Speed Painting Blindwater Congregation – Part 1: Gators

When our club was starting up a Journeyman league last year, I decided I wanted another army that was quick to paint that I could churn out easily.

I’d been painting my clean looking Retribution and I needed a change.

I settled on Blindwater Congregation.  The gators are easy to paint and they don’t have many different models, so I could easily get most of the range done easily.

I switched to speed painting mode, which is a skill in it’s own right.  Want to know how to quickly paint your gators?  Look no further!

The key to speed painting in a way that will look decent on the table is blocking out your colors across the whole army to look the same and then churning through the whole thing in big batches.

If you look at the studio gators, they have a variety of different colors.  Thrullgs are purple, Ironback Spitters are orange, Swamp Horrors are bluish, Croaks are yellowish, Bog Trogs are sort of skin-toned, and obviously gators are green.  That is too much variety to speed paint properly.  There’s no reason that these units except gators can’t be the same color.  Doing this will also give your army a more coherent feel.

I ended up deciding on a purple theme, but darker than the Thrullgs.  I’ll be showing how I did them in part 2.  Part 1 is about the gators in all their greenness.

So when looking at the models, we have a couple of distinct blocks on the model to paint.  They are:

• Skin(many gator models have different bellies and backs, but that’s too much effort)
• Leather
• Metal
• Skulls
• Rope
• Feathers
• Claws and Teeth
• Wood
• Tongues

We can combine some of these into like colors

• Skin – Green
• Metal – Dirty silver
• Leather and Wood – Brown
• Skulls, Rope, feathers, Claws and Teeth – Khaki
• Tongues

That tones it down a little bit.

Step 1 – Skin

First we basecoat all the skin with a dark green.  I used Dark Angels green.  For this whole step, we don’t really care if we get on the other areas of the model since we’ll be painting over them next.

Next, we heavily drybrush the area with a second stage of green, for me it was Camo Green.

 

 

Next we add a light drybrush of a very light color.  These were done with Rotting Flesh.

 

This will now have a lot of depth, but have that typical drybrushing messiness.  To fix that quickly, we’ll give it a nice wash.  I used green with a little bit of brown and black added to dirty and darken it up.  If using Games Workshop washes, you can use Biel-Tan Green, Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil.  Otherwise, you can make your own with the guide I did here.

 

 

Part 2 – Metal

Now we’re going to use the same principle of basecoating with some drybrushing followed by a wash to keep it simple.  But we’ve planned it out in such a way that everything other than the skin can use one wash to save us some time.

First we basecoat the areas with Tin Bitz.  You can use a dark brown instead as well.

 

Finally, Drybrush with a dark silver, like Boltgun Metal.  This will keep it looking dirty.  For this and any further drybrushing, use a small drybrush and be careful not to get it on the already done areas.

 

Part 3 – Leather and Wood

These are the brown areas.  Since they’re usually separated, it’s not that big a deal that they’re the same color.  Basecoat with a dark brown like Scorched Brown.

 

Then drybrush with a lighter brown.  I used Snakebite Leather.

 

Part 4 – Bones, Feathers, Rope, Teeth and Claws

They’re almost looking like painted models now.  These parts are all a little different but they’re all vaguely the same color.  Basecoat them with a khaki color.  I used Commando Khaki.

 

This will look a little flat, but all of the areas are small and detailed, so the wash will make these look nice.

Part 5 – Tounges

I’m not actually sure if red is the right color, but it works.  Paint the tongues and gums red.  I used Blood Red.  I had to do number of coats to make the color solid.

 

So everything now has some paint on it, but it’s looking a little flat.  Just one last step.

Part 6 – Final Wash

Do a wash of mixed black and brown on everything but the skin.  Same wash colors as we used on the skin but without the green.

 

Boom!  Finished gators and fast.

How you want to finish the bases is up to you but I did sand painted brown with drybrushes of Bubonic Brown and then Bleached Bone and added some static grass.

You’ll also want to spray with a coat of matte varnish as the washes can be a little shiny.

 

Next, I’ll be adding part 2, where we do all the non-gators.  You can even see some of them in the picture above.

If you have any questions or other models you want some speed painting tutorials on, just let me know.

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