Following on from my beginners guide to painting a single Necromunda ganger ( Painting a model in minutes: A beginner’s guide) where I tried to show how to get a tabletop soldier in as few simple steps as possible, today I’ll be doing something similar with 40k scenery.
A mate of mine runs a hobby store and needed to get a couple of tables worth of scenery ready for a event next weekend. He had 4 boxes of the new “Nachmund” kit. It’s standard sci fi stuff. Buildings, radar dishes, random machine looking bits. Nice solid terrain. However 4 boxes was too much to do on his own so he asked me if I’d take two boxes and give it a go.
After receiving the boxes at 3pm Saturday (picture next to a toddler I have lying around for scale)
This was achieved by using simple, easy to repeat steps and by using techniques that take less effort but yield good results.
Let’s go through how I did this.
What you’ll need. Black spray. Metallic spray. Optional: another colour spray - I used red. Your normal hobby paints for details. Cheap bulk black paint. Cheap bulk orange paint.
-
First i built the terrain. (This was the slowest step. Anyone have a guide on speed building!?)
-
next every part of the kit received a coat of black spray paint.
this is an important step because we save more time than any other step here. We spray black so we can use a “zenithal “ coat next.
-
zenithal coat. Here we use our first cheat. A zenithal coat is a light coat of coloured spray over a darker spray from above. The model is almost “dusted” with the new colour at an extreme angle. Like so:
The idea is that detail that sticks out catches paint and recesses remain black. It gives a quick and easy effect of lighting that would normally take a longer time dry brushing or layering.
Here is the picture above after zenithal.
See how theyare not pure red? There’s a bit of shading already on them.
I then proceeded to zenithal everything else. Some larger terrain pieces had their walls zenithal sprayed different colours to their roofs. This can be done before glueing them together for ease and to prevent one colour contaminating another (I did this on the largest platform but on the smaller hab blocks I lived dangerously,)
3.5) an optional extra. See the buildings with a blown out roof? They were hit with black spray again in order to simulate damage and burning from an explosion.
- now we add detail to the models. I do not pick out every single detail. Every wall gets a few pipes or a sign or something picked out in a different colour to the wall.The roofs get more attention , with every detail picked out. This is simply because when playing , you stand at such a high elevation that it’s actually more important that roofs as opposed to walls look best.
Hazard stripes are not an optional step. The 41st millennium is hazardous. You need hazard stripes.
Now honestly - you could call this done at this stage. You have shaded walls and details. You’re ready to play. But the next step is quick, easy and makes the whole thing feel less Technicolor and more “lived in”
- shading and rust
Now anyone who has painted minis or followed my beginners guide to painting a model, knows that aggrax is liquid gold. It is however expensive when being used to shade a model as big as a building. Guys like @Reaver can make their own washes and save some imperial credits that way, but for what we are doing today a simple paint and water mixwill do the job.
So we will use a cheap black paint and lots of water. We mix them until we have a runny water like consistency. We then Cover every single model. I then use a paper towel afterwards and clean wash off of anything that I wish to remain bright (mostly the detail that sticks the furthest from the building such as large struts.
After this the models look old and grimy.
Next we mix bright orange paint with water into a very watery consistency. We then dab this whenever we want rust. We aren’t careful and we let it splash and run wherever it wants.
Question: Why do we not use watery paint instead of expensive washes all the time then?
Answer:
Tide marks. A reason people use proper washes and not watered down paint on miniatures is something called tide marks. Paint medium behaves slightly different to water and let’s the pigment settle in the recesses well. Water does this but has a habit of leaving line like stains around where it was splashed. If you were doing a wash on a characters face or clothes this would look wrong. That’s why we use proper washes. However on a building like this the tide marks are totally fine. The washes represent grime and rust. The tide marks are actually consistent with what you’d expect to see on a dirt, grime and the results of rusty water pooling.
After this step is dry, the models are finished!
Here they are:
And there we have it. A tables worth of scenery painted in in 24 hours (much of which was spent sleeping!)
Any questions about these techniques , just ask. A lot of it is considered very basic beginner techniques but if nobody ever shows us, how do we know them right? These buildings are totally tabletop standard. They are not masterpieces.
But at the end of the day the scenery is there to make your army look good, not the other way around.
Here’s the set now on display at my mates shop:
could easily fool people and say this was airbrushed.
