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There is a more detailed report on my blog, but I tried some Army Painter Speed Paints yesterday. My test piece was a unit of 12 Caesar 1/72 scale plastic elves. I primed these after work, and then sat down with an oatmeal container lid and a single dubious #2 dollar store brush to see what I could do. Since I didn’t really plan ahead, I had the five colors above to work with. Hardened Leather and Camo Cloak were used for cloaks and tunics; Slaughter Red and Pallid Bone for trousers; Crusader skin was flesh tones; Pallid Bone hair and arrow feather in quivers; Hardened leather for boots and bows; Leather and Red for quivers. I used whatever random brown came to hand for belts, and there are a few metallic bits. I realized after I was partway through that lighter colors cannot cover darker, so the proper sequence of painting is light to dark, regardless of where on the miniature those colors fall. Total time from starting (with figures already primed) to adding grass to bases was about 1.5 hours. I let them dry overnight and varnished them with my usual spray varnish this morning. The above is an idea of how they’d look at the typical table top battle viewing distances, alongside some other archers speed painted using my usual techniques, and an elvish command stand in which each figure was painted as an individual to the maximum level I find amusing. So, honest opinions?

First painted this as a speed paint at Reapercon last year. Not a prize winner, but not too bad for tabletop in under an hour. And then there was the tip of his hat. So I grabbed some paint an did a quick clean up/repaint to spiff him up a bit.

It's definitely a worm, and it's definitely purple. Speed paint. .

Though I have no actual intention of playing until Quarantine 37 is released I went ahead and created a Stargrave crew. Initially this was only an excuse to start planning out the crew and maybe even finalizing a list/crew sheet. Once I had finished filling out the crew sheet however I couldn't help but notice that I probably had all the figures needed for this crew. A quick rifle through my backlog just confirmed my suspicion. Even more interesting though, at least for me, was the rediscovery that I don't own any unpainted Guardsmen with flamers. I had planned to paint one up specifically for this crew but it turns out I don't own any unpainted ones. So before the project even began I've already finished a miniature, talk about speed painting. Armed with the remaining nine figures I decided this would be a nice palette cleansing project. Oh yes, I actually made that joke. It also occurred to me that this would be a great project to try my hand at speed painting too. After a few years of debatably tabletop quality paintjobs I'm eager to see the results I can achieve when I'm trying to paint quickly. One quick note before jumping in, this single post condenses four nights of work all together. Back row from left to right: My Captain, First Mate, Gunner, Burner, Sniper, Grenadier, Runner 1, and Runner 2 Front row: Recruit 1, and Recruit 2 First up was my Captain who needed some conversion work. I'm not exactly worried about WYSIWYG for this particular batch but I figured my Captain deserved the extra "effort". That extra effort being laughable once you see it. A quick snip of the hand, a pin, and some glue completed the conversion. I'm not exactly big into converting but this may just be the lowest effort conversion I've ever done. Painting the Captain proved to be a little more involved but about half a session later I had a nearly finished miniature. The First Mate went even quicker as I chose to go with a limited color scheme. Next were my three remaining specialists. My Gunner like the Captain took about half of a painting session with the Sniper and Grenadier taking most of the remaining time. That bit of leftover time wasn't wasted though as Recruit 1 received most of its basecoat. My two recruits were finished pretty quickly during tonight's session. The Runners received most of their basecoat but I ended up running out of time tonight.

This is my first "speed paint". I estimate around 2 hours per mini. The sculpts are hit or miss but I think they did a good job with the faces. I learned a bit about speed painting and what I could possibly get away with. I used Uniform Gray primer, a minimal pallet, Quickshade Strong Tone, and added a a bit to a few bases. The gray primer I left for anything that was steel and I like the end result. I am working in the Generals (bad guys) now. Most of their sculpts are not that good but the dragon looks pretty good. I will continue with the expansion sets after the base game is painted. Sorry for the double post.

A thread dedicated to Work In Progress pix of those minis that have sacrificed their surface area to the never ending the quest to find ways of slapping paint on without it looking like absolute rubbish. (Some miniatures may be harmed in the making of this thread.) Contents List: A Random Space Marine A (bugbear?) shaman A bloke named Mangu To be edited if more be added…... Keywords TGPTGP, speedpaint, speed paint, color scheme tests

