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I have a lazy side project that I have been putting no effort into and trying to use and find any tricks I can to get them table worthy with minimal effort (they're death guard so it helps that it doesn't really matter how bad they look).

So far they have had a quick prime in light grey, airbrushed from the underside with grey and above with white, then painted in contrast paints. for the metalics I have been using a bronze sharpie and found the results are actually pretty good. to base I will prob just buy dome of the base ready stuff from geek gaming.

Does anyone have any tips or tricks to share about saving time in the hobby?

Zenithal highlighting is godly for contrast painting.
Spray a model black/dark grey then give a gentle white spray from a top down 45 degree angle.

This pre-shades it all ready.
Slap your chosen contrast colour on and it will save a ton of time.

To go a step further, you can highlight this by drybrushing but in a slightly different way.
Pick an edge highlight that is brighter than you want.
By removing more paint than normal a very gentle drybrush against the edges will show them up well without hitting flatter areas and leaving a dusty look.

Easy pre-shaded black - spray black, zenithal spray white, wash drakenhoff nightshade then black contrast.
Will give a nice black armour with tons of depth, smooth transitions and a slight blue tint.


Best part of zenithal highlights is you don’t need much precision.
I use rattle cans for it.

Drybrushing bases. I love it. Don't get to cheat much as I try to do everything to competition standard. Oils can be a quick way to get good shading transitions though.

Contrast paints are black magic in little bottles. You get solid table-top results in no time, with not effort. Not necessarily applicable for all armies, but I did about 750 points of Tyranids as a quarantine side project this year, and am VERY happy with the results.

They scaled from rippers to trygons. Still look good



Not going to win any awards, but battle ready and looking for hugs and snacks.

Cool! Indeed, seems like Tyranids are a perfect match for contrast paints.

Not sure how well they'd work for other models..

I have been working on using green stuff worlds intensity inks and a quick base that provides shades and highlight areas. For example I’m painting a squad of word bearers and primed in light grey then painted the whole model in a brown ink. Then all I needed to do was a single layer of each the red and a dark bronze on the power armour trim.

In the picture I have done highlighting and other bits of detail but if I wanted to a squad for table top ready I could do this very quick with the ink, power armour and some leach belcher on the weapons.

I need to do some more in the unit so I will take some picks. I also have a scheme worked out for quickly doing plague marines that I will share when I start them.

Obviously all depends if you like the results and what your style is

Lower your standards and time yourself on different steps of the process to figure out where you're wasting time and can speed things up. IMO it's better to have a half decent painted army than 5 awesome painted models and the rest of the army unpainted.

Also avoid armies that are super detailed and require a large number of models.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Drybrushing bases. I love it. Don't get to cheat much as I try to do everything to competition standard. Oils can be a quick way to get good shading transitions though.

Contrast paints are great for doing bases too. I am currently painting almost all my bases in blueish grey that is Gryph-charger Grey on top of Grey Seer.

I paint fantasy and other miniatures from different companies, but...

* Assembly line painting. Models don't have to be the same, and even dissimilar models may have something in common (eg. gaps when prepping).
* Colored primers followed by a wash. This often means I have a leg up on basecoating. If I'm lucky, the raised areas are lighter, so I don't have to do much detailing and highlighting, later.
* Save the expensive hobby brushes for faces and detailing.
* Models with low prep. Tiny Furniture resins are really good for this, although their range is mostly terrain. Beginner-level GW space marines too, I guess?
* No eyeballs. Terrain is easiest. Obviously, GW models with covered faces are easier to paint than faces exposed.
* Deadlines. Most players don't care about the details of a miniature. They can't even see them. More important to get some paint on the model than it is to be at some standard.

Tamiya panel liner.
Godsend for painting.

