Fast and furious: speed-painting techniques

Fast ... and at least a little bit cross!

I'm by no means a great miniature painter. But I am a reasonably fast one. And for gaming, speed is often more useful than skill: better to have lots of half-decent miniatures on the table than a handful of good ones.

As several people have asked me about my speed-painting techniques on my Lead Adventure Forum thread, I thought I'd put up a bit of a tutorial here.

I use various different speed-painting ruses. This is probably the fastest. I start off by undercoating the miniatures in Pebeo's black gesso, which costs about a fiver on Amazon for an ample tub. It covers very smoothly and dries quickly. I then paint in all the base colours except for metal things.

Base colours over black gesso

Next, I drybrush the whole thing with Vallejo's silver grey (equivalent to Citadel's Wych Elf Flesh). This takes seconds and picks out the highlights (rather too starkly, but we'll fix that later).

Drybrushed in silver grey

After that, it's time to paint the metals. You could do them before the drybrushing, but that would leave them with non-metallic highlights (which might work OK, depending on the effect you're after). 

Now with a glint of steel

Things look pretty rough at this point, but that can be remedied with washes. For these ratmen and similarly scruffy types, I slop on Citadel's Agrax Earthshade wash on wood, armour and bits of clothing. In a real hurry, you'd be fine using it on everything. I usually use sepia on reds and greens, but sometimes use red or green washes instead or as well. For flesh, I usually thin down some of the Citadel blood-effect paint with medium, to get a ruddy glow in the recesses.

Washed

All that remains now is to paint in the eyes, teeth and other details, and then add a few highlights here and there. For this, I use silver grey thinned with glaze medium. The silver grey (or Wych Elf Flesh) is sufficiently opaque to provide a visible highlight even when thinned heavily. I use it on everything that requires it, regardless of the underlying colour. This is a very quick process - just a couple of minutes on each figure. 

A final step is to thin down some black paint with water and add the odd bit of black-lining or darkness where required. This and the highlights could be comfortably skipped. A quick drybrushing of the bases, and we're done.

Done!

The results aren't anything spectacular, but they'll do the job. In the group below, the two closest to the camera were painted with this method, while the others were given more time and care. The others hold up better to close inspection, but who bothers with that on the tabletop?

Were-rats!