Hi all,

I've been playing miniature games for just over 25 years. Runewars is probably the first large scale miniature game many of you have played. Painting a full army can sometimes seem like an overwhelming challenge.

I want to state up front, I am not a great painter. I don't have the patience to get my miniatures up to the kind of wow standard you'll see around the interwebs. My advice to you is don't compare yourself with those painters. They are talented and have practiced for years. They also deserve the kudos they receive.

Me? I just want painted figures you can push around the table to a standard that makes me feel alright about myself.

If you are anything like a friend of mine painting 40-50 figures can seem daunting. He told me the other day he'd spent 3 hours just doing the arms of his 16 figure spearman unit. With a family and full time job he is despairing of ever getting his army painted.

This is how I do it. Line up your unit, pick a reasonable number of figures. I do this at 16 but I'd advise when you are first starting out do a tray or two at a time. Pick one colour, do all the bits for that coluor right the way through. Pick the next colour and do it again, rinse and repeat. Production line painting is one the few ways you can get through large scale projects.

Here is how I approached my first unit of reanimates, about 7 hours work for a finished unit to the standard I am comfortable playing with.

Priming - wood glue onto the base and dip into rough dirt/gravel. Spay paint with mat black.

I always tend to do the the base with a covering before I prime. I have found that if I don't then there will bits of covering which don't get painted. The mat black priming covers the dirt and also helps bind it to the base. I use dirt out of my garden (cheap and lazy ) but you can use sand or whatever tickles your fancy. Just try to get some fairly fine stuff. I also choose mat black just in case I miss a bit when painting, basically it is pretty forgiving. White priming can show through, but admittedly it does give you models a lighter look, perhaps when I do elves...

Base paint - I use GW paints but if you're using a different brand no big deal. There are colour comparison charts on the web.

I then washed most of the model with the Reikland Fleshshade but on the The Fang blue I used the Carroburg Crimson to give a strong contrast. I picked Reikland Fleshshade over other brown or black washes as i wanted a light touch on the models. I find the others can tone down your colours too much.

Highlights - I'm a lazy painter but I know highlights make a huge difference to your models. As I am doing big blocks of infantry here I decided to do a basic highlight. A basic highlight simply consists of reapplying your base colours back over raised areas of the model. If I was doing a character model I'd then find at least 2 other matching but lighter colors to highlight further.

For basing here's the basic basing materials I use. The contrast with white and green is quite nice. I have been slowly converting my armies to this mix as I go back over them. Re-basing old armies can given the a new lease on life.

Before putting on the flock I paint with a dark brown followed by dry brushing two lighter browns. This isn't the extremely light dry brushing where you wipe most of the paint off first but just a basic dragging of the brush over the rough surface of the model's base. Just make sure you go all the way to the edges. I usually pick another colour to do the rim of the base for definition but as Runewars figures sit in a tray this time I just chose to use the Dryad Dark.

So here's the final product. If I wanted to make them a little more fancy I might do the eyes as well. Perhaps after I finish my first 200pts

o_o

wow. Those are the most beautiful models I've ever seen.

The next model I painted was quite a bit of fun to paint.

For the Carrion Lancer I picked the most garish colours I could find in my paints box. I still have a few mid 90's paints which due to their colour never quite got used up. So for the Carrion Lancer they were perfect. After the primer of mat black I based using Bugman's Glow. It's a really good colour which then takes on other colours like purple, which traditionally I found needed 2 or 3 layers.

This model needs a little blending as the large surfaces will look a bit weird if you don't paint with a view to taking into account lighting. Blending in this case means that you'll have two or more paints that are similar in tone but move towards a lighter colour as you get towards the areas where the light naturally hits the surface. For me i just have two brushes on the go simultaneously so I can add the blending on the fly.

Here's the colours I used for the worm itself:

For the rider I just used the same colours as the Reanimates which I posted above, I added some green eyes, cause you should . I then washed it with the following colours. I used a technical paint as well just to add a little blood onto the talons of the worm. I had to wipe down the tops of the worm's scales to remove the additional Leviathan Purple because it is quite a dark wash.

I can't see the image, although I'm sure it looks great XD

And here is where I ended up.

Again, for me this is good enough to play with but there is always areas a model like this could be improved.

Highlighting could be better as an example but I'm lazy.

2 minutes ago, Alino said:

I can't see the image, although I'm sure it looks great XD

I'm having to put attachments in separately as there's a limit to the file size on FFg forums and it's tricky to keep adding images to a blog like this.

