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I have many models. As I've been collecting for decades now, I have many armies with either unfinished parts or new additions. The problem is that I used to not paint my models with as much detail or care.

So, if you want to add new units to an old army what do you do? Do you repaint everything? Do you dumb down your painting to match the old stuff? Do you just paint new stuff to a high standard and live with the slight clashing?

That's entirely up to you. I'd check out the "Dakke Rescue Shelter" thread to see what you think.

Do you really love the old minis? Do you really love their old paintjobs? Rescuing miniatures is hugely satisfying. If you're not solely buying new units, consider stripping down and repairing/rescuing those old minis. You can take shortcuts like re-basing old minis to match new ones, etc.

If it picks at your OCD...sell off the old stuff and start over, etc. Depends on your time and how much it bugs you.

I dumb down my painting, not just for reenforcements but for army painting in general.
Some of my armies are huge, they look so much better in a cohesive scheme.
If I feel that an army is going to end up very large I'll significantly drop my painting standards in order to get it done in a timely fashion.
After a while you can paint that standard really really quickly if you're a better painter.

"Quantity has a quality all of it's own" :Joseph Stalin.

I tend to agree with Alex. My ork army is humungous and fully painted. I dipped them. I like the scheme less and less, but I have 1000+ points. So as I add new ones... they get dipped too. However, my other minis and their paintjobs have improved, but I try to paint to a standard that keeps everything cohesive. Right now, my 40k models are meh compared to my Adeptus Titanicus. All that said, i have "rescued" an entire tau force that I got on the swap shop which looks so much better now.

It depends?

With my Ultras, I never used to do shoulder trim and edge highlights. Partially because my old RTB01’s didn’t have trim to do and I didn’t want them to feel out of place, and partially because I’m lazy. My collection is pretty full, so I’m not adding to old units much anymore. Those that I do, get painted in my old style to match. But new units get painted to a higher standard. This is mostly primaris, but also the occasional character.

My Eldar I just paint better. The core of the army is a lot smaller than my marines, and painted in my “black wash EVERYTHING” phase. Eventually I’ll go back and strip and repaint stuff, but I’ve got a backlog of new stuff I’d rather be painting, so that day might never come. When finishing up partially finished squads (swooping hawks, warp spiders) I did go over the old guys to help tie them in with the new. Not a full strip, but just a layer over some parts due to style and paint changes over the years.

So I take the attitude that I don’t paint quickly enough anyway and even a “poorly”* painted model is better than an unpainted one, so I paint the new stuff as best as I can and live with the old stuff.

Some mythical day will come when I have nothing else to paint and can improve the existing models!

* Fortunately even my first models are to an acceptable tabletop standard.

I have a good few Eldar models that are pretty poorly painted as they come from a time before I properly considered collecting them as an army. I'm unlikely to strip them though as I have enough models to catch up on as is.

With my nids, almost all of them are a terrible quality and I'm very tempted to strip those and start over before adding anything new to them.

I think it's a choice that's going to be dependent on loads of factors. How bad the painting is compared to your new models, how sentimental you are about the old paintjob, whether you can live with painting new stuff to that standard, how big the old army is, etc.

I came up against this fairly recently when I had an urge to add some new models to my old WHFB High Elf collection. I considered upgrading the painting, but I had quite a lot of them and I realised that I was fond of my old painting as a sort of marker for how I painted at that point in my journey. So I decided to paint the new stuff similarly, which also had the advantage of being quicker - and when you've got a big pile of unpainted stuff that's quite the advantage.

 doktor_g wrote:
I tend to agree with Alex. My ork army is humungous and fully painted. I dipped them. I like the scheme less and less, but I have 1000+ points. So as I add new ones... they get dipped too. However, my other minis and their paintjobs have improved, but I try to paint to a standard that keeps everything cohesive. Right now, my 40k models are meh compared to my Adeptus Titanicus. All that said, i have "rescued" an entire tau force that I got on the swap shop which looks so much better now.

I assume 1000+ is a typo

Some of my older ones are the same. It’s not that I’m enamoured with the 15-20 year old style scheme. But it is how they look, so I try to match it.

(Though more realistically when I sit down to paint, that’s probably partly why I end up steering towards my newer projects and such, as it is harder to link the styles)

When I was faced with this dilemma for my old Eldar, I decided to redo the old models, one squad at a time to bring them up to my present skills. Kept the same colour scheme so that the army remained playable and slowly "refreshed" my older units. Did that with both my Eldar and my Orks.

Cheers,

CB

PS: It can also help you resist buying new models.

I don't have armies but if I did, I'd repaint them or at least touch them up.. It would stop me buying more until they were done.