"Painting: How Important is Faster?" Topic

The promotional materials for The Army Painter system stress that their product will allow you to finish your army faster.

On a scale of 0 (no importance) to 10 (prime importance), how important is speed to you when completing an army?

I guess everyone has their own sweet spot of "neatness" (or whatever you would call it) and speed, but speed is very important to me, so I'll go with a 9.

Depends on:

a) the attention span and patience of your opponents
b) the degree to which "painted only" matters to you and your opponents

10

1. Fast is nice, but I would rather have them look nice.
I could spray paint my entire British 8ty Army, Russian and American armies with Krylon Camo Khaki, but they would look like .
I still have to go back and touch up the khaki…
FAST is a single step in the process.
The Dip may be fast, but you still have to get all the block colors done first.

Besides, I HAD a can of Army Painter Olive Drab for my Shermans. The damn thing leaked all over my hands and basement floor.

11.

0. Unless I'm trying to fit in with my group. Often we're playing a new era and have agreed to get certain units done for the next game. That can be more challenging.

For me, I rarely compromise on quality so it just ends up being a lot more intensive work to get em done.

I should add we play 28mm these days. I can't for the life of me, work out why anyone would play in 28mm scale and not have at least 'wargaming standard' (whatever that means?) figures on the table??

Wow, sometimes it doesn't take long to change one's mind! I'm going to resubmit my opinion from 0 to a 3 after seeing the highlander and Brit rifleman in this thread (scroll down):

TMP link

I could reproduce this, but it would take me far too long to realistically build whole armies of horse and musket to quite this level…

i'm gonna be the odd man out here. Speed of painting is about a 5 on a tenscale for me. When I get in a painting mood it is helpful to be able to hammer out an entire unit at once before ADD/life kicks me OUT of the inclination/ability to paint. This is therefore a HUGE factor in my ability to game. (We ALL know how wrong it feels to field an UNPAINTED unit)

7

The only important thing is that they look right.

It is a nice thing if they can be made to look right quickly (or at least not horribly slowly).

0 All the stuff Army painter claims to make things faster I've had or have been using for years already.

0 here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

8. Speed has to have some importance or you'd never finish. Also, unless you only do skirmish armies speed is an important factor in the final analysis.

Thanks,

John

if you are painting for the rent then faster is important..though faster and effective is the magic mix..I don't think army painter makes things any faster for me..

Given the increasing costs of figures it would seem sensible that you would paint them as best as you able to. This not only gives you a good looking army but will increase any potential resale value later on. So speed to me is not important

8

Lately, at least an 8. I don't like spending too much time on projects anymore. I far prefer to have figures/units ready for games as quickly as possible. That said, I'm still happy to spend more time (read: effort) on specialty/unique figures. Best, Dean

0

5. The old quality V quantity battle. The figures must look nice enough but I need them in large numbers and soon. Its a case of squaring it with yourself with what compromises you can make.

It dependes on my level of interest. And whether I already have figures of that type done.
I just had some new Dervish arrive a couple days ago. Haven't started to paint them yet. I'll see how long it takes…
To answer the question. Somewhere around 0-3.

0.

I choose to paint them as well as I can rather than as fast as I can.

8.

I changed the way I paint, from black undercoat and 3 shades to coloured undercoat, block clours in light tones and then army painter brushed on a year ago.

I have not looked back. I now have armies on the table rather than units and I don't have an aversion to slogging through my painting table. If you work to a bulk production method, focusing on doing a lot of figures in batches, AP works. Don't let anyone tell you it doesn't – my figures and output say they are wrong.

Jaz
6sided.net

I'm going with 5. It important to actually finish a project so you can get playing, but it's not the most important thing.

Just enough, just in time, so I'd go with a 9.

I am about an 8 as well. I just picked up the army painter system. The only fast part I see is the dip, and I am not a fan of that look. I think the "washes/inks" (which are water based versions of their dip cans) will be good. A bit more control.

