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I'm such a slow painter, and it's okay sometimes because it lets me give the attention to detail that I want to give, but other times I just get frustrated and have to take the evening off painting because I know it's a bad idea to paint when feeling impatient. My evenings are so short with work that it often takes a week to paint one single model, so I do find the frustration gets to me. Any advice?

Fast painting is about a few basic principles:

1) Compromise on quality. The key, no matter what anybody tells you, is to get out more work by dropping the quality. You can't do elaborate layers, or freehand work, or extensive NMM on speed painted models.

2) Know where to use your time. With any given model, you'll reach a point where another hour is only going to marginally improve it. That's when to bail. Basic shading/highlighting, fine details, base work, and faces are all areas that are good invesments in time.

3) Have good basic brush technique. Part of painting quickly is simply putting paint on the model faster. Paint neatly, use higher pigment paints and fewer coats, and make sure you have a fine enough brush for the work you're doing.

4) Simplify your paint scheme. the more colors you have, the more work you have, and the more chances of screwing up a color.

5) Cheat. Washes, black primer, foundation paints, and the dip all lead to quicker paint jobs. Use them for rank and file troopers.

It seems I do all of those things, except compromise on quality. I might not have amazing technique, but it's not going to improve overnight, only with practice. Oh well. :( I'll just have to get used to completing models at a painfully slow rate.

Thanks for your response!

NO offense, but you simply can't be doing all of those things, and taking days on a model.

How are you spending your painting time? What steps take the longest? How many steps do you take?

I think you have to really decide on the quality you want....I paint my slaves to a decent table top quality (you can check my gallery) and I speed paint them in batches of 10-15 and can finish them relatively quickly when I want to.

Honestly pick a white primer and then do a wash of whatever colour you want on the majority of the model. I just find you can get a better layer with a white primer with a simple watered down paint wash than just over a black primer.

The key is to keep the amount of layers to a minimum and once you layered one model in 1 colour you move to the next model same colour etc etc. Once you come back you go to the second layer of a different colour and keep doing that until all models have base layers.
If the layers aren't solid do it again. Do a wash on all the models and then pick out a few details.

If you want any extra highlighting that should be done after you have a solid base and wash. Washes are a speed painters best friend don't be afraid to do a wash over an entire model (if the model allows it)

Also keep the paint schemes simple if you are painting a horde army (not sure exactly what you are painting) because more colour means more time.

 Polonius wrote:
NO offense, but you simply can't be doing all of those things, and taking days on a model.

How are you spending your painting time? What steps take the longest? How many steps do you take?

I'm not spending all day on these models obviously. I have a very busy work schedule, and might only have three or four hours of free time per evening, not all of which is spent on painting. But my Helbrute model took seventeen hours of painting over five days. It turned out pretty decent I think (at least considering that I am a beginner painter and don't honestly think I can do much better than this)...



... but if I want to give that level of detail to my larger models, which I do, I'll be spending upwards of a hundred hours on them.

I don't want to sacrifice detail or quality, but it seems they are the answer

 Polonius wrote:
NO offense, but you simply can't be doing all of those things, and taking days on a model.

How are you spending your painting time? What steps take the longest? How many steps do you take?

If I only had an hour to paint each night, many models would take me several days to paint

But yeah, use a decent sized brush, for a lot of work you can use a big square tip brush and that will speed things up. Use a white undercoat and work down to the shade rather than layering up to a highlight tends to be faster for me.

I actually don't see much benefit to painting in batches beyond drying times (sometimes working on 1 model at a time I apply a wash that takes a long time to dry). If it takes me 10 minutes to, say, apply the green for the skin on an Orc, it won't magically only take me 5 minutes per Orc if I do them in a batch. Trust me, I've timed it, lol.

Getting an airbrush sped up some of my models, others it makes little difference.

You do really need to compensate on quality. Basecoat -> wash -> edge highlight. Anything more starts to take up a lot of time, and the basecoat/wash can be done with an airbrush/spray paint/large brush to speed things up.

But if you want a model to look good, you have to spend time on it. It takes me 30 minutes to paint an Orc, I spend about 7 hours painting my Warboss though. It takes me 45 minutes to paint a Hormagaunt, but all told I spent 30 hours on my Trygon (including cleaning and assembly). Took me a full month to paint the Trygon as I could only spare a few hours every few nights. Managed to do my Giant in about 5 hours which was nice, mainly using the art of "big brush" to do the flesh.

