Lower your standards, have more fun.

 

What started as a quick way for me to paint an army, has – I think – turned into my new approach for larger scale army building.

 

Part of the reason I am writing this is because I have had a lot of conversations lately with people who have had trouble getting a painted army to the table. I wanted to show that there’s a bunch of really easy ways to get an army done quick and make it look decently good. And this isn’t a speedpaint hack or a slap-chop guide – there’s no new fancy technique here. It’s really just about using a few high contrast colours and picking out bold details. It can be done incredibly quickly, even by a beginner, and it has a very strong style of its own.

To set the stage a bit, I’ve been working on a massive Dwarf army for Warhammer: The Old World. It’s something like 6000 points before adding magic items – way too many models. Additionally, I made the decision that this army was going to be done using something approximating the 90’s ‘Eavy Metal style. For me, this army was always going to be an exercise in nostalgia (Like TOW more generally), and I wanted to take the time and make the effort to paint it this way. I am loving this process, but it doesn’t leave much time for other projects – it has already stretched out over 8 months and I’m maybe a third of the way through the army. So, to exercise a bit of creativity, I decided to bash and paint a chaos army in a few days.

 

In truth, I ended up bashing and painting two chaos armies. The total combined time to build, bash, and paint these armies was less than 7 days. And most of that was just in the evening after work. And – they don’t look like total garbage – at least I think they look pretty good. While I was working on these armies, I came up with a bit of a philosophy around how I created them. Firstly, they were both chaos armies. One was a Khorne-ish army for a 40k style game, and one was a Tzeentch-ish army for a TOW style game. I say ‘_____ style game’, because I built out rosters for both armies using OPR Regiments, and OPR Grimdark Future. I’ve since gone back to see how these lists would be slotted into other systems, and they work well enough. My goal was to have a healthy mix of heroes, infantry, special units like chariots and ogres, and large units like monsters and tanks. You know – a Warhammer army. Whether or not these lists are competitive, they look right on the table and I can use them in a few different systems.

My first challenge was to actually create these armies. One limitation that I set myself was that I didn’t want to buy any new models, and definitely not any GW product. In this regard, I have an advantage. Being a miniatures hoarder, it wasn’t hard to source enough torsos and models to start bashing. And this is specifically why both armies are chaos armies – because I could throw practically any bits at them and call it chaos. This whole project would be a bit harder if I wanted to create a Tau army and a High Elf army. Both armies do incorporate some GW models, because I happened to have them laying around already. In fact, the impetus to start with a 40k style army (an aesthetic that I’ve never really cared for in the past) was that I had an old busted imperial guard tank sitting on the shelf, that looked like prime kitbashing material to me. Once you get past the GW models, I have a variety of other kits and bits, many pulled from the bits box and some that I traded for with friends. Again – not everyone is going to have the same collection of models laying around as I do, or maybe the generous friends that I have either. The one thing that everyone has access to is cheap junk! 

When I didn’t have the cool bits or models to field a unit that I thought the army needed, I just made one. My hellcannon is a Halloween skull with a tube sticking out of its mouth. My chaos chariot is made of popsicle sticks, wheels I cast out of greenstuff, paperclips, and cheap jewelry chain (and a cool fly model I found). My chaos dragon is just a plastic dragon toy from Michael’s craft shop – I didn’t bash it al all. Same with the skeletal centipede – that’s also a Halloween decoration, just with a chaos dwarf sorcerer stuck on top. This is not the first time that I’ve made a whole army from junk and been proud of them. I made a Wyrd Action army (mutants for a homebrew Bolt Action setting) out of plastic farm animals that I cut in half, with the remainders of head and arm bits that were left over from some old Bolt Action sprues. That army was really the precursor to these two, and together, all three armies have changed my perspective on what an “army project” can be.

Bashing and building was the bulk of this project but was still a quick process. When you are making armies out of garbage and hot glue, you learn not to sweat the little things. Mold lines were still scraped, but gaps could be filled roughly with super glue and baking soda instead of waiting for greenstuff to dry. Once everything was built and stuck to a base, they got a load of basing material – one army got premixed stuff from a jar, and after I ran out, the other army got coarse sand stuck to the base with wood glue. Both of these armies got primed with a mix of cheap black craft paint and mod podge. I hand paint this concoction and slather it on thick – the craft paint and glue contract when they dry, so they don’t usually obscure any detail. It also adds a durable layer and reinforces all the basing material. This is often the area I get the most pushback on – people seem to hate the idea of brushing on craft paint as primer. In the summer months, I will sometimes spray prime models, but I always end up missing areas on the model – and spray paint doesn’t give the added structural benefits of acrylic and mod podge. I also live in a place that gets very very cold, so for 6-8 months of the year, I’d rather hand prime inside (even if I could technically run outside, prime super fast, and then bring the stinky models inside to off-gas).

