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like, lets say 125 ork models in a little less than a month?

EDIT: final result: yes i did very good got all my army painted except for a few details with boltgun metal. although as a general tipp if you want to get your army painted fast, dont lose your cat. but yes a total success! thanks for all your help and advice!

You need to give us more information. I can crank out about 125 necron models in a day if I'm painting a traditional metallic scheme (spray silver, wash twice with badab black, pick out eyes w/ scorpion green). On the other hand, if I was painting something like eldar w/ an artsy-fartsy paint scheme... well lets see 3 years later and I still haven't finished a single mini.

ork goffs, extreme detail i cant help myself (ex: three layers of colors and a wash for the skin). yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

Extreme detail Goffs? Gahhhh.

I am not sure of what you have in the way of equipment, but an airbrush could really help to speed up with basecoating\highlighting layers for large groups of troops.

lets also say with the budget of an american 14 year old


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anyone? please? i actually have to paint 125 models in a month!

First I would suggest using a wet pallet, it will really help keep the speed going with keeping your paints wet longer.

Secondly, if you need them to be done in under a month, I would suggest mixing pots of your highlight colors so you don't have to keep mixing for every ork.

I don't use washes personally but they may be a big help in this. I painted 1500 points or nurgle marines in a month but that includes more drybrushing, which doesn't fit overly well with your 3 layers of blended skin.

Other than that, make a plan and timetable to get your stuff done, and follow it. It'll really help.

Good luck!

Your best bet is to hunker down and start painting. Do large lots of figures at a time (as in 50). As long as you are disciplined and work on them every day, you can make progress. You might hate the site of green at the end of the month (I am still seeing red from my Praetorian project last year), but the army will be done.

i've heard something of like a "reward" system where you paint a certain number of small infantry and "reward" yourself with like a killa kan or something along those lines. does this work?

Honestly the only way I see that amount of models getting done in under a month would be to use an airbrush to do your main colours, picking out the details in their base tones and then dipping.

One can of dip should probably get you the whole way through the army.

The airbrush would be expensive but someone around you might have one.

I think it would help you not burning out at the end. Imagine having to paint all the boys for your end stretch because you did all the "fun" models first.

Really the only way to find out if it'll work is to try yourself. As long as your painting your not wasting time by trying.

Edit: And I'll second that dipping suggestion. It would pick out details on orks nicely and really help you get through it.

In a month? Maybe, if you just paint the skin then give them all black clothes and equipment, and gunmetal weapons, and a nice wash of Devlan mud over everything. Otherwise i suspect you'll run out of time, unless you're sitting at home all day...

Orcs I am guessing?

Get your hands on some green spray. Spray entire model green, block in all clothing and weapons with tin bitz, try to be as neat as you can. Drybrush over tinbitz with boltgun. Pick out teeth with dheneb and tongues with mecharite,then wash entire model in devlin or badab wash. Pick out little things afterwards, like eyes and little earrings etc.

That is about 1 hour per model not including wash dry time, and if you just try to stay neat, it won't look horrible. It will also let you come back and improve them later, as you will have models base coated and shaded and ready for highlights or more metal improvements.

I agree with Clang in the I could see it happening if you were on some kind of break where you're home all day, like say...maternity leave. If you're not home all day then it may be difficult, but really I think it comes down to how fast you are at painting, time each day you have to put towards them and how much detail you put on them.

I managed to finish a lot of Orks in a short amount of time 'cause I mainly drybrushed, especially for vehicles. Also helped I had a lame job where I just sat in a guard shack all night watching trucks drive in and out of the yard.

Long story short, I'd suggest doing a quick, but nice looking job on them to classify them as finished (plenty of examples above), then if you have any spare time, do some finer details.

Ifalna wrote:That is about 1 hour per model not including wash dry time, and if you just try to stay neat, it won't look horrible.

At 125 hours (which is a reasonable estimate) in a month, that's a full time job. Since you mention you are an american 14 year old, I'm guessing you're in 9th grade this month, right? So you won't be able to crank this out in time unless you drop out of school, which might I add shouldn't be a real option.

Your only hope is to drastically reduce that by getting some friends to help. Even if they are crappy painters, if you can spend only 15 minutes per model fixing their mistakes, you're going to save an enormous amount of time. Try to recruit 3 people to help for even 2 hours a day. That turns your 2 hours a day into 8 man-hours a day. Other then a team effort, the only army that can be painted in that time frame to an acceptable level is Necrons.

125/25=5

Work on it a few hours a night and try to keep your models half an hour each tops. At least 10 a night should be doable especially if you do them in batches so don't have drying time to worry about. And if you do get stalled on drying time grab the next batch and keep going. Try to get all the troops done first, other models are going to take longer. And skip the fine detail, you can come back at the end.

