Are you looking to paint your Warmachine Hordes models faster? Painting miniatures faster requires some dedication and a bit of planning. You also have to reduce the amount of detail you expect to paint on a model.
In this article, I show you how I quickly speed painted this Menoth Warmachine miniature so I can get right to playing the tabletop game.
A Dark and Stormy Painting Session
On a particularly rainy night, I decided I needed another Crusader Menoth Warjack. You never know when you might need another one of these beat-sticks. In the game of Warmachine (read more), Menoth fight with fire and iron.
When you’re running a theme list for a game, you tend to need more than one of most things. So, when I decided I needed more “meat” in my Menoth lists, I added this guy. And, of course, you can’t run a good game without having your models painted. The Menoth Crusader is the powerhouse grunt on the ground.
Do You Hate Painting Multiple Miniatures of the Same Type?
I hate painting multiples! The repetition of painting models gets old quick. So, I decided to speed paint this model. For more about speed painting miniatures, check out this article about speed painting models.
Fortunately, painting warjacks becomes easier because the model is larger than your typical Warhammer 40k Space Marine, for example. For the sake of simplicity, I used a regular brush instead of my airbrush (‘cuz reasons). An airbrush requires clean up and I did not want to spend the time at the end of the paint job cleaning. I dove in with a big brush.
Paint Fast Without Worry
Here’s my thinking about this model. I wanted to paint this miniature quick without worrying about making a mess. I used colors that closely matched the references from the studio art. But, I didn’t concern myself with getting it too close. I also didn’t ask for any feedback while painting the model because I knew this would slow me down (and diminish my confidence).
Instead, I aimed for maintaining contrast on all the major elements, e.g., shoulder pads, the chest/front piece, and getting the edges highlighted properly.
It helped that I had painted this same model twice already. I had a feel of where colors needed to go, and getting a bit messy (coloring outside the lines, as it were) was OK with me. All I needed was to get the model to look closely like the other two Crusader warjacks I painted previously.
In the series of photos below, you can see my steps that I took when I painted this model. I jumped around a bit. You can read more about this process below. Overall, the entire tabletop quality paint job took me just under 90 minutes. This is pretty fast! For fun, of course, because I like to experiment, I used a variety of methods.
Overall Approach for Painting the Warjack
I tried two brush blending and wet blending (as mentioned, no airbrush was used). There are other advanced paint blending methods I also considered, but then realized incorporating too many “experiments” would slow me down. In general, to make best use of my regular brush, I played around.
Because I didn’t use my airbrush, I didn’t need to mask areas off to avoid overspray. I also didn’t need to worry about using the airbrush to blend areas of the model. I’m quite skilled with the airbrush nowadays after tons of practice, but was never great at blending across small surface areas on miniatures.
Painting the Warmachine Warjack (Step by Step in Pictures)
Anyway, with a regular brush I was able to fix mistakes more easily. All I had to do was use the original base coat color to clean up edges and stray lines.
1. Prime the model
2. Block in the base colors
3. Examine the piece (take your time)
4. Paint highlights
5. Try to be consistent as you paint your layers
6. Don’t forget to paint all the viewable angles
7. Layer up to strengthen the color (build up coverage with thin layers)
8. Paint secondary colors the same way
9. Build up contrast (the dark versus light value paint colors)
10. Use mid-tone colors and values to balance the transition (blends) between base colors
11. Continue working on layers to strengthen each color
12. Take your time; allow each color layer to dry before apply another on top
13. Paint metallics last (Recommended)
14. Use shades and washes to accent metallics, and add contrast and realism
Final Thoughts
Overall, I was quite pleased with the results of the Menoth Crusader. I painted it quickly and the overall paint job looked great for a tabletop game. I am looking forward to seeing how well this model does in the game alongside its fellow Menoth troops.
If you liked this model, you can take a look at other miniatures I painted in the gallery and other painting articles.
Happy Painting!
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