Introduction
Painting is an enjoyable, relaxing experience, but staring at a massive pile of grey and silver miniatures can get depressing (no offense meant to space wolves and necron gamers!). This article will attempt to cover the different ways you can speed up your painting process without adversely affecting the quality or your enjoyment. As always, feel free to add any suggestions or techniques you have to offer.
Brushes and Tools
Use the Best Brushes
Using poor quality brushes will slow down your painting considerably. A brush that forks, has bristles sticking out all over the place or has poor spread and absorbency will just mean you make more mistakes which you will have to correct later. As soon as a brush starts deteriorating, replace it or trim off any rogue hairs. Buy the best acrylic brushes that you can afford and painting will become less of a fight with your tools and a much nicer experience. The best brushes available right now are Windsor and Newton Series 7 brushes. Windsor and Newton were the suppliers for the red handle GW brushes before they got replaced with the cheap and nasty blue handle brushes, and the Series 7 brushes are considerably superior to the red handle GW brushes.
Use the Biggest Brush Possible
A pretty simple tip is to use the largest brush that you can. Almost all work on a regular 28mm model can be done with a size 1 brush (GW standard brush). The bigger the brush, the more paint and coverage you can do in one go, without having to continually go back to your palette and prevents having to clean the brush again and again.
Wet Palette Painting
If you find yourself painting a lot of highlights and mixing a lot of paint then you should try using a wet palette.
Airbrushing
Anything with a single base colour such as tanks, space marines, tyranids, necrons, etc. will benefit hugely from having the base colour airbrushed on. This will save a considerable amount of time and give you a smooth, even coat to work from once you master the basic airbrush techniques.
Paints
Premixed Paint
If you use a consistent range of colours and find yourself frequently mixing certain shades when highlighting for example, then you can save a considerable amount of time by getting an empty paint pot and mixing up a pot of paint. For example, instead of mixing up some black to grey highlights every time you want to highlight some black, you could get three empty pots and put different mixes of black and grey in them, allowing you to do rapid highlighting in the future.
High Pigment Paint
Using high pigment paint such as games workshop foundation paints or vallejo model color paints will save you a lot of time as you will be able to paint your miniatures with fewer coats, meaning fewer potential mistakes and less time spent going over blotchy areas. Try and plan high pigment colours in your colour schemes when coming up with a design for a new army or unit.
Use Washes and Drybrushing
You can make models look beautiful with complicated layering, but if you want to ever finish that army then often you will have to compromise. Using a combination of drybrushing and washes will save you a huge amount of time and provided you use the techniques correctly and in the right places, the models can still look extremely good.
Environment
Lighting
Make sure your painting area has good lighting at any time of the day. This can usually be accomplished with a good, flexible desk light that has a blue tinted bulb. Using normal light bulbs is fine, but your models will look different in the daytime as normal bulbs tend to have a yellow or orange tint, whereas natural light is more blue tinted. This can cause a big difference in the appearance of your models and can lead you to notice errors that you might not have otherwise seen.
Paint Station Setup
If at all possible, having your painting area always ready to go will obviously save you setup time when you want to paint. If you are unable to have a space in your house dedicated to painting, then having a painting station that can be concealed is also a big time saver. For example, some people use large, portable 'art kits' to contain all their paints, brushes and materials which can then be put down along with a sheet of newspaper and some water for their paints and then they are ready to go. Keep your paints well mixed and well sorted to make it easier to find them too!
Assembly Line Painting
Painting in assembly line mode can be quite boring but gets the job done a lot faster. The key is to break down your painting into units of 5 or 10, and to paint all of one colour on each model, one at a time, then when finished on all 5, go back to the first one and add the next colour and so on. This has a number of advantages, namely that you get consistent looking units and you get faster and faster as you get more experience painting that type of miniature. You dont have to waste as much time preparing and swapping colours either.
