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Right now I have 80 or 90 guardsmen that need painting. Did 20 of them a couple months ago and just got really burnt out on them, I'm used to marines that seem easier to paint (I do minimal highlights outside of characters and DW, usually just washes). I have a shaky right hand (my dominant hand) and generally need to rest it on a table, which means I hunch over and get sore after 15 or 20 minutes. On top of that I'm not very skilled.

For my guard I'm doing white and gray camo clothing, fenrisian armor and lasgun stock, leadbelcher on all the aquilas and barrels and bayonets and grenades, XV88 on the pouches, the GW texture paint snow on the bases with some stones and spots of dirt showing through (mournfang/xv88/ushabti layered). As I said, got through about 20 and was having so much trouble I kind of gave up on them. I hate to do a sub-par job on them, but I really don't know if I'll finish them, especially since I'll likely be buying more as time goes on. Don't get me started on eyes, which I've practiced for about 8 hours on primed sprue and spare heads and still can't pull it off without them looking derp.

I hate playing with gray or white primed models, so I was wondering if there are any reasonable shortcuts or advice I can take that would still make them table quality. Would an airbrush help with them, or would I still be doing a lot of detail work (faces, armor, guns)? I hate that they frustrate me but it's a real downer when I spend half an hour on one and it still sucks. I constantly need to go back and touch up mistakes which piles paint up slowly. I just really love the way the army plays, that's what got me to buy them.

My IG are just speed painted dark grey on light grey. Prime white, paint cloth with Celestra Grey (use a big brush to speed up the process, if it gets on other areas it doesn't really matter). Pick out the hard armour using a dark grey. Pick out fleshy areas with Cadian Fleshtone. Pick out metals with Leadbelcher.

Wash the entire miniature with a black wash then go back over the flesh areas and highlight with a fleshy colour, go over the metallic areas I want to pop more and highlight with Runefang steel (like Imperial eagles).

That's pretty much it, they don't look incredible, but they look good enough and they only take me 25 minutes or so each to paint (compared to something like my Space Hulk Blood Angels that take me about 4-5 hours each to paint or my BB Skaven that take ~2 hours each). The difference is the dudes that take me hours to paint look good individually while the IG look good as a big blob of bodies.

As for an airbrush, in my experience an airbrush probably isn't going to speed you up all that much for painting infantry, but it's a godsend for painting vehicles. It will speed up you base coat application, but on an infantry dude it probably won't speed you up all that much compared to hairy brush application of the basecoat, on a tank it'll speed you up a lot.

My airbrush almost exclusively slows me down when it comes to infantry because I spend more time setting models up to be sprayed than I save spraying them and then I spend the same amount of time doing detail work anyway. I use the airbrush to make models look better, not to paint them faster.

Though I will say an airbrush speeds up painting of colours that have poor coverage, like yellow. Hairy brushing yellow is just annoying, even if you start with a white primer it takes a few thin coats to get it right, but it's pretty quick with an airbrush.

I keep it simple as I started the army over 10 years ago and they look way better painted in a consistent 'quality'.
En masse they look fine as with most armies.
A picture is worth a thousand words.

My fledgling guard army is made of Genestealer Cultists with Skitarii ranger heads. I do base colours and a wash. Thats it. 50/50 badab black and devlin Mud. Instant detail in a bottle.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
My fledgling guard army is made of Genestealer Cultists with Skitarii ranger heads. I do base colours and a wash. Thats it. 50/50 badab black and devlin Mud. Instant detail in a bottle.

Since I have so many of them, I don't really get super detailed. infact a lot of them are in various stages of painting. (unpainted, based, partially, fully).

I also got a whole bunch of new ones from a friend who was switching to Iron Hands. I havn't painted a one of those yet (many of them were just based or unpainted. a handful had full paint)


COmpared to my skitarii or at least how I handle my skitarii painting wise, my guardsmen are the least detailed things in the whole army.


Skitarii


vs.

A few guardsmen.



I apologize I don't have a good picture of either. WHile I do my skitarii, "elite" infantry (such as, my "Space Marines", Scions and others") and other important characters with more effort than my guardsmen.

I still hate painting infantry in general. I prefer the larger tanks and vehicles. hence, many of my infantry are not fully painted. with so many of them it gets boring quickly and my attention is going to be drawn to something else. its a matter of "when" not "if" in such cases.

Its all the tiny little bitz that bug me. but anyways.

beyond getting an assembly line style process, there is little that can be done to speed up guardsmen or large amounts of infantry in general.

 kingbobbito wrote:


I hate playing with gray or white primed models, so I was wondering if there are any reasonable shortcuts or advice I can take that would still make them table quality. Would an airbrush help with them, or would I still be doing a lot of detail work (faces, armor, guns)? I hate that they frustrate me but it's a real downer when I spend half an hour on one and it still sucks. I constantly need to go back and touch up mistakes which piles paint up slowly. I just really love the way the army plays, that's what got me to buy them.

Airbrush big time. Of particular value I found was Vallejo's Red Beige over base black. This gives a nice drab to whatever other colour armour and trousers you use, and it's the work of a few dabs either darker or lighter to make the face and hands skin tone of your choice.

Above and beyond that, I found with guard that a. pinning and b. assembly painting them is a big deal. Combined with the airbrush method i've managed 20 presentable lasgun guardsman in just under 3 hours, generally with just under an hour's painting.

In case it's not obvious from the above, prep work takes up more of your time than painting with an airbrush; not so much because it's so straightforward (it is), but because the quality of an airbrush's result really shows up the imperfections in the base model if there are any left.

Dip.

Spray paint and dip.

Granted, Guardsmen are not wearing full suits of armour like most armies, but you can do very table-top quality simple forces using colour primer and dip (or a lot of washes). I "speed paint" my armies.

I've posted this before in a few threads, but here is a sample of step-by-step easy to do figures:

http://myminiaturemischief.blogspot.com/2016/06/step-by-step-spiders.html

With some models/figures you can do even less (single colour Space Marines are a joke). With Imperial Guard I'd say spray them one colour, paint the faces, guns, maybe a few armour pads and a few tiny bits (magazines, trinkets, boots) and then dip or wash them. Apply whatever kind of basing you want and move along.

Airbrushing does cut the time down but if you want highlights and such it will still take a while. I had a to do a bunch if cultists a while back from myself. What I did was hit the major areas with an airbrush, then drybrushed the minor colors, shaded, then dry brushed some highlights.

These all were zombified so i blood and ooze in the imperfections... these didn't need to be perfect so i did them pretty quickly.

There is also the commission painting route, I am sure you can find a reasonable painter on Dakka Dakka that would be happy to paint your army.