Slavetopainting's speed painting experiment

LXG has been a fan of Slavetopainting's tutorials for quite awhile.  Always offering great tips to use on all kinds of products, as well as offering those products at a reasonable price.  When we asked Chief Slave graciously offered to write an article for us.  Here is his article on speed painting.

Speed Painting Infinity Nomads

As everybody knows who follows my page Slavetopainting, I am somewhat obsessed with the concept of high quality speed painting at the moment.  I suppose that this has largely come about by having two little ones appear on the scene recently and my business growing very quickly limiting the time I have for the hobby.  So in my quest to paint good quality table top armies faster and get gaming quicker I have been experimenting with speeding up my techniques with my air brush to get ‘advanced’ effects in a limited time.

A recent experiment of mine was trying to paint a Nomads Infinity faction (worth around 250 points) in under 8 hours.  So here we go…

Blended Base Coats
I Have always loved blended basecoats and often used them in my higher quality paint jobs.  But I figured that this technique with an air brush is actually quite a quick approach to painting in the first place.  So I started doing some quick experiments using blended basecoats from my airbrush to speed up my painting but still give a nice visual impact with the miniatures.
To keep things simple I have gone for a transition in brown tones from bone to dark brown, if you are feeling more adventurous you can run transitions of more extreme colours with contrasts between warm and cold colours being particularly effective.  Running a mix from warm reds and oranges to cold purples, blues and blacks looks amazing!

 

 

The image above of my Szalamandra Squadron and shows the initial base coat on the mini - I have only used an airbrush and total time was about 20 minutes.  Starting with the darker tone first I slowly built up using lighter mixes in the airbrush until I got to the lightest shade at the top. The colours I used were Vallejo Model Air Burnt Umber, Mud Brown and Sand.   Finally for the very top I used White and Sand 50:50 for the top highlights. The Grey areas use Pale Grey Blue and mixed with White 50:50 for highlights.

Cool tip! This tip alone meant I could pull of painting the full faction in under 10 hours.  As we all know masking is key when airbrushing, especially on smaller details. Instead of masking using card or tape, I have found using latex gloves (which most people wear for airbrushing anyway) are really effective for temporarily masking the mini.  You can easily wrap them around areas to suit and they are very cheap and easy to work with.

 

After the basecoat was done I washed the recesses with Vallejo Pale Grey as this tones lighter colours very nicely.  This stuff is quite simply amazing and almost feels like cheating with shading white and other light tones.

Final step is to detail the mini. Details included a bit of weathering and battle damage - I used Secret Weapon's Shell Casings, Weathering Pigments in Dark Earth, Terracotta & Burning Sands and placed the mini on a resin base - 60mm Desert Mesa with The Army Painter's Tufts for that finishing touch.
OSL was achieved mixing Model Air Red with air brusher thinner in a 1:4 ratio.  Simply spray until the effect looks ok to the standard you are aiming for.

Secret Weapon's Realistic Water and Exhaust Black Weathering Pigment were used for the running oil in the joints.

This approach also scales very nicely to smaller miniatures as well as shown in the two examples below:

Overall I painted up 8 miniatures in total in under the 10 hour goal to the standard shown above.  While these are certainly not display quality miniatures they do show that you can achieve a great table top quality army in a short space of time using a few simple techniques to speed up the basing process.

Happy painting!
Chief Slave