Best way to "cheat" is to realize nobody cares. Also, I can't paint. This colors (no pun) my how to cheat guide.
1. Make a simple paint scheme, where the color of the primer is also the color of about half the model or more.
2. make the parts that are primed and then different color overpainted the easy parts topaint. Like arms, or heads. Or boots, I could see deathgaurd as all wearing black boots where you mix a little red in the black, or something. Whatever it is, you get 2 colors + prime = 3 color minimum, table ready.
3. use 2 colors for that. For deathgaurd, maybe use the khaki color primer spray that I use on tallarn tanks, then some sort of green and some sort of brown/yellow. Or go to walmart and buy some primer that looks vaguely khaki/bonecolored. vaguely.
Now the cheat part. "details light"
4. when you got a bunch of your troop done, pull out some other color (like red, in the example of chainsword teeth) and go back and fill in HALF or so of them with that detail, then. An easy detail to give them all is a leadbelcher colored boltergun, too. Now each guy has TWO details + 3 colors. That's done! Or perhaps drybrush an area with a dark red over the green to give it a deathgaurdy sickly look .. that's fast as heck, but painters go "oh, he has layered his colors" and stuff like that. Its deathgaurd, its supposed to be chaotic infection oozing, it don't got to be precise.
(for the other half,. pick some other little detail like green glowing eye sockets, pull out the technical paint and the tiny brush, and do the other half with the funky eyes. Now you assemblylined them details and they aren't all the SAME details, either. Looks like a real paint job if you squint.
6. base them all by smearing either stirling mud (thick) or valhallan blizzard (thick stuff) on the base. takes seconds, and they are on either mud, or snow. There is also a martian red thing that's a terrain that works nicely.
Viola. Table ready, and someone who looks at them even casually will spot a few splashes of detail color among them -- but not so consistant as to appear like you did it without thinking about it.
and
7. take extra time (add in both details, and maybe another detail each) on officers. Those are supposed to be noticed in a lineup, so maybe paint the shield fo the officer in a light shiny green where everyone else has the darker, less popout green. This is one model among 30 or so that takes extra effort, but cheats your army to look gooder than it looks, if you know what I mean.

Ah yes, the i Cheat at painting o sphere

OK jokes aside, stuff that personally helped me:

Choice of paintscheme:

There are 2 really simple truths about it:
A simple scheme can look just as good as a difficult one but you can paint it easier. The core point to get is, that the unform needs to match the identity of the army:
Is your army a Massed unified Warband of Chaos marines following a particular organised Lord of chaos f.e.? Make the uniforms as coherent as possible, whilest differing out key units and HQ which might have specific alignements:


Your army is a hastily built up auxiliary , made up of scum, cannonfodder and the most barebones equipment, Keep a few core line colours, but differ the unit, a good rate for rabble is having 50-60% models of a unit having core colours of the faction to give the overall impression whilest the other % is a mix




A concept army can look phenomenal whilest beeing even easier, depending upon what your concept was.
F.e. Ghost concept chaos marines, nice handy tutorial out there and allways something that i wanted to do:



It took me more time to make the base then the model.

Equipment:
There's something to be said, for looking outside GW paints.

My Plague marine equivalents f.e. use 2 decolacks for their effect:

For one, a thinned down brown lack to the point to be used as a wash compared to the "regular" CSM of the faction to make him look less grimey and more outright dirty and 2 some nice nuclear look.

The HQ effect, as above allready stated, Armies that are planned and foccused around their HQ require their special attention on these models, whilest a "simplified" scheme for the rest of the army provides the context for the HQ to stand out. This works best with very individualistic factions.

The picture below aren’t great due to lighting but I think they are good enough. Here’s an example of how I use GSW intensity inks for quickly painting squads.

The model is primed in grey
Then I have painted on red intensity ink on the power armour and then brown on the areas I want to be brown, gold or bone
I then used black in and a layer of lead belcher on the bolter
Then I went over the red areas with the green intensity ink.

Inks are a bit like washes in that you want the to Pool to create dark areas and leave lighter areas but as they are heavier than washes they will pool heavily in areas that gravity takes them too. Just clean your brush and absorb the excess.

