I hate grots. They’re so many of them, and they cost so few points, that it really doesn’t make sense to spend so much time on them. But honor dictates that all my minis need to be painted to a certain level, which is a bit of a catch-22.
Thankfully, I picked up a few methods which, didn’t actually allow me to speed paint per se, but more like cut some corners while keeping the overall standard to something I’m happy with.
Also, I got to play around with my new green stuff world base rolling pin, which was fun!
All about the Base
Some of the bases were made from green stuff world’s terrain rolling pins, some from normal texture paints, and some from some push molds I made from instamold a while back (Check out the instamold in use here).
I’m not a fan of how the Green Stuff World people treat Asians, but well a product is a product.
Above you see the bases primed, and below some of the bases are in progress.
You can’t really see it, but the bases have some striations running through them (it’s probably the most obvious in the brass mesh base in the centre). This is because the terrain rolling pin itself has striations. I’m not sure why that is, if it’s a product of the construction or something. Actually, let me pull up a closer picture.
The imprint is clearest on places that it’s supposed to be ‘smooth’, like the bars of metal. Other than that though, it’s a very good product, with a white variety of different types of metal mesh (for the one that I got), allowing for many bases to look unique.
Slapping some Paint on
Ok, so what were the ways I cut corners on my minis?
- Zenithal priming
- Contrast paints
Ever since I discovered it a while back, I’ve been a convert to zenithal priming. However, I don’t think I used it very well, since I usually ended up layering on paint pretty thick after that. Recently though, my picking up contrast paints and trying out wash style techniques have resulting in me being able to leverage on the ‘pre-shading’ that zenithal highlights provide.
Above are some of the grots with the zenithal highlights on….
And below are some of the models halfway through paint. My go-to contrast paints are those that are very strong pigment wise, but still allow some level of pre-shading from the zenithal through. Specifically Talassar Blue, Blood Angels Red, Gore Grunta Brown and Iyanden/Nazdreg Yellow. These colours allow me to get the basecoat and most of the shading done in one application of contrast, which means I just do a bit of highlighting and job’s a gud’un.
For example, in the above picture, the red and brown on the grots are after one application. The blue had 1 or 2 more highlights, but that’s cos I like to spend more time on the blue.
One thing that didn’t work for me though was the Ork flesh contrast green. It works well enough as a contrast , but I’m not a fan of the super heavy saturation green on ork and grot flesh. Also, it doesn’t match my army’s skintone.
So in the end, I modified my old method, using a wash/glaze of dark olive green, highlighting back up with goblin green, and then with a mix of goblin green and fleshtone.
Final Pics
And here they are! A group of 20 grots, painted up in… maybe a week or so. It’s still insanely long, but it’s probably a damn sight faster than how I would’ve done it, and honestly I could have cut the time even shorter if I didn’t spend so much time gussying up the bases.
Hope you guys like it!
