Reply To: What Painting Method do you Use and Why?

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Color primers and washes, before basecoats.

I do assembly line painting, but spray primer usually doesn’t save me time vs. brush-on colored primers, particularly since I may do the priming in the middle of the night. Color primers with the caps don’t have the clogging problems of eyedroppers, and are cheaper per ounce than hobby paints, since colored primers are sold in larger containers. For advanced tabletop, you don’t need more than six or so colored primers. Washes (Army Painter Ink from the eyedroppers) are easy to use compared to paints.

If you remember the 80/20 rule, colored primers and washes are the 20% of the work that results in 80% of the results. The last 20% is conventional hobby paints. I still haven’t tried contrast paints, but the total cost of the paints puts me off, since I’ve sunk so much money on conventional hobby paints already. I figure I’ll pick up contrast paints if they ever go at a deep discount. As irritating as it is to have thousands of unpainted miniatures (including boardgames), I’m not sure what campaign boardgame I’ll be playing once CoVid is over, so am okay with a slower pace of painting.