Time to paint?

I don’t know about you but the thing I find hardest to do is paint, or to be exact have time to paint. I regularly spend time forcing myself to paint an army just so I have something that looks good on the field. This does work I even completed 2000pts of Tyranids in 7 days last summer. The thing I had a problem with was whether the models that I painted looked rushed or not? I recently spent quite a sum of money on a complete Marine company with all its ancillary support I wanted to paint this completely before I start using it in apocalypse games. I did play with the idea of making it a white army but the reality of this quickly became apparent. I eventually stuck with a templar imagery based codex marine force in red and bone with some key models in white for contrast (I was trying to get a mirror of the original Knights Templar) This seemed like a good idea to me and it certainly looked good in the tests that I did my biggest problem was…having the time to paint!
This brought me on to my next question, how can you paint a large amount of models well with as little work as possible? Now I know that this is an age old question and that people far wiser than me have gone mad musing over this but the other day I was perusing the info on BOLS and there was an excellent post from Goatboy on themes when painting a 40k force. His comments made me think about what I really want from a force for 40k. I don’t want to win golden daemon and I certainly don’t want to make my models look as clean and crisp as the Eavy Metal models. I want my forces to be dark and textured with vast contract between dark and light much like the fictional world in which we set our weekly playing with toys. With this in mind I began to play with how I would paint the rank and file troops in the force.



The image above shows the first 3 models that I have painted for the army they are part of one of the devastator squads and as such will probably not be used much from day to day in games so it won’t matter if they have gone a little wrong.



I started by spraying all the models with a red primer. I got mine from Halfords it’s a great paint with a low price they do it in grey, black, white, red and mustard yellow (good for bad moons me thinks)
I then played with paint then ink and just paint if you look at the image of the 3 marines the one furthest right is 3 layered and the one in the middle is 2 layered. The 3 layered version was one layer too many it had no real bearing on the overall look of the model so I scratched it and just started to ink then layer on blood red. This gives a good stark basis for the detail to be added. I completed each model in around 20 mins with a bit of waiting around, this seems awfully quick and will look effective on the battlefield, which is after all what I paint models for!

Well that’s the space marines covered I will add posts as I complete more of them, especially the vehicles it will be interesting to see if the same process works on a larger model.