Assembly Line Painting: Blighted Legionnaires, Farilor and Standard

Our monthly Warmachine painting challenge beckoned this week. 10 points of figures (give or take) every month for a year. Who knew this would be such a grind!

Anyway, this month I decided to knock out an infantry unit...and it was a good opportunity to discuss the topic of assembly line painting. My models are the Blighted Legionnaires for Everblight, along with the officer and banner attachment. 

Here was everything before assembly started.

Most Warmachine and Hordes units are good candidates for assembly line painting. They most often wear the same gear, are armed the same way, and just have a few different poses. I particularly like the Legionnaires for the assembly line method, because they carry so much metal armour. That makes everything pretty quick to paint.

So the main idea behind assembly line painting is that you have a number of similar figures (in this case, 12), and every time you sit down to paint, you do one similar pass on each model. These particular models would require about 14 steps to finish...so that's a good two weeks of painting assuming a half-hour painting session every day. A steady pace, but not strenuous.

As usual, I started with assembly and basing. Then everything got shot with white primer.

Next came the obligatory dark wash to pre-shade the models and pop out all the details.

So, down to painting. Working from the inside out, the scale mail and other "golden" armour areas got a thin coat of P3 Blighted Gold. This is a dark greenish gold, similar to bronze, which can be dry brushed into a very interesting metal colour.

The bronzy areas got a drybrush of Vellejo Old Gold.

And a final highlight drybrush of P3 Radiant Platinum. The end result is kind of a shimmering bronze.

Next came the steel areas...thankfully, lots of that on these models. I started with a watered down coat of Reaper Shadowed Steel applied, as always, to all the models in the unit. It has kind of a bluish tinge, which I thought would contrast well with the bronze scale mail.

Then the steel was given a wash of Umber and Blue, mixed together. This darkens the metal, and increased the blue coloration.

In the next painting session, I did a GW Chainmail drybrush pass on all the steel areas. This lightens up the steel and gives it a dull sheen.

In the next assembly line session I moved onto the leather skirts worn by each figure. I started with a thin coat of Reaper Ruddy Leather.

The next two passes were Oiled Leather and Burnt Orange. This was straight layering...I wasn't going to get bogged down in blending all the colours here. In assembly line painting, the goal is to get out a unit of well (not professionally) painted figures in a reasonable amount of time. The next step would serve as my blending pass.

The leather areas were then given a thin coat of Umber wash. I did this to help blend the layers together and unify the look of the skirts.

I was going to move onto the skirt fringes next, so it was time to do the bases, so that the fringe wouldn't get ruined later. Basing was standard brown, orange and off-white. The circular plastic bases were painted with a few thin layers of black.

OK, on to the leafy fringe. I know that this is not the usual colour scheme for Legion. In the studio scheme, the parts I'm picking out as leaves, Privateer Press calls out as black feathers. Well, all my Legion of Everblight models are done in a jungle scheme...so leaves it is. I used a progression of Reaper Pine Green, Leaf Green and Pale Green.

Once this was done on all the models, everything got a blast of Testors Dullcoat, and then the bases were finished off with static grass.

And that was it. Two weeks of step-by-step steady painting, and this unit came off the assembly line.

'Til next time.