Batch painting is an important aspect of my painting method. With no permanent hobby space I can’t just leave things sitting between painting sessions, mix in work, a two year old and other family commitments and I’m lucky to get in an hours worth of painting in on a week night.
With uniformed armies it’s easy to batch paint. Build a dozen guys, prime with an Army Painter colored primer, slap them into GW painting handles so I don’t fat finger the paint off while manhandling them and go at it. I’ll add a tiny bit of uniqueness to the models: mixed equipment, different colored boots, different tufts on the bases. But for the most part I’m just going down the line and painting the same parts the same colors. When I’m painting a hundred infantry and weapons crew this is the only way I can get a force done in a reasonable time.
Batch painting isn’t just for uniform armies though. I often will take different figures and use the same paint schemes, even for different scales and genres. A couple figures might have brown pants, a couple brown shirts, some brown hats, etc. This not only helps me paint more figures faster, but it also gives me a change of pace from cranking out a dozen almost identical figures at a time.
Two examples of ‘batch painting’ non uniform or different forces and the same time.
When I’m painting my D&D figures I’m often just looking to get a bare minimum tabletop paint job on them. I’ll pick 2-3 main colors and and a batch of six or eight different NPCs or humanoids will all have those base colors, mixing up pants, shirts, and cloaks. Some brown for belts and pouches, a quick wash and I call them done. The theory is that they won’t hit the table all at once so I don’t need that much variety. This lets me get painted figures on the table, and since they’ll probably only see action in one or two games I don’t spend much time on them compared to other gaming miniatures.
Blues and reds, reds and greens. Chances are five bards won’t be in the same tavern…
Sometimes it’s harder to get more than a handful of monsters with the same paint scheme if they’re not humanoids. It’s easy painting a dozen gnolls or 30 kobolds, but I’ll probably only need a couple ghouls and one mind flayer. Sometimes I use these as a nice ‘palate cleanser’ something I can take a little more time on and concentrate on something different to break up the monotony.
Batch painting is an important tool in my arsenal, and the only way I could possibly get 350 miniatures done this year. I’ve mentioned before how I’m not the kind of guy to spend hours on a single figure agonizing over every single detail and stripping it when something goes wrong. I’ve spent time on character figures before, but it’s pretty rare, I’m usually focused on the army not the individual.
