Miniature Painting
How to Paint Miniatures Fast (Batch Painting)
The fast way to paint miniatures is to stop painting minis and start painting a batch: prime everything at once, then do one color across all twenty models before touching the next color. Add speedpaints, a drybrush, and a "three colors minimum" standard, and a weekend produces a fully painted warband that looks great on the table. Here's the assembly-line method, honestly costed in hours.
The mindset: tabletop standard is the goal
Batch painting has one enemy, and it's the idea that every goblin deserves your best work. It doesn't. Armies and monster hordes are seen at arm's length, in groups, mid-combat. The standard to hit is "looks cohesive and finished on the table," which is a much lower bar than "survives close inspection," and the difference between those two bars is about forty hours per twenty models.
Save the craft for heroes. We'll get to that.
The assembly line
The core trick is eliminating decision-making and color-swapping. Every switch between paints costs cleaning, remixing, and remembering; across twenty minis those seconds become hours. So invert the loop. Instead of "finish mini, next mini," it's "finish color, next color":
- Prep and prime everything in one session. Mold lines, wash, stick them all on corks, one spray session. Light primer or a zenithal/slap-chop base if you're using speedpaints, which for batch work you should be.
- Line the minis up and paint color one (say, all skin) on every single model. Don't evaluate, don't touch up, just move down the line.
- Color two (leather) across the line. Then color three (cloth). By now the first minis are dry, so there's no waiting either.
- Group details, then stop. Weapons, teeth, one accent color. Resist the fourth accent; nobody will see it.
- Speedpaint or wash over everything if you basecoated traditionally, or skip this if speedpaints did the shading already.
- Base all twenty at once (glue, sand, drybrush, rim). Bases sell the paint job harder than anything on the model, and they batch beautifully.
Twenty goblins this way is realistically six to nine hours of actual work: a weekend of sessions, or three paint nights. The same models painted one at a time would eat a month and, more likely, would join the gray pile of shame around mini six.
The three-color minimum (and why it works)
A model reads as "painted" when it has at least three distinct colors plus shading and a finished base. That's the whole formula. Skin, leather, cloth, a wash: done. It's why speedpaints are the batch painter's best friend; one coat delivers the color and the shading, and our speedpaint starter list covers a whole horde palette in eight bottles.
Uniformity does the rest of the work. Twenty goblins in the same four colors look like an army; twenty goblins in twenty schemes look like a yard sale. Pick the palette before you start and let repetition read as intentional.
Corners you can cut, corners you can't
Safe to cut: eyes (a dark recess reads fine), freehand, edge highlighting, layering, individual basing schemes, and any detail smaller than a fingernail. Also variety; three goblin skin tones is charming, but one is faster and nobody counts.
Don't cut: priming, thinned paint, shading of some kind (wash or speedpaint; unshaded flat colors are the true "unpainted" look), bases, and varnish. That last one hurts to lose at hour nine, and a horde that gets handled every session without varnish will show it by the third game.
Heroes get the good treatment
The classic army approach is two tiers: batch the rank-and-file at tabletop standard, then give the hero, the villain, and your own character the full single-miniature treatment. The contrast actually flatters both; the horde makes the hero pop, and the hero makes the horde look deliberate. GMs prepping a monster cabinet for weekly games live by this split.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to batch paint 20 miniatures?
Six to nine hours of work with speedpaints and the assembly-line method: one priming session, three or four color passes, details, and a basing session. Spread over a weekend or a few evenings it's very doable.
Is batch painting lower quality than painting one at a time?
Per model, slightly; per army, no. Cohesive colors and finished bases across twenty models look better on the table than five beautiful minis and fifteen gray ones. Batch standard is a choice about where the hours go.
How many minis should I batch at once?
Ten to twenty. Below ten you lose the efficiency; above twenty the repetition gets genuinely demoralizing and quality slides. Big projects go in waves of fifteen or so.
Should I use speedpaints or washes for batch painting?
Speedpaints if you're starting from a light or zenithal prime: one pass gives color and shading. Washes if you've basecoated traditional colors and want to shade everything at the end. Both are batch-friendly; speedpaints skip a whole step.
What's the fastest way to base a lot of miniatures?
Assembly-line it like the paint: glue and sand on all bases in one pass, brown paint the next, a quick drybrush the next, rims last. Texture paint is even faster if the budget allows; one thick coat does the first three steps at once.