Painting to a great tabletop standard.You can do it!!

Painting can be a daunting process. Especially if your a new player or have some sort of deadline( upcoming tourney, pending commission, OCD). To help new painters or anybody else who needs some tips and tricks, I've decided to write a series of painting articles. My first post will be about painting quickly and effectively. To showcase some of my own techniques for getting the job done, I've got a recently finished commission and my own blood angel tactical marine( scroll to the bottom to see why he is absent). For myself, when thinking out how I'm going to paint a model, I think upon this: how can I reduce the steps involved in the paint process? In my latest commission, this revolved around creating a paint scheme that relied largely upon one base coat. In this case, a blue base coat(via rattle can) with a scaly green drybrush, forming the the foundation for my Tau paint scheme. This cut down on my painting time immensely. So, tip #1 pick a primary color and apply it in as few steps as possible( buy it in a rattle can or use an airbrush). Additionally, use that color as much as possible. This may seem odd as the model may get boring but perhaps an example can show case this better:

I used my base coat across the entirety of both models, and then applied a new technique I like to call: conservation of colors. Which involves conserving...color's, to this end I decided to use hawk turquoise as the highlight for primary color. Then I also used this color to break up the model and make it look more interesting( conserving my colors). This brings me nicely to tip #2: make it interesting with a secondary color.

Thus, I chose to make some panels on the models hawk turquoise and also began to think about how to highlight this new color. Leading me to decide that this  new highlight color would do double duty: it will become my accenting color. So I chose to highlight with green, Mainly because I love green and it generally works well with any paint scheme, I also love bright colors on xenos models...snot green and scorpion green sufficed nicely to meet this end.

Now this brings me to tip #3, extreme highlights are your friend.  Seriously!! Good clean extreme high lights make a model really pop, especially on models with a lot of flat area's. Plus they are pretty easy to do with a little practice, if you wash then perform an extreme highlight you add a ton of depth with only a few steps!

Now onto a model of my own, a blood angel tactical marine with plasma gun. Well actually, I think I'll save him for another post...stay tuned!!In fact there will be a step-by-step for..How to paint a Blood Angel!