Test Models and Batch Painting - Isorians

I’ve got a number of armies to get through, and even selling off a lot of fantasy and 40k stuff will still leave me with piles of Antares, Bolt Action and other historicals to get through.

Which means batch painting.

So we’ll talk about picking an army colour scheme, doing a test model, and then batch painting.

I recently purchased an Isorian force, and have about 1000 points worth of models to paint, consisting of 2 Phase Trooper Squads, a Command Squad, 2 Tsan Ra squads, a weapons team, a phase sniper, 2 light combat drones and a Targeter shard. This clocks in at 30 models and 13 drones.

So what colour scheme to use? There was a good recent article on the Warlord website with people’s Isorian colour schemes, and I had a good look at it.

I knew I wanted to play up the bio-mechanical aspect and alien-ness of the Isorians, to increase the contrast with the Concord (who are largely a mirror in terms of troops at the moment, though this will hopefully diverge more as more supplements are released).

The immediate thought when it came to bio-mechanical monstrosities in popular fiction was the Borg, who, in Star Trek, were to some extent a metaphor for the dehumanising nature and forced loss of personal identity of modern corporatism. However the only thing I took from that was the idea of having a dark base colour.

I imagine the Isorian phase armour as not something you wear, but something that plugs into you. I wanted to make it inhuman but organic. Shark skin was another thing that came to mind.

I ended up choosing a dark grey base for the armour, and the exposed ‘muscles’ or piping or whatever 

I chose to paint red. In some schemes these parts were treated as being light sources, but I chose not to in order to make the whole thing easier to paint. Given some models have more than 15 of these patches, I didn’t want to spend ages on them.

That left me with weapons, plasma sources and bony protusions. The weapons and bone protusions I painted a bone colour, the plasma sources I painted as a green metallic using the Citadel technical paints.

I did a test model, which was a solid 5 hours of work including listening to podcasts etc.

I was fairly happy with this. I had a basing scheme of ash over volcanic rock, which contrasted a lot with a fairly dark miniature.

I then painted the rest of the squad and the special weapon team in the same scheme. Having done the test model though I came up with a number of shortcuts for doing the full squad.

The scheme I used was:

Undercoat – Black enamel spray from Wilkinsons touched up with Vallejo Black.

Armour:

Mechanicus Grey (GW dark grey) – wet brush (like a dry brush but with more paint).

Mechanicus Grey dry brush

Nuln Oil Gloss wash (to give an oily finish to the armour)

Warpfiend Grey (GW mid grey)

‘Flesh’ panels:

Khorne Red (GW Dark Red with good coverage)

Mephiston Red (GW Mid Red with good coverage)

Blood for the Blood God Technical paint (blood spatter to give a more glistening look).

Bone

Rakarth Flesh (GW Khaki)

Ushtabi Bone (GW bone colour)

50/50 Ushtabi Bone/White mix

Plasma

Silver (Vallejo Air Silver, excellent silver colour)

Waystone Green Technical paint (gives a green metallic finish, is meant to give a gem effect)

I completed the rest of the squad in about 6/7 hours on and off.

 

So that's my Isorian colour scheme nailed down, and a reasonable chunk of the force painted. 

Batch painting

What is the bane of every wargamer? Unpainted miniatures. Whether they are the missing character or unit from an army or a complete force of grey plastic, there is nothing worse than an unpainted army except for bases with lumps of polystyrene and a semi legible name written on them representing dreadnoughts/titans/giants.

This is where batch painting comes in.



These archers aren't going to win an prize, but I painted 8 of them up in less than 2 hours while doing other things.

There are several secrets to batch painting.

Plan

- pick a limited number of colours and try to stick to them.
- know how detailed you want the models to be ie base coat, wash, highlights.

Tools & Techniques

- When painting a large number of figures, things like drybrushing metallics are a good time saving measure.
- Production line - give all the models one colour at a time ie do all the models armour at once. This means you get everything finished quicker and because you do the same thing again and again, you get better at it and pick up your mistakes.

The final rule is this - know when to stop. Painting OCD kills projects stone dead as you try to paint every figure to the highest standard that you can. Remember the two feet rule (if it looks good from two feet away, it is ok for rank and file) and stick to it.

There have been some recent developments that aid swift batch painting.

Foundation paints (GW paints that give decent coverage in one coat).
GW washes (washes that go pretty well with foundation paints).

GW is the biggest supplier of acrylic model paint to wargamers mainly because so many people started gaming with GW and they cross promote their paint range so well. For basic techniques GW paints are pretty good.

The LOTR Gondor archers above were spray undercoated black.
A boltgun metal drybrush was applied to the armour.
A brown ink wash was applied to the armour.
A light mithril silver drybrush was applied to the armour.
The gloves were touched up with black.
The cloth was painted graveyard earth.
The bow and leather were painted charred brown.
The face was painted bronzed flesh.

The base was drybrushed with codex grey and then another lighter grey (which was used on the feathers on the arrows).

The model isn't perfect. Not by a long way. If I were painting it now I'd wash the face with Ogryn flesh wash and add a dose of magic wash at the end. However the models look fine from two feet away.

I think the grim realisation we must come to is that no one cares if you wet blended your goblin spearmen or skaven slaves. Your Shamen on Wyvern or Screaming Bell? Yes, because those are display pieces. Your sixth rank of clanrat pushers around the bell? Not so much.