1 hour ago, Thornoo1 said:

I'm having to put attachments in separately as there's a limit to the file size on FFg forums and it's tricky to keep adding images to a blog like this.

Most people host their pictures on somewhere like Flickr or Photobucket and link to those images directly, rather than uploading to FFG's forums.

Doesnt look very lazy to me.

If you consider this a lazy, quick paintjob im curious what you can do if you actually "tried"

Also as Budgernaut suggested i'd put the photos elsewhere and link'm (i use imgur) because most of them arent working for some reason.

Yup can't see most of the pictures unfortunately

What are these? Pictures for ants? (also as above, unfortunately most of them are not working).

Interesting. I haven't had a problem with these images. At least, not on mobile.

Thanks for the feedback, I have transferred the images into Photobucket.

Nice! These are great.

have to admit, both the lancer and the rune golem have been sparking some really amazing paintjobs. Think ive seen ... maybe 2 lancers i didnt like lol

Ok, punched out another 16 figures this weekend. When I say punched out, 10 hours across two weeknights and the weekend. I recall now the time and effort that goes into an army. I reckon in total the Waiqar will absorb about 50 hours to get to about 300 pts. That's enough to give options across most unit types.

This set is my archers. Currently I play these as two 2x1 with Combat Ingenuity, they form my main blight batteries. Though I have started to run just one 2x1 so I can get two big blocks of reanimates in.

I wanted to go a different way with the colour scheme, de-emphasis the armour and make them recall that they were once living beings who probably hunter in the forests of Terrinoth. I have heard quite a few people complain about removing the molding lines on RWM models. In the normal course of events I would say that removing molding lines was crucial but I resisted with these. But to be fair the Waiqar archers do need some work particularly along the arm which is drawing the arrow.

I chose to do a colour scheme of leather armour and green clothes. What I realised quite quickly is that these models have more detail, particularly the leather bands that go around the model, and the quiver adds some more too. This lead to a 9 pot selection, more than I wanted to originally. More pots means more time.

I experimented with 4 different washes for the bodies before locking in the Nuln Oil. I was toying with one of the three brown GW washes but due to the focus on leather armour they just didn't give the contrast the models needed. For the green I settled on Fuegan Orange. It's weird choice but I used it to great effect when I did my Warhammer 40k Nurgle warband. I also tried a green wash but it was way to bright.

With my reanimates I used highlighting to bring out the relief and lighting. That is easy to do when you have a few colours, especially metals. As I had so many browns I switched to dry brushing for the archers. Dry brushing is a fairly indiscriminate approach, local areas can be targeted though. Due to the skeletons being darker from the black wash I dry brushed the bone with Rakarth Flesh. I started the leather with the Mournfang Brown, then the XV-Base before finishing the browns with Zandri dust. I then went and dry brushed the green with Castellan Green. I went this way as there is usually a bit of cleaning up when dry brushing so finishing with the green makes sense.

Dry brushing is murder on your brushes so only use old ones you can not get any detail out of any more. I used one up completely and you see the impact between the two detail brushes here.

I'll post the outcome next.

First unit of archers.

Second unit of archers.

As a block of 4.

And just for good measure here's the current state of play with my Waiqar army.

These look so sweet. I love the muted more natural colors, and your basing complements the painting perfectly.

the basing looks great. love the snow motif there... I think the skulls could use a hit of highlight around the eye sockets and jaw, but I'd be proud to square off against an army that looks so good at the table.

10 hours ago, Dosiere said:

These look so sweet. I love the muted more natural colors, and your basing complements the painting perfectly.

5 hours ago, docForsaken said:

the basing looks great. love the snow motif there... I think the skulls could use a hit of highlight around the eye sockets and jaw, but I'd be proud to square off against an army that looks so good at the table.

I've found good basing takes the eye away from shabby painting . Yeah you're right the skulls could do with some whiter highlights.

Yeah I know I said I'm a lazy painter but we're having our first gathering of more than 2 players in Brisbane this weekend so i want to look pretty.

This little group was fun to paint. I makes a nice break when you move away from production line painting. Don't get me wring, I still did the the same colour on each of the 4 models before moving on, but painting 4 models is better than painting 16 right?

I tried to layer the blues here to give shading, I'm not top notch at this and didn't really get the blending right.

Same bunch of browns but with a little flesh for the necromancer

And I layered a bit more with the metals this time. They are heroes after all and deserve a little bling.