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So a couple of days ago I decided to shape up and finally finish painting my orks that have stood shining in gray glory for so long. After 16 boyz I remembered why they had been unpainted for so long. There are soooooo many of them (still have around 60 to finish painting) and they all look more or less the same. The details are different but generally very similar. How do you cope with painting a whole horde of orks? I got bored after 16, like I said, but I switched it up with painting a Weirdboy who had also been unprimed for ages. Should I just do that? Paint a batch of boyz and then have a break where I paint something else? Is there some trick to painting faster?

Paint the same similar feature on all of them at one time. It sucks at first, but you'll be done in no time, as you have to wait no time for paint to dry.

I did 50 in one weekend sitting in front of netflix with South Park playing in the background.
Assembly line style worked best for me.
I did it like this. (On all 50 for each step)

1.) Remove flash and mold lines.
2.) Prime.
3.) Skin
4.) Pants
5.) Shirts
6.) Belts and Straps
7.) Armor
8.) Weapons
9.) Touch up
10.) Clearcoat

I'll keep two or three paints available for each step so that I can vary the color scheme for tertiary items like pants and shirts.

Yeah, with numbers, assembly line is the way to go. I tend to do 5-6 of my little guys at a time, so that I have a full rank of fantasy guys done at a time. This keeps sessions relatively manageable, and has the added bonus of keeping the blocks of troops tidy and neat enough that I can clearly track my progress.

Thanks, that sounds like a good way to do it =) Makes it feel like not so many are left either if you take 5 or 6 at a time. Great tips!

The way i got through my 20k skaven army was a) use a spray gun/ airbrush for basecoats it really saves a lot of time, b) do roughly 10 or so at a time then reward yourself with a model you want to paint but after a few bits on that eg skin and armour go back to the boys, you will work harder to get them done as you want to get back to the character, c) sit in a corner and regret picking a horde army

I paint my 10 at a time, I prime them black and usually leave the shirt or the paints black, but I always paint the straps it breaks up the black and if I leave the paints black I always paint he boots brown for the same reason, I have done 90 boys done in this manner. It took me 2 months to do them all to an above table standard. I really like orks but I must admit when I started this I was like for get this I dont like them that much.....but never the less I guess it ended up that I did. Good luck.

There's always tricks and ways around painting particularly large armies, you just need to find the one that works best for you.

For example, doing an assembly-line painting of 20 orks at a time was undoubtedly the fastest way for me, but I hated it so much. Such tedious work...

So I got it down to about 5 orks, and seeing 5 complete orks painted each time helped me keep going.

Yeah, I took 2 and a half hours on one boy today, just as an experiment after reading this, to see exactly how long it'd take doing it the hard way....I believe I'll be going the assembly line route as well. I have found that life is also much easier if you paint the arms and heads while theyre still on the sprue (if you don't mind the mold lines so much) and simply attach legs to base, and torso to legs and proceed with assembly after you get all the nooks taken care of

To not get bored, paint them all differently. It's still assembly-line painting but you won't be that bored.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpmZHUmzWCA

starsdawn wrote:To not get bored, paint them all differently. It's still assembly-line painting but you won't be that bored.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpmZHUmzWCA

Dang, I wish I had seen that earlier! I think it's a little too late for me to do multi-colored orks, however, since I don't really feel like repainting 50ish boyz...damn shame, because that looked good!

BATCH PAINT!!!! For the undercoat. Save you an hour or two. But yeah, a break does help

Similar feeling.

The other day, I was handed a tau megaforce in various stages of assembly, plus random tau boxes, again, partly assembled.

There's about 36 fire warriors primed black, but they've been fully assembled. I did a test mini and had an embolism.

Now I don't want to paint them. EVER.

Ixias wrote:

starsdawn wrote:To not get bored, paint them all differently. It's still assembly-line painting but you won't be that bored.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpmZHUmzWCA

Dang, I wish I had seen that earlier! I think it's a little too late for me to do multi-colored orks, however, since I don't really feel like repainting 50ish boyz...damn shame, because that looked good!

You can just paint the other orks multi-colored, then mix them. You can pretend that there's one orky common color.

This is exactly why I have no interest in any of the Horde army's :( Best of luck finishing them up!