Tutorial: Speed Painting Daemons for Quality Part 1

TJ here with a tutorial that is geared toward not just Speedpainting Daemons (or anything else really fleshy), but speedpainting for quality. A lot of people see speedpainting and immediately just think "Crap" but it doesn't have to be that way. Recently, I painted up 40 daemons (20 plague bearers and 20 Horrors) and I did it all at once and it took 8 hours total. I paint for two hours a night, so it really took me less than a work week and less than i usually spend on a deamon prince, but the look is above what many call a table top standard and fits in nicely with my army on the whole, so let's take a look:

If you are looking for pics of the final product, please see my post on the 20 horrors I recently painted.

Like any paintjob, everything depends on that first layer you put down: The primer. For the flesh color that I desire in the end-product, I need a ruddy brown/red primer to be the anchor to this whole look.

For that, I use Krylon Color Master Red Oxide Primer, though I think the Valspar equivilent would likely work just as well, but it is lighter.

With the primer dry, I then wash the entire model in Leviathan Purple (or whatever the purple shade color is now). Once the washes dry, you will be ready to dry brush. The first dry brush layer you will add is Pink Horror, which you will dry brush liberally onto the model, brushing from the top down and also side to side, leaving very little pure red showing.

Next you will dry brush each model, brushing from the top down with Cadian Fleshtone, keep that brush dry, you want some of that pink undertone to be visible.

Speaking of Dry Brushing. One of the reasons I can paint so fast is that I start with the biggest brush first. Each one of these models takes me seconds when I use the brush. Now, I will say that I inherited a ton of old GW brushes back in the day, so the only size I have for this brush is "Tank Brush" which is about as big around as my pinky. I use the napkins to absorb most of my paint before I drybrush. I joke with my wife about painting napkins whenever I drybrush.

Next, you are going to dry brush Elf Flesh onto the models, moving the brush in motions from the top down. You will want the brush to be dry as you are really looking to start picking out highlights at this stage.

Here is a look at what some of the details will look like at this stage.

Next, you are going to add one final dry brush layer (still using the HUGE BRUSH) of Ushabti Bone or P3 Menoth will work as well. You want to go lighter than ever here as you are looking to only pick out the details like cheekbones ect.

Now that we have the messy drybrushing out of the way, we can start looking at bases. If you are rocking maggot bases, then Graveyard earth needs to be heavily applied to get all the little nooks and crannies on these models.

For the base work, I step down a brush size, so I am not getting the base colors all over my nice drybrush work.

For the horrors (and most traditional bases), you can just paint them all Dawnstone (or with the dollar store equivilent as I did).

That is where I leave off for now. Hopefully, this has given you a start in the right direction. I will continue through part three as the week goes on and hopefully, this will motivate some people to get some stuff off the shelf and painted on the table!