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As a man who will soon be painting 30 Tau Drones for a tournament in June I'm interested to know of a way to speed up the process without sacrificing quality. Highlighting the bottom parts of the discs by hand is likely to drive me nuts and cost time, so I'm interested to know any hints or tips on getting the cleanest results from Drybrushing?
Photo examples would be great please. I've used the technique in past projects but none of them were as clean as the Tau so I'm just after edge highlighting without any possible weathered effects.

make sure that when you dry brush, you load up your paint. Then wipe off 95% of it on a napkin or paper towel till barely anything comes off. Then its good to let it sit for about 10 seconds, then apply. Personal oponion. I just tried it on my Firehawks with daemonetter purple on black base.

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bottom parts as in the stuff hanging down from the bottom of the disc?

the thing about drybrushing and clean is, if you are drybrushing something that should most likely not be drybrushed that people still drybrush (like a space marine shoulder pad or body) you will have some paint hit those flat areas. that being said that drone area doesnt seem large enough to where this effect would look bad at all. i cant imagine you having any issues getting a clean finish by simply drybrushing lighter colors here unless you have already done this and for some reason are getting poor effects

Just get your drybrush (flat one is important) wipe most of the paint off and (sorry above guy) start going right away. you want the paint "wet" but not enough to where it easily applys to the wrong surfaces. if you let paint on a drybrush dry it will cake up which looks horrible and it will force you to push harder which leads to the entire process going poorly

i guess im not exactly sure what under the disc means. it could mean the bottom part of disc itself and not the stuff below it. also for the record, if i were to paint those drones, i would edge highlight with a brush all of that. you could also wash that area and drybrush or wash and edge highlight. not sure what colors you are using because black drybrushed grey for example, would look MUCH better if the paint hit areas other than the edge than say any other color at all.

you cant not sacrifice quality by switching from regular highlighting to dry brushing. dont get me wrong dry brushing is a perfectly valid technique and one that i use regularly, but the simple fact is that if you dry brush something youd usually highlight by layering up through many layers of paint, the effect is not going to be the same.

One little trick with drybrushing is to go over the surface you have drybrushed with a very thin glaze of the colour you drybrushed. Don't let it pool, and it will help smooth out the textured finish created by drybrushing, whilst maintaining the highlights and shading. It won't cover it completely, but it will look better.

For picking out edges more cleanly you can dry brush with the edge of the brush instead of the tip.

 JamesY wrote:
One little trick with drybrushing is to go over the surface you have drybrushed with a very thin glaze of the colour you drybrushed. Don't let it pool, and it will help smooth out the textured finish created by drybrushing, whilst maintaining the highlights and shading. It won't cover it completely, but it will look better.

You can get some really nice transitions by using this process and repeating the drybrush, wash/glaze stage a few times over.

I've had some success by first thinning the paint more than normal (to around the consistency of skim milk) and then applying the usual drybrushing technique. This gives it a more "airbrush" like feel but requires more layers to build up a noticable amount of color. However I only do this because I don't have the steady hand for highlighting small stuff, the end result is that it requires just as much effort as highlighting for a slightly worse appearance. I used it some of my nurgle daemons and the result was...varied to say the least.