The Quest for the Perfect Wash, part 1

   I like the idea of a wash. I do. It saves countless hours of detailing when you are painting minis. But when you are trying to paint up an entire zombie apocalypse, you really want to be able to base coat them, wash them, and be done. You really don’t want to go back in and highlight a thousand zombies. Not unless you’re that rare gamer that had an obnoxiously lucrative stock brokering career and decided to retire early to do nothing but paint miniatures. If there even is such a thing.

Painting Tips: A Horde's Worth of Zombie Flesh

   There are many nice ways of achieving a rich, undead skin tone (see our article on the one-hour Zombie Painting Challenge for four different looks made by the four people in the challenge). Many of them, however, include multiple layers of paint and highlighting, using different washes in different areas, or other special effects that one might not want to take the time for when painting an entire zombie horde. Especially if you ever need to paint models for other games, a multi-step process on your several hundred zombies may take more time than you really want to put into it. After all, zombies are supposed to spread like rabbits (aren’t you scared of rabbits now?) The more quickly you can pop ‘em out, the bigger your horde can get!

Keeping your Hobby alive: What to do when you hate painting, part 1

Hey guys and gals, today we start a new series about a topic that effects many of us, myself included.  First a little background, though.  I used to live about 20-30 minutes from the rest of LXG but a few years ago I had to move another hour or so away.  This has severely hampered my ability to game and hang with my gaming friends, to say the least.  To add to this problem the nearest gaming store isn't much closer and it's in the opposite direction, so I'm not playing as much as I would like.  There are only so many things in this hobby that can be done on our own, and I hate one of them.  Painting.  So I'm going to take some time and talk about the things I have been doing to gear myself up for painting, and show off some of my inspirations.

How I feel when I have to paint.

Painting Basics: "3 Step" Painting (Basecoat, Wash, Drybush) made easy.

     So, if you're like most hobbyists, painting your models isn't exactly your favorite part of the hobby. For most, it falls in somewhere between doing chores and getting a root canal. While it's true that it's not always the most rewarding part of the hobby, it's the part that makes the rest more rewarding. Painting your models is like going to practice, or Leg Day- it's what you need to be at your best and get the most out of what you've already paid for.

     The good news is, we live in fortunate times. Several excellent products exist to make your painting duties easier. I'm going to demonstrate the simplest way I know to get a really solid finished product, and link you to each one of those products so you can find out more about them.

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…

Thinning down your paints

Something that a lot of hobbyists are taught is that you should thin down your paints.  The reasons for this practice a varied.  For some it makes the paint easier to layer.  Others use thin downed paints to glaze or wash models.  One of the most basic reasons is simply to get a smoother finish.  For each reason there is a preferred product to use, and this article will cover some of them.