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 know it would vary between monster but i am asking for an average, i'm just interested to see how the amount of time i spend compared to other people.

personally... i spend a good amount of time on my Mc's gonna be doing some wet blending and such because ...they are the biggest part of your army..make them shine the brightest. my gaunts takes me an hour to paint 10 ... i know thats not alot of gaunts per hour...but thats using 3 colors for the skin. (base, mid tone and hilight) same for carapace, claws and fleshy parts. so i'd probly spend 5-10 hours on one mc. making it look amazing.

I'm not sure, generally I paint in a few sessions over time. Probably somewhere around 3-5 total.

Well it took me around 3 hours to paint and base my FW hive tyrant.

Weeks. I'd probably never finish it.

I've really no idea because it would take many sessions over several days and the hours really can add up. One of the last things I painted was my Nurgle Sorcerer and that took me well over a week.

Depends on the creature. Are we talking Hive Tyrant/Carnifex size or Trygon size or larger? My Hive Tyrant I painted in a day, took about 5 hours, Carnifex was similar, maybe 6 or 7 hours.

Both of those, however, were bought 2nd hand so I didn't have to do much preparation work, just reposed them and added some details, didn't have to do the whole cutting from sprue thing and assembly which takes a lot of time as well.

My Trygon took me around 30 hours from tearing open the box to completed, and those 30 hours were spread over the course of about 3 weeks.

Ya I'd say anywhere from 5-10 hours for a MC. I did a trygon from start to finish in about 6 hours on and off for a few days. Depending on how much you put into your basing the time can take even longer.

@ Allseeingskink: When i asked the question i didn't really have massive gargantuans in mind.

Typical monster size (dreadnought / greater demon / carnifex) take me around 3 days (15 hours ish).

I really need to start clocking my painting time, one of these days. I'm genuinely curious what my rough "troops per hour" rate would be, but I paint in such short and infrequent spurts, it can take me anywhere from a week (on a very good week) to over a month to finish a small batch of 3-5 models. A single MC would probably be on my table for two months, at my current rate, but if I really buckled down, I could probably have it done to an acceptable standard (by my standards for my own painting, which are about as high as can be, at my skill level, without requiring me to immediately strip any and all completed minis) in under ten hours.

winterdyne wrote:Typical monster size (dreadnought / greater demon / carnifex) take me around 3 days (15 hours ish).

Is that commission quality from opening the box to finished product or only painting time? How much would you expect to make off a model like that? I've always been interested in the sort of money/hour commission painters make. When I was younger I considered commission painting but realised the money per hour was terrible given the speed that I painted and I could make more doing, well, almost anything. I ended up doing chores and asking neighbours if they needed help with things to make a few extra bucks. I just assumed most professional painters could paint a lot faster than me to make it worth while, and/or could paint well enough to actually make tons of money off each model. I guess the flip side is people doing it for the love of painting, but personally whenever I put a lot of time and effort into a model I want to display it on my own shelf rather than selling it

oadie wrote:I really need to start clocking my painting time, one of these days. I'm genuinely curious what my rough "troops per hour" rate would be, but I paint in such short and infrequent spurts, it can take me anywhere from a week (on a very good week) to over a month to finish a small batch of 3-5 models. A single MC would probably be on my table for two months, at my current rate, but if I really buckled down, I could probably have it done to an acceptable standard (by my standards for my own painting, which are about as high as can be, at my skill level, without requiring me to immediately strip any and all completed minis) in under ten hours.

I always struggled to paint more than a few models in a given army before getting bored and giving up. So I started timing it to really nail down just how long it actually takes me to paint each model and therefore how long it'd take to paint an army to keep things in perspective of how much free time I actually have and how much of that I'm willing to dedicate to painting. It's definitely put things into perspective for me and freed me from trying to paint entire armies when it's not remotely realistic or practical to actually do an entire army, so instead I've become more content just to paint a few models here and there for different armies instead of going out and buying whole battalion boxes and then getting depressed that I never finish them.

What really surprised me was just how long it takes to assemble models (since I always clean off mould lines) and also that the vast majority of the time is spent doing the basecoating more than anything else.

Yeah, commission quality (high end tabletop). I think the carnifex for the diorama I'm working on now was around 20 hours, mostly down to extra layers on the carapace.

Price has to be fairly fluid, and the time actually taken varies on whether it's included with a job lot of other stuff, whether or not the paint processis broken up by other tasks etc. I try to aim at a minimum of around £7 an hour* for my time, so the starting rate I charge for 'monsters' is around £100.

It's a fairly competitive market, you either need to be putting out some eyepopping work or charging comparitively with other studios at the same quality. Asian and Eastern European studios (due to a lower living cost) pull the market price down.

I'd say around 60%-80% of the time for a model is cleanup and base coat.