I like having painted models but like many I rarely have the time to sit down and actually paint anything and when I do my patience is fairly limited. Whilst there is plenty of painting guides out there most focus on the upperend of the scale, I need to paint quickly and with as few repeat layers as possible, I dont mind layering different colours as it feels like progress but if the painting is a chore It wont get done.
So by leaving large amounts of the mini simply basecoated I minimise fine brush control as the colours rarely actually meet, the end result is a very high contrast style that suffers under a macro lense but looks more than serviceable at arms length.
So heres a bit of a guide that differs slightly from normal advice. Please excuse the focusing, shooting no handed proved to be a bit of a ballache. I am using some flow improver to stop the paint drying whilst taking pictures which is why it looks so wet, normally it wouldnt be neccesary.
Having primed the mini I blast the whole thing with a shade up from black. In this case scorched brown
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Mix a smidge of the next shade (filty brown) into the previous layer and apply to the tops and protruding armour sections.
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Now apply the previous shade (filty brown) unmixed to the same areas as before but leave some of the last layer exposed.
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Next do the same but with the actual armour colour you want the mini to have, in this case sun yellow.
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And again with the highlight colour, I'm using elf skintone for this but you could just as easily add some light grey to the previous layer instead.
At this point I have also applied a mix of darkened khaki to the trousers leaving large areas with the original base layer.
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Some straight Khaki applied to the raised areas gives the trousers the bulk of their colour, then a final highlight of dead flesh finishes the job.
A base of grey goes onto the weapon, backpack and other metal areas
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Three layers of progressively lighter grey are applied in total, on the large flat surfaces I just do diagonal streaks.
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The weapon and leg armour gets a liberal helping of white spots.
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And we are done, a couple of extra details such as some blue around the eyes and a bit of a logo to break up the backpiece.
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You can see just how much of the mini is left basecoated to give it the contrast and save time
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Again its not something thats going to be to everybody's tastes, but it lets me paint up my line troops quickly and with very little skill involved. For the more distinctive troops in a force I just add extra layers between each colour and pull the colours further around the edges so less black shows.
Edit: Not quite sure what i've done to the spoilers there.