It's that time of year again. I wasn't able to paint over Memorial Day weekend, so I've bumped it to the next available date. Those of us in the US have a 3 day holiday weekend coming up (July 3-5) and I am challenging you all to join me in a massively multiplayer paint binge! Everyone is welcome to join, even if you can only paint for one day.  The object is to finish as many figures as possible. Quantity counts over quality. All manufacturers are fair game, posting of WIPs and finished pieces is strongly encouraged. You may prep and prime figures before hand, in fact I recommend it. Get out all those new Bones, old primed or half painted figures and get ready to finish them! Got an army to finish, need to move some half painted terrain off your desk, want to tackle that dragon for the big figure contest? Stuck at home because of the virus? Shelf of shame looking a little crowded? This is the time. All manufacturers, and 3d print jobs are fair game. Prep and prime your figures now so they are all ready to go Friday morning (or if you're taking a 4 day weekend, Thursday night). Have your camera ready to share photos. Photos strongly encouraged! You have until midnight the evening of the 6th to post your progress and be counted in the total. For this holiday there is a special extra challenge: paint with the colors red, white, and blue. You do not have to use all 3 colors at once or have a patriotic theme. Painting begins at 00:01 July 3 and ends 23:59 July 6, in your time zone. Those of you who video chat are welcome to set up channels.

This was a quick speed paint, less than an hour. And I think the Night Spectre (Reaper Bones SKU 77099) turned out looking awesome for the amount of effort put in.

This was a super quick project. DH printed the model on Tuesday and I painted it in about 6 hours on Wednesday. So <48 hours from liquid resin to finished model. I intentionally wanted to work with vibrant colors and picked jade green, gothic crimson and golden yellow as my starting paints. The figure is slightly modified, a crossbow on her hip broke, and I shaved the remains off. I added the fangs with paint, I think the figure was intended to be an elf.

Recently I bought a bottle of the brown GW contrast paint (Fyreslayer Flesh), and decided to try it out on this large Reaper metal bear (SKU 14452). It took less than an hour to finish, so color me impressed. I have all the Army painter quickshades, I am going to try some of those soon on other speed paints, just to see if I can get similar results. I painted the bear white first, then used the contrast paint, in some places I had to spot fix areas where it t go into every crevasse. Then I painted the mouth, eyes claws and base. and finished it off with some pre-made plant matter.

I have a few WIPs that are taking forever, but I needed an alternate Kuo Toa faction for D&D tonight, so I went for it and “speed painted” these in about 4 hours. I used both BCA Pink *and* Drow Nipple Pink as the main skin and spine colors! Do I get bonus points for that? Here are the ones I did a few months before that took about 4 times longer over several weekends.

After yesterday's work on the Bones 4 scenics, I dug around and finished off the first of a set of resin buildings I got from an Apocalypse Miniatures Kickstarter a year or two back: I also finished basing up a seriously vintage (ca. 1974) Minifig Ent: And, finally touched up basing and finished off my Gencon speed paints: From left to right, a Word preliminary round figures, a Reaper preliminary round, a Wyrd final round, and a Reaper final round. (So, 45 minutes on the preliminaries and 60 minutes on the finals...I added names to the two preliminaries; retitled the Word final, and attached the Reaper final to a Frostgrave-themed snow and rock base.)

Bit of a kitbash here. The chap with the spear is from Alternative Armies. The others are a mix of Warlord orc heads (previously Wargames Factory) with two frostgrave arms and bodies, one Oathmark goblin, and one Oathmark dwarf heavy infantryman. Have managed to get a really quick palette going for speed painting orcs. I prime them by brush with Vallejo dark grey primer, then use Scale 75 black metal for the armour, Vallejo hammered copper for decoration and metal details, dark red for cloth and dark brown for leather. The skin is Vallejo Model Colour Heavy Warm Grey. Then the whole model gets a black ink wash and I pick out teeth etc in light grey. These models took about 90 minutes altogether, ex drying time.

As I said on my Saproling's topic, I had today off, so... I decided that in addition to the saprolings, I'd knock out some tabletop quality ghouls. They were already assembled and primed, so the first thing was to paint the undead flesh. I used Vampire Shadow for their sickly skin. It didn't quite match the ghoul I'd painted before, but it was close enough. I sadly didn't always take good notes... After that I decided that as these were primarily going to be gaming ghouls, and not for a unified force for Kings of War, they'd each get their own clothing color: Red, Green, Blue, Tan, and Dark Brown. I used Rusty Red, Muddy Olive, Rich Indigo, Desert Stone, and Ruddy Flesh. The eyes were all painted with Walnut Brown, as were the spikes sticking out of them. Then I washed them all with a mix of 4 parts sepia wash and 1 part black wash. A little bit of highlighting with the base clothing color, then it was time to paint the bases black, and then flock them! Oh, and a bit of watered down rusty red around the mouth. Oh, and aged pewter on the spikes and the cleaver. Looking good for such quick work.