I read an amazing tutorial about speed painting an army but I can't seem to find it again or remember who wrote it. I can try and sum up a little for you though.

The writer claimed that you don't have to sacrifice quality for speed. You just use the time more efficiently.

One of the biggest time wasters is changing colour. Many speed painters set up all their units in a production line and then go through them doing all the green areas for the whole army. Then all the brown areas for the whole army. That is one change per army, rather than one change per model (which can save an awful lot of time).

But the tutorial actually went one better than this... See to really paint fast you have to have the right size brush. The bigger the brush the faster you can cover any given area. Ideally you want to be using the biggest brush that you can still paint tidily with. You don't want to be painting large flat areas with a fine detail brush, because that wastes time.

Unfortunately not all areas of the same colour can be painted with the same brush. But changing brush a lot also wastes time. using too large a brush means you will not be able to paint tidily so you will have to go back and fix bits which again wastes time.

The solution is to divide your each section of your miniature up into areas that use the same colour AND the same brush. Then go through your whole army painting that bit.

For example: Say your orks have black boots, and a black belt with a small strap. The boots and the belt can be painted with a larger brush, the belt requires a fine detail brush.

So what you do is you line up all your boyz, then go through them one by one with a large brush, painting his boots and belt black. When you paint the same area over and over like this (And this guy was talking about painting hundreds of orks at a time) You get very good at it, so you can do them very neat, and very fast.

Once you are done you can than change to the smaller brush and go through them again painting the strap black.

Other tips are working from light to dark so that you can cover faster.

Choose colours that can all be shaded with the same wash.

Don't stop for anything. If you make a mistake put the miniture to one side to retouch later. And keep going with your production line.

I hope that helps. If I do come across the tutorial I will link it as it was a great read and very informative. Maybe if you search through the painting and modeling tutorials yourself, you might have better luck finding it than I did.

All good advice there, but I might add...

OP...there really inst a quick and easy way to get good detail on a large quantity of models. Expect to invest a lot of time. I know this all to well. Ive started but never finished several armies in my time because of that. My ADD doesnt allow painting 40 or 50 near identical troops...I get bored and lose interest long before its done.

chaos0xomega wrote: I can crank out about 125 necron models in a day if I'm painting a traditional metallic scheme (spray silver, wash twice with badab black, pick out eyes w/ scorpion green).

This is exactly the reason I may start a Necron army. As far as style and such its about my 3rd choice, but ease of painting shoots it to #1. My method would be: primer, metallic base coat, dip (brushed on), green eyes, paint and flock the base. Throw on a little extra detailing for Lord, Destroyers, etc.

Only drawback to Necrons is they are expensive to buy. Immortals and Pariahs are metal models sold individually, costing about $14 US each. That gets expensive when you want to have a couple squads of 3.

Mad4Minis wrote:OP...there really inst a quick and easy way to get good detail on a large quantity of models. Expect to invest a lot of time. I know this all to well. Ive started but never finished several armies in my time because of that. My ADD doesnt allow painting 40 or 50 near identical troops...I get bored and lose interest long before its done.

chaos0xomega wrote: I can crank out about 125 necron models in a day if I'm painting a traditional metallic scheme (spray silver, wash twice with badab black, pick out eyes w/ scorpion green).

This is exactly the reason I may start a Necron army. As far as style and such its about my 3rd choice, but ease of painting shoots it to #1. My method would be: primer, metallic base coat, dip (brushed on), green eyes, paint and flock the base. Throw on a little extra detailing for Lord, Destroyers, etc.

Only drawback to Necrons is they are expensive to buy. Immortals and Pariahs are metal models sold individually, costing about $14 US each. That gets expensive when you want to have a couple squads of 3.

Thats why you buy a box of warriors, and convert them into Immortals. So for $35 GW(but who buys from them honestly?) youll get 6 Immortals a box, so your paying under $6 a mini that way. Then you have 6 gunless warriors left, most people turn them into flayed ones. Or you could get crafty and make them into Wraiths. And I just read this badass Wraith wing build that is a real pain to take out.


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Jeez forgot about the OP


Goffs make it a bit easier since they are mostly black clothing. Adding "extreme detail" to boyz is as much as rusting up the metal, painting teef, and putting on some checkers. So Id spray them green, paint the clothing and metal parts black, high light the clothing, boltgun/rust the metal and then wash the whole mini to bring out detail on the skin and such.

Do that, then when you get say 20 boyz done and dry, paint some checkers on shoulder pads and what not. Done. You get that method down, and youll be able to hammer them out. You wont win contests with them, but cmon, you dont REALLY need super badass looking boyz, theres a million of them. Save the details and super fine painting for the nobs/bosses/bigmeks

Mad4Minis wrote:This is exactly the reason I may start a Necron army. As far as style and such its about my 3rd choice, but ease of painting shoots it to #1. My method would be: primer, metallic base coat, dip (brushed on), green eyes, paint and flock the base.

