Another useful Speedpaint video

 

More useful tips on using Army Painter Speedpaints to get great effects, interesting to think about using them more like oils with blending than conventional acrylics. Thanks to Dana Howl for keeping on with these great tips.

Army Painter Speedpaints

 Speedpaints are the Army Painter's response to GW's Contrast paints where the idea is that a single specially formulated paint allows a base coat, shade and highlight effect to be achieved in one application. There has been some controversy about the reactivation effect where overpainting or highlighting causes the speedpaint to bleed in with any water based paint or glaze. This video shows how to get around it and to use reactivation to produce highlighting effects.

Overall I have found that Speedpaints are great for bulk paining armies, which is what they are intended for, but they reward painting that keeps colours in the areas they are meant to be in as they are quite translucent so anything under one can show through. 

Here are some trial pieces I've been working on.

Alternative Armies Sidhe (Celtic Elves) - using Crusader Flesh and Dark Wood. The flesh definitely works better over a flat white undercoat than something else I tried which was a pseudo-zenithal approach with a grey basecoat (AP Uniform Grey) with a white drybrush that I tried with the witches. I think next time I use Dark Wood I'll thin it with some medium as otherwise I find it a bit strong.

Frostgrave Witches made from the plastic set and Reaper Owl familiar. Crusader Flesh, Grim Black, Dark Wood, and Gravelord Grey used so far. I used my pseudo-zenithal technique on these but in future I'll use a plain white finish on skin areas. 

Skeletons from Mantic and Oathmark in Pallid Bone, Dark Wood and Gravelord Grey. Reaper bones troll done with pseudo-zenithal and Orc Skin. I'm pretty happy with these particularly the troll.

Painting Progress October 2022 and Song of Arthur and Merlin plans

 Some figures that I got finished this month mainly for Five Parsecs from Home and Stargrave, with one marker for Silver Bayonet/ROSD. These were largely painted with The Army Painter Speedpaints, where I've found that that it really is critical to get a smooth finish on the undercoat as otherwise the paint tends to clump around any spots.

 

For the Culwych and Olwen campaign I needed a giant which was not something I had in my collection, so I went with Reaper Bones for a Stone Giant, Cave Troll and Basilisk to give me a bigger set of large monsters to work with.

More painting progress and plans for OcTrollber painting

 Finally finished my first set of the walls and barricades I bought from Alternative Armies in the very good value pack, each type of construction comes with 12 40mm lengths, so suitable for DBA or HotT in 15mm or other miniatures games. 

 

These stone walls could be used easily with either 28mm or 15mm obviously representing a much more formidable barrier in 15mm. The following photo shows a 18mm HoF Security Force Alpha officer and a 28mm King Fernando of the Dark Elves from Flintloque for scale purposes.

 

A lot of people use October as Orktober, but not having any orcs in my painting queue, I'll be working on these Reaper Bones monsters including a troll, meaning I can make it OcTrollber.

I am also tempted to pick up some of the old Asgard Miniatures trolls that Alternative Armies have recently released and paint them too.