Painting Tournament Armies: Or how I learnt to stop stressing and love being lazy

Painting an army for a tournament or event can be intimidating and stressful.  After all you want to have your army looking its finest, to catch many an eye, and for those keen competitors, to score as many painting points as possible.  However, there are a lot of ways you can make it a painless experience and avoid the dreaded "Death-march" in the 48 hours before the event.

Painting Event Armies:  It Doesn't Have to be Blood, Sweat and Tears

There are many different approaches to painting.  Some hobbyists revel in it and consider themselves primarily painters who love events as a chance to show off their master pieces.  Others aren't such fans and would rather avoid painting as much as possible for whatever reason.  I'll admit that I am now firmly in the first category, but this was not always the case.  I used to loathe painting with a passion.  I'm now known by my gaming buddies for being able to churn out armies to a decent quality really fast, so I thought I'd share some the changes I made to my painting habits that helped me paint armies.

Don't Try for Perfection

Unfortunately, for many of us the peak of painting perfection is pretty distant goal.  When I set out to attend my first tournament my painting looked like this:

Not terrible, but far from what I wanted my first tournament army to look like.  However, I was going to do my best darn it!  That said I was also not going to try for perfection.  For a lot of hobbyists I know, myself included, what holds them back is perfection.  They want to get everything looking perfect. The issue is that perfection takes a lot of time and effort and experience.  Even the perfection of very good painters only lasts as long as it takes to find the first flaw.  So I decided that I was going to stop at the point I was getting frustrated.  I was going to paint the best I could without spending an insane amount of time on each model because most people don't look that closely at models!  To most observers, a model that's 90% of the way there looks just as good as a model that's 100% done when it's part of an army

Take Shortcuts

My first tournament army was Tyranids. So loooots of models!  I decided early on that if I was going to get all these damn bugs painted I needed to do it as efficiently as possible.

These little fellas are the first squad I did for the army.  Not too flash but they look great when there are about 30 of them in a unit.  They are also 90% washes.  The carapace was bone feathered over brown then washed Badab Black.  The skin is Badab Black over white undercoat.  The fleshy pink bits are Baal Red over white undercoat.  It made painting a unit of 30 something I could in relatively short period of time. Refining your scheme is also important.  Initially the carapace had three different layers of blending until I realised that it looked identical to one layer after the wash.  I originally washed all the recesses brown before the black, but you could barely tell the difference. There's no point in doing 14 stage red if no one can tell the difference between that and 3 stages.

A more recent example, my Sylvaneth are also painted almost entirely with washes, this time applied via airbrush over a preshaded model.  The glow is just nihilak oxide applied over white.  The extra texture of the models is simply static grass and flock applied directly to the models.

Keep Your Palette Simple but Effective

You don't have to use that many colours to get a good looking force.  In fact many of the the most striking colour schemes are ones which use very few colours.  Don't be afraid to crib heavily from existing schemes.  This Algoryn force for Beyond the Gates of Antares had its colour scheme lifted wholesale from mass effect.

Don't forget that basing is part of your scheme.  Picking a basing scheme that is easy to implement, but also sets off your main scheme.  For my Raven Guard I picked a light desert basing style to contrast their dark armour.  It was also one that was simple to do.  Rip up cork board and stick bits on.  Paint Agrellan Earth, drybrush white, apply weathering powder.  Done!

Try New Things

Don't be afraid to try new things.  Weathering is the latest thing that I've tried and sponging chipping over armour plates followed by gratuitous amounts of weathering powder has produced pleasing results.  Before that it was the use of an airbrush for base coating and highlighting as well as glazing colours over undercoats.  Even heavy uses of washes was once experimental to me.  Try new things as you go along and see which ones save you time while still producing the results that you want.

A Note on Airbrushes

Airbrushes are a very useful tool in the speed painters arsenal.  They allow you to basecoat, highlight and shade with remarkable speed compared to conventional brush techniques, but they are not a magic wand.  They are fiddly, unreliable and take a significant investment of time and effort to learn how to use.  Once you are familiar with them they can produce great results, but if you pick one up with the expectation that it will drastically improve your painting overnight you will be sorely disappointed.  After my first experience with an airbrush I was convinced I had wasted my money, but after a fair slog I've got to the point where I am quite comfortable and find it very handy

Some Final Words

Finally I feel that I must say that painting is a very personal experience.  These are techniques that I have developed over many years that suit me and what I want to do.  I also still enjoy slowing down and spending a lot of time on a single model and doing my very best.

This bad boy took me innumeral hours to complete, but even then I found that the techniques I had learned to speed up my painting had really broadened my horizons and that they had improved my technical skills significantly.  So give it a shot, try everything, don't be fussed if it doesn't work right off the bat and remember why we do this:  for the love of toy soldiers.

-Asher