Pistol Wraith in 75 Minutes

I'm leaving for GenCon in two days...and at the last minute I decided I wanted to bring along an extra Pistol Wraith for my Deneghra list. Sounded like an opportunity to post a tutorial about speed painting a good table-top quality piece.

I started with the one-piece model based, primed and inked. OK, start the clock.

Blocking out base colors. 30 minutes.

Fast painting calls for a few bold choices. I decided to contrast dark blue with orange-red to help make this simply-painted figure stand out. All base colors are shown here. The inner skirts are Cryx Bane. Main coat is Storm Blue. Scarf and sash are orange-red. Cuffs are leather. Skull and hands are bone. Pistols are wood and steel.

Inner skirts. 5 minutes.

Starting on the Cryx Bane Base, I did a quick highlight with Bastion Grey and then edging with Cryx Highlight.

Coat. 15 minutes.

I spent the most time on highlighting the coat, as this constitutes the majority of the figure. I generally wet-blended up to the highlight color and back down the the base shadows.

The shades and highlights of the coat are fairly subdued, but this helps represent a very matt finish like wool.

Sash and scarf. 5 minutes.

I used P3 paints for the reds, as their pigmentation is quite dense. Their coverage is good. Since this was an exercise in fast painting, I didn't want to waste time with building up multiple coats of red, which would have been the case if I'd gone with a paint like Reaper.

Leather cuffs. 5 minutes.

I used some Vallejo paints for the cuffs. The tones were probably not the best choice (too muted), but I was rushing through and didn't spend a lot of time dilly-dallying over choosing the best leather color.

Guns. 5 minutes.

There were only two colors required for the guns, and the equipment was quite small. Pretty fast to paint up.

Bone. 5 minutes.

I used a wet-brushing technique for the head and hands. Wet-brushing is like drybrushing, but using damp, thin paint.

Base. 5 minutes.

This is a very simple base with a couple of stones and some static grass. The drybrushing goes very quick, and the paint dries so fast, you can move straight on to the static grass.

All tolled, 75 minutes of painting. Adding in a little drying time between stages and a few minutes for a coat of matt spray to dry on the figure, this Pistol Wraith still comes in at under 1.5 hours from start to finish. Just enough time to listen to a Warmachine podcast (today I listened to an episode of Road to War, from the guys in Texas).

Now I'm off to GenCon, and I hope to post from there. If you are at GenCon, look for the tall fellow in glasses toting around the Cryx bag...that would be me. Stop and say hello!

'Til next time.