This leaves us with painting – I think both of these armies are very visually striking, and it is the colour choices themselves that really make this all possible. And for that, I want to give a shout out to Ryan (GingasaurusRex) and Brad (bitsbibsorks) who helped give me contrasting colour suggestions, giving me the blue and ochre for the sci fi chaos army – it made all the difference. Both armies are painted with around 6 colours – and if I did it again, I might even cut a few of those. There are no washes* or highlighting anywhere. The techniques I used were overbrushing, drybrushing, and occasionally layering in place of highlighting. This allowed me to move fast. The sci fi army took about 2 hours, and the fantasy army took maybe 3.5 hours. The fantasy army was more experimental and a lot of choices were made on the fly – I think that’s why it took a bit longer.

Additionally, the majority of paints used in both projects were cheap acrylic craft paints I stole from my wife’s paint set. I didn’t use any GW paints, and only a few actual “model” paints. Using plastic toys and craft paint means that both of these armies ended up being ridiculously cheap (free because I had everything in the house already, but cheap if I was going to go out and buy the supplies). There are so many ways we can reduce the barriers to play if we are willing to break a few norms and mental narratives.

 

 (The Turbo Dork paint was my one fancy thing).

For the sci fi army, I overbrushed a deep red over everything, and then I heavily drybrushed a much brighter red on top of that. I honestly could have left it there. Even that much work, which took maybe 15 minutes for the whole army, gave me a visually interesting army to play with. Over metallics like weapons and armour, I drybrushed a brass metallic – heavier or lighter depending on what the surface was supposed to be. There was a surprising amount of bone texture in this army, so I thought an ivory would be a great contrasting colour. I gave a rough overbrushing of ivory on anything that looked like bone. The red peeks through in some spots, and that’s great. The last 2 colours are what really make this army special. The basing material is painted with a rich yellow ochre, thinned down with water so it doesn’t have perfect coverage – this makes the models pop and stand out from the ground. There are also a few places I used the ochre on details to make them pop a bit from the red. Then we have the star of the show – electric blue. This colour is so bright and contrasting that it really steals your eye from the rest of the model.

That was it for painting, but I did add a lot of banner poles to these models, so I had to put something on them as well. I ended up using a regular old printer to get some black and white images I liked. I cut these to size and shape, painted the backs black, and gave them a very watered down wash of agrax earthshade (there, I broke my promise of no washes!). I then gave them 4 or 5 layers of matte mod podge. Each time I would slather on a coat and then blast them with a hair dryer to make it dry quickly. Drying this way made the mod podge crack and texture in interesting ways. Once that was done and the paper was suitably protected, I singed the edges with a lighter, which gave a great rough outline, and had the added benefit of making the mod podge bubble and crack even further.

And there we have it. That whole process took about 2 hours of painting, and maybe 30 minutes of working on the banners from printing to gluing. If you can hold a brush, you can probably paint an army like this. The key to both of these armies is bold, contrasting colours. If I did this army with 5 shades of red and brown, it would look like a muddy mess, but the ivory, ochre, and blue are a shock when they go against the deep reds.

 

The fantasy army follows the same principles, but with different colours. We again start with the black base coat. On top of that I drybrushed a mix of royal purple and violet. Then I used a fluorescent pink/purple and heavily drybrushed the models. This got thick and chunky and obscured a bit of detail, and I love that. It made the army look kind of gross. Also, my drybrush started falling apart, so there are individual bristles glued into the models with this rubbery paint. Free texture, baby. On top of the weapons and a few other details, I used an apple green with good coverage just to help with the transition to the next colour. On top of the apple green, I used a fluorescent neon green. Without that apple green layer, the pink would have bled through and required a ton of extra coats. The last detail colour was a mint green. This was just a mix of two blue/green paints that I had. It wasn’t fluorescent, but was still bright enough to hold its own against the blazing pink and green.

 

The final step for this army was painting the bases – and I really debated over whether or not I should do what I did. This was the one fancy thing I added to either army, and I’m glad I did. Originally, I was just going to leave the bases black as a contrast to all of the aggressive colour on the models, but I wanted to get even weirder and I thought “I’ve never seen a metallic base before, I wonder how that would look”. I have a few Turbo Dork colour shifting metallic paints on the shelf which never get any use, so I thought this would be a great opportunity. I used a soft blue/silver called Motherlode, and I think it was the right call. My narrative for this basing is that this is what the warpstone dust in the chaos wastes looks like – this army is changing and mutating as they walk through the raw stuff of chaos. Both armies got a black base rim (and a bunch of the big bases on the fantasy army are actually just thick sheets of cardboard – cheap!), and we are done!

 

If you made it this far, and if you are one of those people who are unable or unwilling to get a painted army on the table – this post is not meant to chide you – I empathise with you. I just wanted to show that you can set aside some of your expectations for what an army can be and have some fun. I’ll still be slaving away over my dwarf army for the next few years, and that’s fine! But it’s not the only way to paint an army. And if several years of painting is daunting to you, and you are scared that your army isn’t going to look good after going through all that effort, why not try something quick and dirty? If you don’t like it, you can paint on top of it or strip the models and try again. Be less precious with your paint. We can add and remove and create and destroy, and we don’t need to follow any rules if we don’t feel like it.

Do you have friends who always bring grey plastic to the tabletop? Share this post with them!