Advice from a Lazy Painter

[MasterShake2 5,184]

It's fair to say at this point that I've painted a lot of armies for a lot of different game systems and even done so as a profession briefly.  Contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, painting for money isn't about quality, but volume.  You can make a lot more money finding fast and easy ways to get "tabletop quality" out the door than trying to spend all the effort on award winning pieces and, unless you're actually an award winner, it's hard to ask for the prices you'd need for the high quality jobs to make sense.  In that respect, it's important to dispel a common myth i.e. reducing time invested also means reducing quality.  In reality, reducing time is more about economizing the time you spend to get an acceptable ratio of time in -> results out.  Obviously this is more important when rent/food are counting on it, but most people also don't have infinite leisure time and many highly value that time, so there's still important lessons to learn even for average painter.

 

1:  Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail-  Yeah, it's super cliche, but planning can shave a lot of time in the process.  In this area, doing a test model is incredibly important.  This is where you find out what primer(s) you need, brushes, paints, basing, etc.  This is also where you can test any weird things you want to try out on the model, but it's also where you can identify any unusual complications i.e. whether or not your colors play well together and need too many layers.  This is also where you can identify some of the oddball details a model may have (weird baubles, pauches, etc) and that you may not have noticed on the first pass.  A good example for Star Wars Legion is the MPL Ion Launcher's backpack.  It has an E-11 strapped to the side which is a weird detail you could easily miss and paint into the rest of the backpack.  If you have multiple model types i.e. infantry and vehicles, it can be a good idea to do a test model for each type.  It's a massive time killer if you constantly have to go buy new colors, new brushes or are having to repeatedly go back and hit details you didn't know were there.

 

2:  Always Prime, Never Paint Basecoats-  Basecoating is boring, tedious and time-consuming.  Back when I started, the options for colored primers beyond basic black and white were pretty limited, but now most lines not only offer colored primer, but primer that's already matched to their normal line of paints which makes both correcting errors and doing shadows and highlights really easy.  Now, I have seen some people balk at the idea of colored primer simply because the higher quality and color matched ones are pretty expensive, but my immediate retort is "how much is your leisure time worth?".  Even if you have a pretty modest value for your free time, the extra 2-3 hours (or more) it can take to hand paint basecoats is about the cost of a can of primer.  Especially if you're doing a big project like a whole army, this is an easy investment that pays for itself.  If you want to go crazy, you can do 2 stage priming using a darker color and then going over with a lighter one on the more prominent areas (there are some really good tutorials on the zenithal technique if you're interested).  It will take almost no time doing this before you get to the point where you never want to hand paint a basecoat ever again.

 

3:  Use a Limited Palette- Pick about 3 colors that you will use for roughly 80-90% of your army.  This has 2 effects, 1 it saves you a lot of time and money over having a bunch of different paints and having to switch them a lot.  You'd be surprised how much time you can waste just switching paints and keeping that process limited, both in number of paints and making sure that you get all the areas that need 1 color, before switching to another.  It's also easy if you make sure the colors play well together, or if they don't, using a thicker mixture to reduce the amount of coats you need.  I won't go too much into Base vs. Layer coats, but the TL:DR is that Layer paints (or paint mixed to a layer consistency) is thinner and works best if it's close to the color it's being painted onto and Bases are much thicker (or mixed to a thicker consistency) and can be more easily applied in fewer layers even on a basecoat it wouldn't normally work well with.  This also has the great side effect that it makes a force looks cohesive even if the individual elements in the force are very different.  It's also noteworthy that this doesn't mean painting the whole model ONLY in these colors.  It's actually a good idea to pick out parts like metallic colors, weapons or flesh tones because it helps to break up the scheme and add points of interest.

 

4:  Use the Right Brushes-  Trying to use a brush that really ill-suited to the job can lead to either spending a lot of time painting parts of the model with a brush that's too small or doing a lot of cleanup becuase your brush was getting paint in a lot of areas that you didn't want.  The test model(s) is usually where you'll find this out.  It's also really important to note that the least thought of aspect when it comes to saving time is limiting how much you switch brushes.  It's something people just don't really think about, but if you have something like a large surface area that you want a tight trim on, do all the trim on all the models at once with a smaller brush, then go back and paint the big areas on all of them with a bigger brush.  you also might have mixes of detail areas and large surface areas especially if you're limiting your palette as suggested above.  I'd also say, my personal rule is:  figure what size brush you think you need, then get one a little bigger.  Unless yo go crazy big, you're not going to screw up enough for it to take away from the time your saving and it teaches good brush control, one of the few skill-related parts of being able to paint quickly and it's a skillset that helps with more advanced techniques as well.

 

5:  Use Sub Assemblies Where Appropriate-  Now, some people go crazy with sub-assemblies, but, like anything, they should be used sparingly and where appropriate.  For example:  Will it make any real difference in your finished product if you paint your basic infantrymen with their arms on or off?  Well, no the extra areas you're getting paint coverage on aren't areas that others will notice (in many cases even if they physically pick up the model, they won't see it).  In that regard, I view a sub-assembly like this as more of a time waster than saver.  A real time saver sub-assembly would be like with my AT-RT's where I left the drivers off for painting.  The drivers used a different primer coat and it would be hard to get to some details if they were on the AT-RT.  For that, it saved a lot of time to primer the AT-RT one color and the driver another, paint them separately (because they used slightly different palettes) and then glue them together later vs. the added complexity of trying to do the whole thing as 1 assembly.  Again, this is going back to number 1 on this list and this is the kind of thing you'll find out with test models or even just dry-fitting parts together while keeping your color scheme in mind.

 

 

The goal with all of this isn't to lose quality, but rather to retain quality while reducing time.  The other major plus to streamlining your process is that you can get to the fun bits faster, whether those fun bits are putting the models on the table and playing the game or trying lots of cool techniques or freehanding.  If you can get all the basic stuff done quickly and to a good quality, you have plenty of time to mess around and, while someone might not notice the difference between a primer basecoat and a hand painted basecoat, they will definitely notice some sexy Object Source Lightning, Non-Metallic Metal or a sweet freehand design.  And that's really the idea, whether you're a painter, modeller or gamer, to get you to the fun parts faster.

[Qualitypunk 156]

This lazy painter would add, instead of painstakingly painting each blotch of camouflage just use dry brushing with a small brush no longer capable of making a point.

As Bob Ross taught us "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents".