Rogues, rapscallions and er...rabbits

As a commission painter I get a limited amount of time to paint my own minis so I have developed a method which speeds up the process quite considerably on my usual commission work. As I am effectively the customer I am willing to accept a lower standard than usual but still want good looking minis. As a consequence I have developed a sort of speedypaint+ method which uses a speedypant/contrast paint base then adds a few layers of standard paints to tart it up.

Above is my Rogues crew with the rabbit of the title! These have all been speedypainted using Vallejo xpress and Army Painter Speedpaints over the standard Slapchop black primer oversprayed and drybrushed with white. I forgot to take a snap of these but essentially like these ancient Myceneans which were similarly painted here...https://www.firstcommissionpainting.co.uk/single-post/mycenean-tower-shields-speedy-painting

As an aside all the WIP photos are taken on my phone whose camera and I are strangers to eachother which explains the graininess. The completed work photos are on my actual camera and look a lot better.

First job was to drybrush all the tails, wings, wood etc with various shades of light browns according to the character. It is best to do this first as you are likely to drybrush onto other painted areas. This is fine before you put in the work making the rest look nice and very annoying if you forget and have to drybrush later

Next up was retouching the armour. I had used Army painter metal speedpaints and tbh you could leave the steel/iron colours as is but the bronze/gold are less good. I have a quick approach to metals which I explain here on a different BaB model. Essentially using two brushes, one with bright silver and the other just damp. This takes advantage of metals being easier to blend if you switch from one brush to the next quickly. https://www.firstcommissionpainting.co.uk/single-post/armour-plated

Doing the metals early also avoids metal particles migrating onto nicely painted areas if you do it later.

Next step is smoothing out the harshness of the layers on clothing and surfaces such as shields or banners. This is as simple as just using standard acrylics on a wet palette as highlights. Because they are highlights, or occasionally shadows where needed, you dont need to colour match 100%. Here you can see exactly where Ia have gone over parts of the bird's hood with the darker slightly satin finish being the original speedy paint and the lighter matter and edge highlight being the added work. This sounds like it takes more time than it actually does but because you are just doing highlights it is pretty quick.

In the pic below I have used this method on the clothing. Probably worth mentioning at this point that I used Vallejo Dark Mud basing stuff on the bases as this is thick enough to cover the little ellipses the minis come on.

Next up is the leatherwork. When using speedpaints I used a variety of browns to give a nice variety for the later work. It is always a good idea to use different browns for leather as any quick google will show there is no one colour such as 'leather brown'. In this scale and for gaming models I am going with basic highlights, edge highlights and minimal scratches as anything more is really counter productive for speed.

In this picture you can see the rough highlights and edging and rough is exactly how it looks at 300%+ actual size but on the real model it looks decent enough for me. You may want to take more time than I did.

I then found myself googling eyes for each of the creatures. This isnt something I ever thought I would do but turns out animals have lots of different eye types from the black of this rabbit to the pupil type eyes on the foxes below! The pic below also shows nice leather contrasts on the arm guard thing and the pouches.

The faces of all the animals were given a bit of a makeover at this point as just like human minis we will always look at the faces before any other part. This fox (and the others having their muzzles whitened as their eyes were painted in.

The bronze/gold metals were reset at this point as well. I persist in using the armypainter bronzes despite constant disappointment but dammit I paid money for those paints and I refuse to accept they are just hopeless. Anyway the two step repaint is actually a doddle. I use ak 3rd gen burnt tin as the base for any bronze/gold then highlight with the gold or bronze and then use the same colour with a bit of silver for top highlights. The two pictures below show how this works really nicely. As does the half mask on the magic user fox further below.

Bases were then drybrushed with my standard technique of vallejo desert yellow and Dark sand and added in my home made tufts. If you are interested a blog on how I make my own tufts is here https://www.firstcommissionpainting.co.uk/single-post/the-tufty-club-making-tufts-for-basing

This is the starting line up for team Freebeast as completed and below as at the start of the process.

Using my proper camera you can see the benefit of the metal working on this fox rogue. The highlights are largely due to the painting rather than the lightingand the eyes look nice.

The strappage(?) and leatherwork look decent now though in retrospect different coloured pouches would have looked better...

The magic user's glowy hand was worked up with an airbrushand some green and yellow because that it the actual colour of glowy magic!!

Could these be better? Yes they certainly could but looking at the times on my phone when the WIP shots were taken the first group foto was taken taken at 14.06 on the 15th Feb and the final phone photo of the gold effect at 17.06 same day. That is 3 hours excluding basing and apparently I wasnt painting for the full 3 hours as I have other pictures taken in between!!

Hopefully this has been of some help to others who are time poor out there. If you have any questions feel free to contact me vis FB at https://www.facebook.com/1stcommissionpainting or via the website firstcommissionpainting.co.uk