My tips:

1. Colored primers. Very rarely do I use black or white. More commonly, I'll prime brown, dark green almond, or khaki, depending on what my color scheme is.
2. Washes. Again, depending on your color scheme, you might be able to wash the entire figure. My tyranids are primed almond with mechrite red carapace and black talons ... the entire figure gets a brown wash.
3. Use the biggest brush possible. I do the majority of my work with #4 or #2 flat brushes. Flat brushes have the additional advantage of being very good for edge highlighting.
4. Practice your brush control. This could be as simple as picking out teeth and eyes quickly without mistakes. Also, any overbrushing you can avoid means less clean up.
5. Keep it simple. My bases are pretty plain: Sand, washed with brown, highlighted, and then some grass. Easy enough where I can do them very fast, but they end up looking pretty good.

Here's an example of the 5 points above in practice.


Same principles applied to Orks. Did 100 of them in a month. I painted the blue facial tattoos and checks on a handful of figures. Enough to create the illusion of more detail than there really was, since they stand out in the mob.

Great thread, cheers to the speed painters giving tips.

I can do an Ork in half an hour, but not to the quality of the above picture. Got a lot to learn it seems

I think your helbrute was well worth the 17 hours. Well done!

Dessorag wrote:
I think your helbrute was well worth the 17 hours. Well done!

Thanks! There's more in my gallery if you're interested.

@ifurita

Brush control is probably my biggest weakness, I have big hands and a very minor shake, so I do spend approximately 15% of the work on clean up. I don't know is there much I can do about this though.

Some of that you can control with the right brushes. I cannot paint a straight line to save my life, but I can swipe the wide end of a flat brush to highlight carapace edges or armor. If you have big hands, visit the nearest art store and see if they have brushes with bigger handles, that might be more comfortable to use.

You can also control shake by proper arm and hand placement. For detail work, I rest both elbows comfortably on the desk, hold the figure in my left hand, and then rest my painting hand (right) on the lower fingers/lower palm of my left hand. This gives me a nice tripod stance that is pretty steady.

For larger areas, experiment a bit to see what washes will do. I've learned that I don't have to paint all the way up to the edges, because the wash will fill that in. Therefore, I'm not applying paint where it can get onto other places.

Lastly, remember that perfection is the greatest enemy of good enough. Sure there might be some clean up you could do ... but if you didn't, wouldn't anyone notice or care.

I do like those triangular handled brushes. Also, use at least a number 1 brush even for fine detail. Most fine detail work is about having a good tip rather than how small the brush is, and if you use at least a 1 size brush with a good tip, it will hold more paint so you'll find yourself having to reload the brush less often and you'll paint faster.

Back when I was painting some of my early 'nids, I painted some reasonably fast and then for some reason later ones took me ages, I figured out after a while it was because I swapped brushes and the one I swapped to took massively longer amounts of time to do the carapace feathering.

I just got an airbrush and OMG does it make painting faster and easier.

However baring that what I used to do was take a group of lets say 10 models or a squad and find one feature and just paint it to completion.

So for example if I was paining marines I would paint the shoulderpads and all the insignias and get them completely done. Then another night I might do the eyes and get them completely done.

So although there are large parts that are un-touched I am seeing noticeable progress on a squad and that is encouraging.

Last squad i did "Fast" was the DV tactical, prime black, spray caliban green, hit all the red, hit all the metallics, hit all the whites, wash it nulin oil. Done.

I am a notoriously slow painter... I started painting a Dark Eldar army (which I will start a blog about soon) and it took me 1 hour per helmet for my Warrior squad. I'm very pleased with how they look and while this topic of painting slowly was bothering me at first, I soon realized that I enjoy painting and seeing the end result look as good as it does. I'm not tooting my own horn, but I'm proud of my work and I think that's important for anyone. As long as you are happy with what you have done, then it's all good

In order to get things done quicker, however, the only thing I can suggest is to find shortcuts and pick easier schemes. You could try doing mottled armour (like some Eldar Alaitoc models painted by GW) in the colour of your choosing, or as some have mentioned, the dipping method. I had to give dipping a try and I was actually pretty impressed with the results. I had done a unit of Khorne Bloodletters in a couple of hours by spraying them red, painting some details like their swords and claws, and dipping them. Once they were dry I did their eyes in green and then varnished them. Bam. Done. Quick and easy. Just the way I like it