Also be careful, like contrast paints, to only get it where you want it as they are powerful colours.

These inks are great and they combine in lots of unpredictable ways. The reason I think this works is that if you just used the green on the primer then it would be too transparent. 2 layers of the green would be too dark.

A bit of gold on the bell thing and back pack you are then “battle ready” but from here I will go on and edge highlighting with a bit of moot green and do more detail. But this gets me to the point of doing details fairly quick.

What do you think?

I tend to do the base layers on the model, and then do all the basing. That way they look decent enough on the table top, and I can carry on with the detailing. That's the theory, although I rarely actually get them on the table top, either finished or partially done.

mrFickle wrote:
The picture below aren’t great due to lighting but I think they are good enough. Here’s an example of how I use GSW intensity inks for quickly painting squads.

The model is primed in grey
Then I have painted on red intensity ink on the power armour and then brown on the areas I want to be brown, gold or bone
I then used black in and a layer of lead belcher on the bolter
Then I went over the red areas with the green intensity ink.

Inks are a bit like washes in that you want the to Pool to create dark areas and leave lighter areas but as they are heavier than washes they will pool heavily in areas that gravity takes them too. Just clean your brush and absorb the excess.

Also be careful, like contrast paints, to only get it where you want it as they are powerful colours.

These inks are great and they combine in lots of unpredictable ways. The reason I think this works is that if you just used the green on the primer then it would be too transparent. 2 layers of the green would be too dark.

A bit of gold on the bell thing and back pack you are then “battle ready” but from here I will go on and edge highlighting with a bit of moot green and do more detail. But this gets me to the point of doing details fairly quick.

What do you think?

Looks great, personally, you don't happen to have an idea about white power armor along the same easy step lines ?

Hmm white is tricky.

Have you looked at the apothecary white contrast paint? I don’t think this ink method will work for white.

However apothecary white comes highly recommended and I think you could use a spray can to prime in white and then just give it a coat of apothecary white. And bobs your uncle.

Check out some videos on applying this specific contrast paint. I have used it in small areas and it’s good

mrFickle wrote:
Hmm white is tricky.

Have you looked at the apothecary white contrast paint? I don’t think this ink method will work for white.

However apothecary white comes highly recommended and I think you could use a spray can to prime in white and then just give it a coat of apothecary white. And bobs your uncle.

Check out some videos on applying this specific contrast paint. I have used it in small areas and it’s good

I ask because i may want to build another warband of chaos marines:
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Corpus_Brethren

Basically i really dig their scheme.

I guess i will have to look at apothecary white.

Thanks for the help though.

Not Online!!! wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
Hmm white is tricky.

Have you looked at the apothecary white contrast paint? I don’t think this ink method will work for white.

However apothecary white comes highly recommended and I think you could use a spray can to prime in white and then just give it a coat of apothecary white. And bobs your uncle.

Check out some videos on applying this specific contrast paint. I have used it in small areas and it’s good

I ask because i may want to build another warband of chaos marines:
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Corpus_Brethren

Basically i really dig their scheme.

I guess i will have to look at apothecary white.

Thanks for the help though.

That’s gonna be a hard one, it depends how much of the detail you want to copy.

I think I’d approach it in one of 2 ways, if the desire is still to be quick to table top.

1. Prime with grey, Light brown intensity ink all over and then layer up to white. I have a white acrylic ink from a company called FW so I might try that but mostly because it’s easier to use than most white paints I’ve had. I’d not know how well this would work but the brown ink would be a good basis for the gold. It also might take a lot of layers. White normally does.

2. Spray white primer. Then a full coverage of apothecary white, then paint the gold bits with your choice of gold (probably choose a bright one) then was the gold bits with gulliman flesh contrast paint. I’d probably go this route actually for speed. Just remember with contrast paints more haste less speed.