Druchii.net

Hey folks,

I have somewhere in the region of 80 warriors mostly on sprue with 10 built as repeater crossbow warriors.

Any tips on the best way to speed paint through them all? I'm not gonna try to paint them to a professional level or anything, closer to what you'd see in the 6th edition army book. Specifically the silver/purple that seemed to be standard for back then. Also does anyone know if the shield iconography for the older warriors means anything (The mask, snake and bat-skull)? I reckon they must be heraldry for different cities or something...

I'm also wondering what the best build would be for them (at least as far as a collection is concerned), but I think I've already settled in my mind on two 16-man spearman units with shields and the rest as repeater crossbowmen.

I have access to an airbrush and a load of vallejo paints, but would for sure be open to picking up new paints to do this. Any suggestions at all is appreciated!

Here is some resource for DE heraldry: http://www.druchii.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=76616

Of course, you can paint them as complicated as you like, but generally they seem pretty straightforward to paint and you should be able to get a decent result speed painting them.

I don't know about the level of your paint skills, but silver drybursh over black undercoat and then adding some skin tones over their faces and some colour to your liking to their tunics should be the simplest way to go.
Paint the shields seperately and glue them on after painting the rest.

If these are 6th edition models, then they do paint rapidly. The last batch I painted, I did glue the spears on, but the shield arm and shield was done separately. That makes it much easier to paint them quickly but then you have the gruesome task of having to paint the shield+arm afterwards

It's worth giving the torso armour a bit of extra attention, but if you paint it in metallic, perhaps a drybrush over black with a wash and an edge highlight might give a good result. It all depends on the standard you want to work towards.

When painting a large unit like that, an old trick we used back in the day was to keep the troopers simple. If extra flair is desired, give it to the command group only. In the end, part of the aesthetic is made by the unit as a whole and not the models individually.