Here's a little quick-paint mimic that I finished up this week. I love this mini, and I want to paint another later, when I have more time. We've been completely snowed in here in Seattle, and you'd think that would mean I'd get more done, right? No. With the husband working from home and the entire schedule in shambles, I've had a hard time managing any painting at all. But the Jan/Feb Challenge deadline is approaching, and I have to get a couple more done...!

Retro Raygun robots, quick paintjob, sometimes simplest is bestest, just used reaper pure silver and washed it with armypainter strong tone ink. then did some detail work with a few other colors.

Nearly done with these I think. I haven't had to do a big batch paint for a while but will do that to get all the orcs and goblins done from the Zombicide Green horde kickstarter. I started off with Army Painter spray paints, necrotic flesh with a light pass of greenskin, or vice versa. Then immediately did a wash of green and purple ink mixed together. This batch has dark red clothes with khaki leather. Will change that on the other batches. What I need to decide (c and c welcome) is whether to do another wash on top or much highlighting. Bases will be an attempt to match/reference the board so flagstones, grass, broken wood. And blood. Also, why do I keep humming "I want it (that way)"?

So, I went to Origins this weekend and entered the Reaper Speed-Paint. I was only supposed to be at the con on Friday and Saturday, but I paved on Friday and won my Saturday semifinal, so I called in sick on Sunday so I could compete in the finals, where I managed to pull off a win. Friday was the scarecrow, Saturday was the hobgoblin, and Sunday they gave us the Jungle Titan. I'd already painted two of the three before, which certainly didn't hurt when it came go time. I didn't get a chance to get pictures in my photo studio before heading out on vacation, so these are the shots I took with my phone at the convention. We had 45 minutes in round 1, 50 minutes in round 2, and a whopping 60 minutes in round 3.

With my bride away on a work trip this week, I decided to try to squeeze in a kinda big project... and after dithering about what it should be, I settled on painting one of my many Bones dragons. Blightfang was actually a main antagonist in a D&D campaign I ran a while back... so that's the one I decided to paint! Tonight was spent scrubbing him down, after he'd spent the day soaking in soapy water. I partly glued him together, and then got painting with Green Liner. I'm only partly assembling him, so that I can more easily access the harder to reach spots. Also the back legs don't fit well into the base he came with, so I'm thinking that I might need to make my own out of cork... And this was supposed to be a quick project... we'll see how I do.

Have had to rush some minis for our ongoing Dnd campaign, Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Am not the DM but paint the minis. All Reaper Bones that started with Army Painter ink washes in one colour over the whole thing. Then using Vallejo paints as base layers and finishing off with another ink wash to tie things together. The Drakes are "young fire dragons" with the wings cut off. With more time I would have sorted out the two stumps where each wing was. The Lizardman is standing in for a troglodyte and the Lilies are standing in for Violet Fungi. The cultists are just the Mythos / Cthulu cultists. There is a roper as well. Can really recommend lining Bones with ink as a liner which I know a lot of others recommend. The whole lot took 3 hours so it is a quick way of getting things onto the table.

After converting Ingrid to better match the character she's going to represent (giving her a bow and rapier), last night I got to painting. I started with thinned down brown liner, then went straight to the eyes with Linen White. Surf Aqua was used for her irises, and brown liner for the pupil. I painted her flesh with a 2:1 Warrior Flesh: Linen White mix. Her hair is Blond Shadow with highlights of Tanned Leather. Her lower lip is a 1:1 blend of her flesh tone with Old West Rose. The armor, gloves, boots were painted with a thinned Rich Leather. The bow and scabbard are painted with a mix of Brown Liner and Rich Leather. Her cloak was painted with Mountain Stone, and then washed with a 1:2:2 mix of Grey Liner: Mountain Stone: Flow Improver. Because I want to bring her to game on Wednesday, and don’t think I’ll get any more time to work on her between now and then, I picked out the end of the scabbard and the tips of the bow with Dragon Bronze, and gave the base a quick wet brush of Redstone Shadow. Not bad for a night's work...

Each of these took me about two hours to paint. Pretty happy with how they turned out, but I was going for more if a woven grass look on the hobgoblin but don't think I actually achieved it.

I speed painted these zombies probably a month ago, I just haven't been in the mood to take pictures or hobby since I finished 'em. Well, I had a pretty good day yesterday, and I think my mojo might be back, so you get some pictures. I think I spent about 7 hours on them as a group, and they're painted to a tabletop level. Thanks for looking.

So, Mr. Mouse joined me in speed painting some of my Imperial Assault Stormtroopers. Mr. Mouse's batch Pretty impressive, given he's only painted about 2 minis before, and we only spent 2 hours tonight. My Batch All in all, we have 7 Stormtroopers painted! Mr. Mouse was awesome to spend time painting with me!

Kobold speed paint! From Bones 3.