Be warned: I had this exact same plan for my warriors. I sprayed a test scarab with shiny chrome silver (Krylon, I think), then dipped it in Minwax Polyshades, then watched in horror as the polyshades ate the metallic coat. I wound up spraying them with metallic and handwashing them with devlan or badab black or something, I forget - but the takeaway is, dip will eat some metallic paints.

Ouze wrote:

Mad4Minis wrote:This is exactly the reason I may start a Necron army. As far as style and such its about my 3rd choice, but ease of painting shoots it to #1. My method would be: primer, metallic base coat, dip (brushed on), green eyes, paint and flock the base.

Be warned: I had this exact same plan for my warriors. I sprayed a test scarab with shiny chrome silver (Krylon, I think), then dipped it in Minwax Polyshades, then watched in horror as the polyshades ate the metallic coat. I wound up spraying them with metallic and handwashing them with devlan or badab black or something, I forget - but the takeaway is, dip will eat some metallic paints.

I have already found out about the polyshades causing metallics to run. Heres what Ive found...solvent bases metallics (IE: aerosols, testors, etc) run when exposed to polyshades. However water based ones such as GW Tin Bitz does not run. Its all in the base material of the paint. I figure Ill use either Mithril or Chainmail for the base color. Sure it will mean hand paining the base coat, but a good large brush will make it pretty quick.

can we go back to painting orks please?

Mad4Minis wrote:

This is exactly the reason I may start a Necron army. As far as style and such its about my 3rd choice, but ease of painting shoots it to #1. My method would be: primer, metallic base coat, dip (brushed on), green eyes, paint and flock the base. Throw on a little extra detailing for Lord, Destroyers, etc.

Only drawback to Necrons is they are expensive to buy. Immortals and Pariahs are metal models sold individually, costing about $14 US each. That gets expensive when you want to have a couple squads of 3.

My thoughts exactly. With better rules and an updated codex, they'd be the ultimate beginner's army.

As far as orks go. It depends what type of quality you're shooting for; I painted 12 kroot in about 4 hours by doing the following:
1. prime green (The Army Painter, "Greenskin")
2. highlight and detail
3. dip (quickshade, "Dark Tone")

You can do about 20 -30 in an evening to tabletop standard.

General Answer; Start painting. Keep painting until army complete.

Seriously, the best way to paint an army is to paint it. Many people forget this. Get up early, paint non-stop until you fall asleep. Repeat.

As for tactics, GW's washes are a godsend. I painted my orks by painting base colours, then painting the whole thing with Badab Black. Got through a whole pot of the stuff for every 20 orks. 150 orks in a month. If you're doing Goffs, use an airbrush or spray can or something, and paint the whole model dark grey (otherwise the black clothes will be flat). Paint the flesh green. Paint weapons boltgun metal. Wash whole model with badab black. Base. Done.

thanks all! wish me luck! ill keep you updated!

necrongod wrote:lets also say with the budget of an american 14 year old

That doesn't mean much. As an american 14 year old I had a larger wargaming budget than I do now as an american 20 year old. Its amazing what you can do if you don't use your lunch money

Anyway, here's how I would do it:

Spraypaint/Airbrush entire army(the orks themselves anyway) Green.
Basecoat/paint all clothe areas in a very dark gray, near black color (you want it to be clearly not black, as you are going for a high quality job, and as such, you want to "auto-highlight" wherever possible, which means picking slightly lighter shades for your basecoat)
Pick out details in chaimail/boltgun (your choice)
Do any other detail work that doesn't require bright unstained colors, etc.
Dip/Wash
Detail as appropriate
Seal
Done.

Doing quick mental math:
Spraying 125 minis in krylon fusion green should take about 30mins-1hr, and cost about 7 USD.
Dry time of 24 hours (if you really are in a hurry, you can get away w/ 1 hr, but I like to give it the extra time to fully cure.
125 minis with dark gray colothing would be... about 30 hours total, and probably about 5 USD in paint
Picking out details in boltgun probably about 5 hours of work. Probably less than a dollar in paint.
Dipping/Washing process + dry time in a day or so. Cost depends on what you do (dip is more expensive AFAIK)
And at that point anything else you do is just icing, so yea...

So how is this coming along?

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/blogPost.jsp?aId=9900028a

that will work I promise you




look at spoiler after link

OP, why not post pictures of your progress so we can comment and encourage you!

By the way, regarding the airbrush and the budget... you probably can get an airbrush and a couple air cans for some 20 USD.

And that will get you a nice even green in no time. Spray cans are another option, maybe cheaper... but be careful they don't result in grainy result!