Speed Painting

Hello again!

This time I figured I'd talk to y'all a little bit about how I seem to get so much work done so fast. The trick is speed painting. Before I went off to Wargames con a few weeks ago I was able to finish my guard army a little ahead of schedule. To treat myself I wanted to do a new project so I ran a poll on my local forums and they decided I should paint the new Legion of the Damned figures.

I had assembled these figures when they had come out (and done some minor conversions) back in February then primed them and put them away for later.
So I broke out the models on July 25th and started putting down colors. A quick look at the models shows the main colors are black, bone, and fire (Fire's a color just get used to it).
Now I knew that I wanted to experiment with the way I painted black so that left the bone and the fire. So I started off with a kermi brown basecoat for the bone areas.




It sure was everywhere! Next up was the fire. I wanted to paint the fire realistically with the lighter portion at the bottom and the darker portion at the top, so I picked up Iyanden Darksun and painted all of the flames.



Up next was the browns, which would be purity seals, parchment, wood, anything that needed a dark brown basecoat. Scorched Brown was up to the task and down it went.



Now those weapons are looking mighty bare so everything metallic got a coat of bolt gun metal.




Now it's time to switch brushes. Up until this point I had been using a number 1 brush. That brush seems huge and it is. I didn't care if I had a little bit of over lap as the next color will often times cover up the mistakes.
The next color was a highlight for the flames, Solar Mecharius Orange. I painted the upper 1/2 of the sculpted flames and concentrated on the larger areas on the "real" fire on the braziers and banners.



The next color was Mechrite Red, this was applied to the upper 1/2 of the orange areas. Now would you believe that is all of the basic colors? Well it kind of is. After this I gave the models 2 heavy washes with Badab Black (waiting a full day in between each coat before moving on).

The next step was to bring those colors I'd just applied back out. I started off with a 1/4 inch flat drybrush loaded with Bleached Bone and hit a the edges of every bone area and parchment. Then I did the same with Calthan Brown on the gun straps.
Finally I got an old number 1 brush out and drybrushed back in the yellow.



I was going to call it quits here so I used a micron pen to do text and wrote some stuff. I then took an old 3/0 brush and drybrushed in the orange and the red back into the flames. Next I took the 1/4 flat and hit drybrushed the weapons with boltgun metal. This created a very subdued color scheme which I think really fits the Legion well.

I then used my usual method for lenses and power weapons. I know it's weird to not use chaos black on a black model, but these guys don't have a drop of it on them! It's all done with black wash and controlled drybrushing. Never throw away your old brushes when they don't hold a point anymore, set them aside as they'll become excellent tools at creating little highlights.

So here's the finished product.


Would you believe that I finished 20 of these miniatures in just 2 weeks.
Well that's it for me.
You can find more pictures of these guys here.

I did some work on the titans this past week but nothing really earth shattering so I'll post about that later.