I enjoy painting, but I enjoy gaming as well. I still want my army to look good on the table.

Now if they sold "army basing" that was "fast" I could get into that. Basing is my least favorite and the slowest part of the process.

Matthew

Depends on the project, some I just want finished so 10
Some the painting is the end in it's self so 0

The question was how important is speed when painting an army but many people just anwered wheter they like the Army Painter products or not. This is just an option to speed painting up but there are many other techniques. Speed is important but the figures still have to look nice enough for me to be proud of them. I will go with 6.
Gianpaolo

8. I want good now, not great later. I'm not even sure I can do great, but I can manage good-enough fairly fast.

I do not, however, use Army Painter products.

Speed is extremely important, as I get maybe 45 minutes during a good week to spend on my hobby. I also have a lot of interests and need for a lot of armies. Additionally my time is burdened by my making many of my own masters and castings, and scratch building almost all of my own terrain. Speed in painting is at least a 9 on the 1-10 scale.

I'll go 8!

What Lentalus said, I'm primarily a gamer rather than a painter.

Good enough to play with, done as fast as possible.

Army Painter are primarily a marketing and distribution company. I've not yet seen a single item in their line where an identical product, or at least functional equivalent, isn't available cheaper elsewhere, usually at around half the price or less.

In their favour they have a wide range of (mostly) useful and high quality products available from a single source and they seem to be succeeding in getting their stuff into stores.

But you pay for the convenience.

Lots of people saying 8 or higher because they don't have much time to paint. At what point on that 0-10 scale does the time you'd spend painting become so precious or limited that you'd use a painting service instead, or resort to playing games that offer prepaints? This is at least a two-axis scale, with Cost and Time factored in – and possibly a third "Pride In Doing It Yourself" dimension.

8 or 9. The dip technique gave me better looking figures in half the time, a major improvement.

I'm more gamer than painter. Unless it's a single character fig, I tend to "assembly-line" paint. (all the green, all the brown, all the black) That usually gives me a reasonable balance between Speed and Quality. And yes, inks are your friend.

An 8 for me too--speeding along painting keeps up my motivation to both paint and game.

Since I paint almost all skirmish figures I'd say 4-5, mainly because I like to spend time at the painting table.

I'd say a 6 or 7 for me. As time has gone on and I've gotten better at painting I'd say the iportance of it has gone down as my speed has increased.

I'm not sure speed is a factor at all, avoidance of boredom and frustration is.

I like them to look decent but without a load of faffing around, and equally I like to hit my production targets.

Fast painting techniques (washing, drybrushing) generally let me hit my targets but they also look good and are not an exercise in frustration. I haven't blacklined a figure for ten years now.

So, call it a 7.

10

I'm rapidly running out of life

8

I think speed is important so that you can get to having playable armies while you are still interested in them.

I do armies as matched pairs and often with matching scenery. My current project is the battles in 1476 of the Swiss against Burgundy. I now have 275 painted figures, with more than 120 done in the past three months.

Since I started painting using fast techniques about five years ago, I am much happier and I have virtually no lead pile. This means I can buy new things as they are launched and paint them immediately.

Mick

2-3

I also like Lentulus' comment, although I'm not sure I'd put it at 8, but something like 6-7. My problem is I seem to have an functional inability to actually paint fast (I eat slow too – maybe there's a study there). I need to work on speed painting methods more.

Faster as a function of "Get them on the table" is an 8 of 10.

Faster as a function of "Hastily slap some color on it and declare it done" is where it all goes to heck.

I used color blocking and dipping techniques on a bunch of Greatcoat Sci Fi Troopers (the ones from that company that causes so much shouting), and despite having a dozen of them done in an evening, my color picks combined with my dip to create a horrid magenta and green looking squad.

I had worked so fast, I'd have to do it twice, and add time to strip them to boot!

0 for me

Pretty low on the scale for me unless I am prepping for an event.

1

7, like Mick says.