Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I look at the other armies and man oh man I get a headache thinking about painting all the little details. Would drive me nuts.

The Ghostkeel though does have an obscene amount of edges so I know your pain a little. It's enough to make me consider wanting to get three more of them. Hahah.

 Brother SRM wrote:
That's not just you. Some armies are harder to paint model by model than others. 30 Gaunts will take a lot less time to paint than 30 Ork Boyz for instance, since you're only going to be painting carapace, chitin, claws, and eyes on the Gaunts, and for the Orks you'll have to worry about weapons, skin, pants, shirts, straps, armor plates, teeth, and so on. Some models are just more detailed than others, and take longer to paint as a result. That being said, even a simple model can be painted to a really high standard if you put in the effort. I've spent as much time painting a modern character model as I have painting a super simple plastic Space Marine from 1991 because I spent so much extra time doing freehand and the like on the Marine.

Nearly all armies can be as simple as you want. Sure, the easy ones like Marines and Eldar can be as simple as two colours (one for the armour, one for the weapons), but even Guard and Orks can be simplified.

In 2nd edition, my Cadians had three-colour camouflage on the trousers and sleeves, the tunics were a different green with the edge piping picked out, weapons were metal with the casings onecolour and the stocks a third (and with the winged skull icon itself in two colours!), boots were black with brown soles and pouches, webbing, etc was brown and the armour plates were black. Now, all the fatigues, pouches, webbing is one colour, the armour and helmets (and heavy weapon carriages and casings) are a second, all metal areas are the same and rifle casings, boots, gloves, etc are black. Much quicker.

For Orks, you've basically got three areas; skin, metal and ... everything else. Paint the skin green, apply green wash. Paint metal ... metallic. Paint everything else as you like, although for speed, keep it to two or three colours,. Wash everything not skin with Agrax Earthshade. Done.

Some people can paint quickly, and can finish a "fully" painted, shaded, highlighted Ork army quite fast. Others (like me) take longer. In that case, then take shortcuts like I describe. An entire army simply base coated almost always looks superior to one where half a squad is painted, shaded and highlighted and everything else is bare or primed.

Necrons are the easiest if you're just gonna T-800 them up.

It also helps that their model range doesn't have much variety in implied materials outside of armor (general necron body parts and other things that look like no-brainers if metal is applied there) and whatever can go in the energy parts (orbs, recessed armor/tech areas, face sockets, rods, "energy colored" highlights, etc.). The only models in their range that have stuff outside of that are flayed ones with their range of meaty parts, flowing robes of the older Necron lord models, and a combination of both traits can be applied to the C'tan models


Of course difficulty level overall depends on how serious one is over wanting a good or an at least interesting paintjob leaving the above observations null.

For whatever reason I tend to paint organics more vigorously than anything that is primarily armored or is a flat panel vehicle. I still had many unpainted CSM from 3 years of collecting them but basically painted more daemons in 1 year than all of my CSM. Even now, I just stopped dead in the middle of 2 mass tank projects to work on another FMC.

Everything can be as hard or easy as you make it. As your skill level improves you will find it harder to do simpler paint schemes as you get a sense of trying to make them look good.

Whoever said tau are easy is making a very general statement and is using the easiest schemes in the book. My fire warriors have 7 different colors involved in just their clothe parts and only one of them is the base and one is a wash. The plates have 4 colors, and then there are the straps, lenses and so forth. On average it will take me several weeks to paint a single 10 man squad. My 30k Iron warriors are the same thing and that's even with shortcuts, although getting them to a simple tabletop level isn't too hard. Boltgun metal, nuln wash, argax wash, BGM drybrush, nuln, do some basic hazard stripes, Tin bits the shoulder pad rims, do the eyes, belts, and pistol holsters, basic table top level in a few days work.

I have learned an important method because I dislike going with simple schemes and I hate playing unpainted armies. Really, if it doesn't have 3 colors, its not hitting the table. If you like doing the details and having really nice looking models then armies will take forever to paint. So don't paint them all.to a high level immediately. I listed the above schemes for these examples. Say this weekend I am planning on playing a game with a friend and I picked up a couple new toys for my IW or my Tau(assuming FWs, my vehicles are actually easy). For the IW I would simply do the boltgun metal, washes, drybrush, washes, black on the shoulder pads and the tin bits trim. Aside from the washes taking time to dry, I could easily knock out 20 marines in a night to this level and maybe even do basic hazard stripes(although as simple as they are, like your diamonds to get them to a good level it takes awhile). Vehicles are the same. Now my army looks cohesive and isn't simply a grey mob. For the FWs its even easier, green grey base on the cloth, dark olive green color on the plates, earthshade the cloth, and a medium blue on the lenses. Again, 10 guys can be knocked out in a night to this level.

Adding that mud stuff GW puts out for texture does wonders for models. After I finish my washes, I put the texture stuff on the bases, it makes even 3 color models looks good.

I do these steps on every unit of every army I work on before they hit the table. Then with the majority of the base areas done, I can come back at my leisure and start adding details on top of these tabletop features either a bit at a time or as a squad. This process makes detail painting soooooo much easier. Most people don't look that closely anyway and you army even having been painted to a half-ass standard looks leaps and bounds better than the grey legions which abound at most stores.

Generally space marines (except the crazy detailed heroes) and necrons and possibly orks are the easiest to paint no?

Orks are really hard to paint tbh. They've got about as much stuff hanging off of them as a fancy space marine hero, and their vehicles are crazy detailed.

A rhino is basically a flat box with a couple emblems, then compare that to all the junk and different parts on a trukk...

Necrons, SMs and Nids are the easiest to paint at a basic level.

Ill agree. Being a detailed painter and painting orks will drive you up the wall. Having painted something of almost every army over the years, orks are by far the hardest because they aren't supposed to look nice and neat like everyone else and controlled chaos is hard to do.

Space marines, necrons and mechanicum are the easiest to get to a three color standard that looks decent. But like I and others have said, beyond that, every army is as hard as you make it.

Tau have nice clean divides to paint, but they don't have a lot of things that make them stand out, so they can be pretty challanging to bring out, especially on the mechs which have large flat surfaces that can easily become super bland looking, unlike other armies which have more texture on their larger stuff.

Necrons are super easy to paint if you go basic, All silver with black guns.. xD I'm trying to paint mine as the Novokh Dynasty. It adds red to the models, Warriors have red shoulders and faces, Immortals the same but with a grey stripe on the head, Lychguard got red torsos and so on.

So GW makes all the Xenos armies hard to paint and wonder why SM make up 50% of total 40k sales.

:(