Speed painting marines- a guide (and some tanks)

February 12, 2022

Hi everyone

The last couple of weeks have been a frenzy of building, but I fell about 20 models and a spray paint session away from having everything built. So before I share a pile of images of assembled marines, I thought I would provide a guide on how to speed paint marines.

Fast marines guide

First things first, if you want to paint highly detailed edge highlighted marines, this isn't going to be of much help. What this will be is some tips on how to speed up your painting in general, with focus on marines.

Scheme

Before you start

Colour scheme pick is probably the most important decision here. Especially with marines, the armour is such a main point of the model, that the decision of colour and technique will make a massive difference to the end result. If you are looking for speed you need to find a way to capture the sharp edges on the armour without spending ages highlighting. There a couple of options here:

Option 1: contrast (or equivalent)

Contrast paints are essentially a base coat and shade in one, while they shine in more textured spaces, they do a decent job on marines. A quick dry brush to bring back the highlight also recommended, and it tends to smooth out some of the areas if it pools.

Option 2: spray paint

Sprays are great for mass base coat sessions. I recommend 2-3 different sprays, starting with black, an all over in your mid colour, and a zenithal in your highlight (more on zenithal highlights soon).

Bonus points for metallic sprays as the top coats really shines as a highlight. You will need to ink the greaves in the armour. If you have one, an airbrush will give a smoother transition, but you won't be able to do the whole army with single spray.

top, lighter spray

bottom, darker spray and black

Zenithal highlight

This is an important concept that can help when speed painting. The idea of a zenithal is that you strongly build the highlights towards to top of the model, while leaving the bottom darker. You frequently see it when base spraying, with a black base with white on top, it can also be used with the rest of the highlights. Essentially you cut down the area used in each highlight to speed up application.

To do this, look at your model straight on, the turn the model so you are looking at it top down at about a 45° angle, from there, highlight only what you see. As this is generally the angle you will see when gaming and on a shelf, so aren't spending time on the areas that are hidden. In the case of the shoulder pad, I paint the whole peice a dark green, zenithal my mid tone the only apply a highlight to the very top. For example, see the photos below:

Dark green at the bottom

mid tone only on the top half

final highlight only in the top corner

No more than 3 tones per colour

Base, shade, highlight. Try to keep to just the 3 tones for each colour. Coming in with an ink over your mid tone works well, and is also faster, and as mentioned earlier, contrast paints are great for speed work, although they will give a Shiney colour over silver if you don't basecoat or re-primer first.

Batch paint

There are a lot of different styles and suggestions here, but my personal batch is 10 marines and a character. The reason for this: too small a batch, and you waste time waiting for inks/contrast paints to dry, too big and you get bogged down in long stages, which can be demoralizing. An 11 marine batch is done in about 2-3 sessions of 1.5hrs, which is great for keeping motivated and moving through the army quickly.

Batch colours

When you are thinking of your scheme, think through the order of your painting. I group together colours that will have the same inks, as it means I can do them all at once with less changing paints. For example the skin, purity seals, and gold all use the same ink, so get base coats together then inked. I also try to end a session on any inks or contrast paints I have so they dry over night.

The rest of the update.

As promised, I built some stuff, here are the marines: