I finished my Daqan from one Core Set... I take what I call a "lazy amateur" approach as, while I do enjoy painting I find I quickly reach a point where I'm more interested in playing than painting. Finding a balance between detail and quality that doesn't take hours upon hours has been my driving goal with anything I've painted. I generally only fill in the colors, clean up any mistakes and then wash and that's it.
I got back into painting by working on my Battlelore 2nd Edition forces, which come from the same world as Runewars TMG, so I knew I wanted to use that as a baseline. My Daqan were mostly blue, white and yellow. I didn't care much for the way the Spearmen were depicted on their reference card. This is just a personal bias of mine, but I don't like colored armor. I think armor should be shiny and metal. Maybe I just watched Excalibur too often as a kid.
So I painted my Spearmen's armor plain metal. Pretend their Barony isn't that rich and can't afford fancy enameled armor. Walmartania?
Then I was worried because all that metal didn't leave a whole lot for the other colors I wanted to use. I especially didn't like the way they showed some sort of copper scales underneath the armor... the last thing I needed was more metal. So I figured they're wearing white woolen jerkins underneath instead, since Walmartania is to the north and um... it's cold?
So blue cloth, white wool and yellow... something? My Citadel Guards (a similar unit from Battlelore) had a nice raised detail on their shields that was easy to pick out but these shields are bare. I thought about making up a simple crown-shaped stencil and doing that in yellow or maybe getting some decals but you know, lazy amateur here. I don't have time for that! Then I noticed the cloth wrapped around their spears and thought that would do nicely:
Everyone else moved along nicely after that... now off to the Waiqar!