In our store’s Journeyman league, I’ve started the Blindwater Congregation army I had intended to start last journeyman league. I chose the gators because I thought that they would be easy to speed paint and thus win the hobby award for the league. Additionally, it’s nice to have a painted army.
I can paint well but all too often, it becomes too burdensome to paint an entire army to that standard. I have some side armies which I intend to take my tie with as I only want to paint a small, 25-35 point army of and probably not play very often. So sometimes, you just want to bang an army out to be able to play with it fully painted and not stress out. Enter the gators. The models are perfect to be speed painted with all their texture as opposed to flat armor plates. I’ll talk a little bit about my plan and show some pictures of the first batch.
The Congregation has quite a few different creatures. Obviously the gators, but also croaks, swamp horrors, ironback spitters, thrullgs, bone swarms, bog trogs and gobbers.
One of the keys to speed painting an entire army is batch painting. It’s hard to batch paint if you have 5 different schemes to paint. Obviously the gators are all similar but I had to coordinate the rest of the gang.
In the studio scheme, Croaks are green-yellow, spitters are orange with brown plates, thrullgs are purple, swamp horrors are blue, trogs are yellowish. Not gonna fly. The green-yellow is a little too close to the gators, orange would not be fast. Blue and purple both work, but I’m liking the idea of the purple. It’ll work on everybody.
I’ll go over this in a little more detail when I do my guide but basically everything I do is basecoat=>drybrush=>ink wash. Where possible, I try to wash multiple parts all at once. Here’s the rundown of all the different colors that happen.
- Gator skin: Green
- ‘Others’ skin: Purple
- ‘Others’ plating: Gray-brown
- Leather: Brown
- Teeth, bone, cloth, rope: khaki
- Tounges: Red
- Metal: Tin/Silver
That basically covers every part of every model. I batch do the skins of everyone which is the most prevalent and then pick out all the details. Boom! In my first batch I completed Barnabas, Spitter, Wrastler, Snapper, Posse, Croak. I have a ton more gators for batch 2 after I did my proof on concept. I hope to have every gator model painted by the end of the league including a number of duplicates that are necessary. Check out some pictures of the test batch.
Eclectic Gamer 