More adventures in speed painting!

Remember when I said more substantial posts were coming? I lied. It's been a busy week, but look for something a little more thoughtful once the weekend passes. Today it's going to be a quick discussion of painting. In the meantime, if you haven't been following my RPG a Day videos, you can catch up with them on Youtube.

So anyway, as I've mentioned before, my besetting sin as a painter is impatience. This applies both on an individual-model level and at a collection level; I get bored long before a proper army can be completed. I tend to have a lot of, at most, little forces of a couple of squads each.

This is one of them! Painting-wise, it's shoddy even by my standards, but on the other hand it's a nice little coherent force that was very quick and easy to paint. It could be a bit nicer with just a teeny bit more work.

These guys are my little mini speed-painted army. The two light squads are Reaper Bones Nova Corp Security from the first Bones Kickstarter, and the heavies are old Space Rangers from Grenadier (now available from em-4). In both cases, they are not perfect models. The Space Rangers have soft detail and static poses; the Nova Corp security have some nasty mould lines that are really hard to remove in the soft Bones plastic. So I decided I would just paint them as fast as I could and see what kind of results it produced.

I sprayed the Space Rangers with Army Painter brown primer, but I just washed the Bones and let them dry before directly applying the first base coat. In both cases I put on a first layer of GW Tausept Ochre, then gave the whole model a dark brown wash (Army Painter Strong Tone ink, I think?). Next I went back and added another ink wash, this time only on the spaces between the armour plates, to give the impression of a brown uniform with lighter armour plates on it. After all that dried (the longest part of the process), I just lined the edges of the armour with the original colour. I then painted weapons and gear black and highlighted them with VMC German Grey; visors, idiot lights and weapon glowy bits got a base of GW Regal Blue highlighted up to VMC Sky Blue. It was quick, it was easy and it looks OK at the range in the photo above (although it's a bit rough in the close-up photos below).

I'm not happy with the bases on the Nova Corp guys, which are too tall, but the integral bases were too flimsy to use and I was worried they'd be too fiddly to cut off. These days I would just cut them off, but hey ho.

If I had to add one more thing, I'd go back and add some rank badges, armour markings and so on just to individualise the models a bit. I might also pick out the belts on the light troops just to break up that big solid colour block a little. If I could be bothered, which I can't.

Anyway, one day I'll run some kind of sci-fi skirmish game where it'll be important to have lots of distinguishable mook guards. Until then, they live with a bunch of other wrong-sized forces in a box marked "sci-fi infantry."

More photos: