Speed painting ? Airbrush+Quickshade

Hi mates,

Sometimes I just dont want to paint tons of miniatures at a high standard, or spend too many hours on a single unit, when you have a lot of simultaneous projects.

I have used Army Painter's Quickshade before, using a similar technique to the one used by Master David Imrie aka Saxon Dog, in his old blog, with very good results, it saves time, but not that much.

This time I have tried a simpler method. Just airbrush the dominant colour, and paint  some miniatures in various brown tones, then block in the different colours, basecoat stuff... boring but you have to do a clean paintjob.  After that is done, the Quickshade's turn arrives. I used the "splash on" method... with a cheap brush, mid to large size, cover the entire miniature with the Quickshade, and then re touch it with a damp brush with White Spirit or turpentine, in order to remove the excess Quickshade, this is a matter of practice, you will know over time how much you have to remove or touch...

After 24-48h  you can paint over it a few highlights, just 10 minutes per miniature, nothing too fancy, and then spray matt varnish.  In my case, I had troubles (hot weather) with the varnish and it became whiteish, almost ruining some miniatures (Thank God they were cheap plastic Warlord´s ECW storming party figures)

In the next pics you can see the some samples before and after the Quickshade.

and now after... (OMG this is horrible! ... No wait, we all think the same at this stage)

Now matt varnish and a couple of brush strokes. the are near decent for tabletop standard

In my humble opinion, you can achieve decent resolts if combined with a good basing and nice flags. In this case, you can se a musketeer wing, using cheap plastic miniatures. I would not use this technique on more expensive or better sculpted miniatures, but I have at least 2 complete Pike & Shot units that I will paint quickly this way. I think it works better with earthy tones, so Thirty Years War miniatures are perfect for it.

Regards!