Speed Painting Part One

A bit of a warning: This tutorial/expose is a bit picture heavy and is kind of rambling in a self-indulgent fashion (however, isn't all blogging?). If you make it through, hopefully you'll find the information worthwhile. The photos were taken using a Sony Nex-F3 with 10mm macro extension. Since I was doing this quickly, I didn't spend a ton of time getting the lighting correct. Hopefully the pictures are clear enough.

The Beginning

I've been in the process of selling a bunch of 40k miniatures on eBay. I put some marines up for auction but no one seemed to want them so I arranged to send them to a friend. I thought I'd go ahead and paint one of the figures before shipping them off, just for fun, and decided to do it as fast as I could. I don't have a ton of time to paint (toddlers will do that to you) and so have been working on painting techniques that will give me the look I want in the time that I have, so this was a perfect test.

The figure I decided to paint is some Space Marine captain. He's got an axe and a storm bolter and I thought he was some limited Games Day promotion for the Black Templars but can't confirm that online. First thing I did was to take pictures of all the brushes I'm going to use and lined up all the paints I was going to use. Of course there were some changes. I substituted an Earth Brown for the Auburn Shadow and added a Burnt Orange to highlight that (for leather). I also decided purchase the Bronze and Gold base paints from the GW line and used them here.

Setup

I'm using cheaper brushes right now since most of what I'm doing is basecoating (fancy detail works takes time). I've got a couple of Windsor and Newton University Series (maybe 3 USD each) that will do most of the work. The green brush is a Crystal Silver series that I'll do blending with. Any sort of work requiring messy blending on the figure will be done with the red citadel starter brush since that's seen better days. The yellow brush is for mixing paint. I have a Citadel small drybrush since those are the only brushes they can get right these days, and finally a Windsor and Newton Series 7 000 for the eyes and darklining.

Here are the paints. As I said, I replaced the Auburn Shadow with a less reddish brown.

My trusty egg-shell palette.

Getting to Work

Next thing I did was to prime the figure black. I usually use a brush on primer because the Colorado weather isn't very conducive to spray primers but the morning was just about perfect conditions and I ended up spray priming four figures, including the Space Marine.

Need to find him a backpack.

Once the primer was dry (I left it overnight), I started on the armor. I used the Vallejo Game Color Red Gore as the basecoat. I made a mistake and didn't shake it nearly enough. That meant I had to thin the paint to get it to give me a smooth coat but then thinned it too much. I had to add paint to the mix and ended up putting two or three coats on the armor. So, it took me a lot longer than anticipated, about 30 minutes just to do the one section. Here's how it looked after I finished with the basecoat and used some of the GW Crimson Shade on it.

The next stage also took me about 30 minutes but I felt much better about it. I decided to do a light blue/white cloak and I knew I was going to have to put at least two shades of basecoat down over the black. I also put down the Bronzed Skintone on the head and the Earth Brown on the leather bits and everything I'm going to paint gold. I didn't touch the weapons so I'll need to revisit those with more Earth Brown. I haven't quite decided what to do with them which explains the delay.

Here are some shots of the areas before shading. The skull motif on the shoulder will be bone rather than metallic. The metal right there next to the head looks kinda silly, imo. Pretty pleased with the contrast between the red and the blue and also the smoothness of the color (Reaper Snow Shadow).

I thinned down the GW blue wash 1:1 with water and applied it all over the cloak. There's a little bit of cloak visible between the legs and I used the blue wash straight out of the bottle since I wanted a deeper shade there. I also applied GW Earthshade to the leather bits and the skull motif. His head was shaded with GW Fleshshade. I went ahead and added a bit extra to accentuate the wrinkles in the forehead.

So here's where the figure is at after about an hour, including picture taking. I've used the size 3 and the size 0 brush (for the head and the leather) so far, but nothing else.