As a quick note, I'll have to apologize for the quality of the pictures on this page. I believe that I took them just inside the focal length for my camera. As an interesting note, you can generally catch the details in much better focus in the reflective surface that they are on. The black reflective surface also cuts down on glare in some pictures, making it much easier to see!

My Eyes are bigger than my Stomach
The first tip is not to buy more than you can paint right now. It's very tempting to go out and buy the newest shiny model that GW or Forgeworld puts out. It's also expensive and it means that you have more to paint. It's also tempting to go ahead and buy all the models you'll need for your army. Again, however, it just means you have more to paint. For example, right now I have enough models assembled to play about 1000-1200pts, but only 400-ish points are painted. That's almost all the models that I own. (I do have a single Piranha that is unassembled at the moment, plus a few Drones, but that's it.) I really want to go out and buy the rest of the models for my planned army, plus a number of extra models so that I can customize it in different directions. I am currently resisting this temptation by refusing to buy new models until I have all my current ones painted. That reduces the unadorned plastic in my apartment and it gives me incentive to get my models painted, which is what I need right now.

Telephone, Telegraph, Tell a person
Another tip is to set a goal for yourself _and tell someone about it._ This is important. If you set a goal to finish your army by next month, but you don't tell anyone about it, you don't have any real consequence if you don't succeed. You just set a new goal and go on your merry way. If you tell someone about it, they'll want to know about your progress, and you'll have to face them if you don't get it done. Maybe they'll ridicule you, maybe they'll just shrug, but you'll know that they were expecting to see your finished models and that'll make you work harder to get it done, even on those days that you really don't feel like painting. By putting my models up on my website, I'm making myself accountable to you. (You'll see my goal at the end of this update, to be specific.)

Two paths diverged in the woods...
There are two methods of painting large numbers of models, we'll call them Individual and Batch painting. The concept of batch painting is the assembly-line. Much like assembling cars, if you do all of one step at a time (such as painting the blue lining on my Tau models) then you will end up taking less time overall to do it. This is because you end up streamlining your process as you do a single step repetitively and the more you do it, the faster you get at it. Once you have finished that step on all the models you are painting in this batch, then you move on to the next step. This does save time, but sometimes the lack of progress can slow you down. Basically, you end up with a bunch of half-painted models and sometimes you can feel like you aren't getting anything done. Individiual painting, on the other hand, is just what it sounds like. You finish one model more or less completely before you go on to the next. This ends up taking more time, but that feeling of accomplishment, the feeling that you are getting it done, can really give you more motivation to paint. This is the method I am planning on using with the rest of my currently assembled Tau models, to give me the motivation to finish them.

Quick and dirty painting without compromise?
One way to finish painting a model quickly is to adopt a "gaming standard" of painting. This more or less means to get the model finished to a standard that is acceptable for gaming, meaning it looks decent on the table top, or from about 3 feet away. This means you don't have to go into as much detail or be quite as perfect in your painting. Generally, this is accepted to mean 3 colors plus some highlighting or shading and having it based. There are a number of ways to accomplish this quickly. One is to use a wash of color (a watered-down ink or watered down paint) over the whole miniature, then add some additional color or touchups to complete it. This can result in a decent-looking (or better) model in a very short period of time. You can even make it look better than that by adding a "touch-up" step to adjust any imperfect flows of the wash or to even out the coloring on the main body of the model. On the other hand, since I'm trying to improve my actual painting ability, I'm loathe to do this. There is one exception, however. If I can paint the models to a "gaming standard" or just a little better without compromising my ability to come back later and make them equal my new standard, then I will accept that. To that end, these models will get 4-5 colors (White, Blue, Black, Gold and Red, respectively) and no touch-up step or matte finish yet. That will allow me to come back and do the touch-up and finish later to bring them up to my new standard, but will cut down a little of the time necessary to complete the models at the moment.

Results and Resolutions
This week I managed to paint both of my Broadsides (one of which is pictured throughout this page in it's various steps. In addition, I painted my last 4 FireWarriors and completed my 2nd assembled Piranha. I still have four Crisis Suits and some Gundrones primed but not painted, and I have a couple more Drones and another Piranha that I need to assemble and then paint. At that point, I will be able to field about 1300pts of fully painted models and I can then start buying my next set of miniatures for the army. (Probably more XV25 suits to turn into Crisis Suits.) As much as I'd like to say that I'll have all that done next week, realistically, it'll be two weeks before you see all my current models completely painted. There, I said it. I set a goal and told you all about it, so now I have to actually get it done!

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