

This way you don't have to be quite as careful with the wash (less effort required!) and details will be more clear (with the same amount of effort).

Thanks for the tip, and kind words!

"Base coat -> Wash -> Highlighting + Details"

If the details in questioning are gonna need a wash (in a color different than the areas in its vicinity), would you say it's better to just begin the base-coating by painting over the "detail" with the color of the vicinity -->wash the mini and then add the details+appropriate wash. Or base thoroughly incl. details and then carefully applying the wash? I would guess the first method is exactly what you meant, and that does seem faster indeed,

Your Daemon Prince looks ridiculously awesome by the way. Incredibly cool.

*edit While I have a thread going I might aswell ask, how I can paint reasonably good bloodsplatter. I would like to incorporate that into the butcher apron of the larger cultists.
Would a Mephisto red and Earthshade mix do the trick? Could I get the desired effect just using Crimson wash in layers?


Thankful for all answers

If you're doing multiple washes of different colors you're going to be eating up a lot more time. Honestly you might want to try experimenting with a single wash over the whole model, then highlights + details. It won't be quite as good, but it'll still be solid tabletop in most cases and will save you a lot of time if you don't enjoy painting so much. But yes, if you wanted to take that extra step, just paint over the detail bits with your main color. Otherwise you'll go into an endless loop of trying to clean up the edges if you try to get them all perfect the first time around. Don't worry about being messy on the first few passes, just tighten up with each following color. Takes a bit of stress away. For higher quality stuff you want to avoid this as you'll be building up paint and losing fine detail, but for tabletop it really, really doesn't matter.

For blood, you could try this fancy new offering that I've actually heard some great things about. Still need to pick up a pot myself.

Evertras delivers! You are solid as a rock, great help.

Since I still have 15 cultists to go through, I guess I'll have to try both methods: Single colour wash, and multi-colour.
And then just compare results with effort / time consumption and decide what's worthwhile.

Well what do you know, Blood in a Bottle. That definitely seem like the easy way to do it. I would like to aim for the effect they showed at the end of the video on the pillar.
As a beginner I'm not sure, but it looked like they may have used a drybrushing technique to achieve that, or did they just spray the crap out of it?


Cheers

<3

Yep, just take two cultists and try both methods. A brown wash is a good 'go to' wash to shade without the cartoony look that a black wash can give. It also looks pretty decent on most colors, aside from green. Should definitely work on the scheme you have, and it works great for flesh and reds in particular while giving metal a dirty sort of look without much effort required.

Think I see which pillar you're talking about. From the looks of it, they painted in the pooled areas, then flicked over the rest for the spatters. Might take a little experimenting but shouldn't be too hard to get something reasonably like that, at least.

Thanks, I'll give that a go on the heavy-weapon cultists when I eventually get to painting them.

I want to give an update on my progress:
I have painted a couple more coultists, one with just a brown wash, and one with brown, black, flesh and red respectively.
The brown wash stands to the left and the mixed wash to the right. Washing in different colours didn't take me much time at all compared to the rest of the work.
Not sure mixing gives the best result in all cases though. I wanna point out I've used minimal highlighting on these guys. Only touching up the Flesh, Grey and Metals with edge-highlights (a bit more than that on the flesh).
I feel these turned out a bit better than the first batch though, so I think I'll stick to going light on the highlights.

What I'm considering is doing proper highlights on the flesh only. But I don't have a clue on how to do it properly. How much should I cover with the first highlight roughly? Second highlight I'll assume is just the edges.


Cheers


*edit The two things I learned/picked up from this session:
Avoid using white in too large areas, don't know if was my thinning or what, but it was a bitch to work with.
Reiklands Fleshshade darkens the skin a lot! So if I want to use it I need to learn how to highlight properly.

Honestly I don't see much of a difference between the different wash colors, but it's hard to really say when the models are very different to begin with. Both look more than fine for tabletop.

What are you using for your white?

The cloth looks fine without additional highlights. Again, if you were going for higher quality you could definitely improve it, but with what you've done with the wash it seems to be in a great place for tabletop.

The flesh is probably the only thing that makes me pause. I'd experiment with different colors on that. If you can, try doing it without a wash at all. I've found washes on flesh to be iffy at best, and often leave strangely oily and unreal looks. You can probably get away with a single base coat and a single bit of highlighting on any raised areas of muscle. Unfortunately my only reference for flesh colors is the Reaper line, so I can't give any specific recommendations. If you do try this, do the rest of the model first and wash it, then paint over with flesh colors. This will save time and headaches.

I agree that there wasn't a big difference and on many colours the brown wash seemed a bit better than the colour-matched alternative.

I used Citadel Ceramic White (a base paint), especially on the cloth wraps it didn't turn out like I would have wanted.

The minis look alright if you are going for a really dirty look, which luckily is fine due to the ragtag look of these fellows. When I get around to painting the Dark Vengeance characters I think I'm gonna have to deal with / learn how to paint properly.

The flesh is definitively off, it looks like someone got the the worst spray-on-tan in the world. On my next little batch I'm going to try doing a very thin brown wash on the flesh, and then considering how it looks, I'll colour in 1-2 layers of highlights. This is basically because the figures look a bit dirty so it makes sense if the flesh does so as-well. I'm also thinking about Base --> Highlight --> wash --> highlight just for the flesh, but not sure about that. If this don't work out I'm going for the unwashed method.


Thanks for your input, it's awesome!

Just so you don't feel to bad about white, it is a PITA to get right same for a bright yellow. I find a light coat of silver under the white really helps make for a bright white.

Luckily for me the cloth was meant to look dirty, if I had been going for a clean white it would have been a disaster. I'll keep the tip about clean white in mind though, as it's bound to come into use.
The bright yellow is a bit worrying, as that was the colour I had in plan for the gems / demonic eyes of the CSM unit / lord from Dark Vengeance, Do you have a similar tip / trick to get that looking alright?
This forum is a gold-mine for useful information when starting out,


Cheers