Speed Painting an Army: Contrast Paints and Drybrushing for Resin Minis
You printed 40 minis. Now what? The zenithal prime to contrast paint to drybrush workflow gets a full army to tabletop quality in hours, not weeks. Real batch sequencing, real time estimates.
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You printed the warband. All 40 of them. The plate is full of cleaned, cured models and you are standing there looking at a small army that would take months to paint model-by-model to any kind of finished standard. The math is bad: 40 minis at 2 hours each is 80 hours of painting. That’s 10 full weekends.
There’s a faster path that doesn’t produce garbage-quality results. Zenithal prime the batch, apply contrast paints in assembly-line passes, drybrush twice, pick out the details on the front rank, call them done. Six to eight hours of actual painting work, two to three sessions spread over a week. Tabletop quality across the whole unit. Not showcase quality (you’re not painting your army centerpiece) but fully painted, visually coherent, looks good at arm’s length across a table.
This is the workflow.
Why Assembly-Line Sequencing Works
The instinct is to finish one miniature before moving to the next. That instinct is wrong for batch painting.
Every color change costs time: you’re cleaning the brush, switching pots, assessing the new color on the model, adjusting consistency. If you paint 40 minis model-by-model, you’re doing every color change 40 times. If you paint assembly-line style (armor on all 40, then cloth on all 40, then skin on all 40) you’re doing each color change once, with 40 models painted in that color before you switch.
The time savings are real. A color change that takes 2 minutes costs 80 minutes total if you do it 40 times. Amortized across 40 models in one pass, the same 2 minutes costs 2 minutes. For a unit with 6 distinct color zones, that’s 10+ hours of switching cost eliminated.
The Setup: Before You Touch Primer
Before priming, get the whole batch mounted and photographed. Reference shots of the model before primer make color scheme decisions easier: you can plan where the armor goes vs. the cloth vs. the skin without squinting at a black-primed model.
Get your painting handles set up. Cork, painting sticks, or dedicated handles: anything that lets you hold the model without touching it. You’ll be handling 40 minis repeatedly across multiple sessions.
Choose your color scheme before you prime. Four decisions: armor color, cloth/fabric color, skin tone, and secondary accent color (leather, metal, etc.). Write them down. Consistency across 40 models is what makes a unit look like a unit.
Session 1: Zenithal Prime
Prime the whole batch in one session. Black from all angles, gray at 45 degrees, white from directly above. The zenithal technique is covered fully in the zenithal priming guide: if this is your first time, read that first.
Active work time: 30-45 minutes for 40 infantry-scale models. Cure time before painting: 6-8 hours minimum. Overnight is better.
The zenithal prime does three things for batch painting. First, it establishes the lighting on every model before a single pot is opened. Second, it makes contrast paints look dramatically better: instead of pooling on a flat surface, the contrast medium is working with existing tonal information. Third, it cuts the number of highlight layers you need to apply manually, because the lighting is already embedded in the primer.
Session 2: Contrast Passes
This is the main painting session. You’re going color zone by color zone across the whole batch, not model by model.
Set up a wet palette with your 4-6 contrast colors. A simple wet palette keeps contrast medium from skinning over between models, which matters when you’re painting 40 minis with a single color and the first models are drying while you’re still on the last ones.
Armor on all 40: Pick up Citadel Contrast in your armor color. Paint every armored surface on every model in the batch. Don’t move to the next zone until all 40 have armor color. This takes 15-25 minutes depending on how elaborate the armor is and how quickly you work. Don’t agonize. Contrast does the shading work; your job is coverage.
Let the armor layer set for 15-20 minutes before moving to cloth.
Cloth on all 40: Same approach. Paint every fabric surface (robes, tabards, cloaks, sleeves) on every model before moving on.
Skin on all 40: Skin tones in the Citadel Contrast range (Darkoath Flesh, Guilliman Flesh) or Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 equivalents. Apply to every face, hand, and exposed skin area across the batch.
Accent colors: Leather straps, bags, belts in brown. Metallics (paint these traditionally, as contrast metallics work but standard metallics are faster for batch work). Wooden weapons.
Session 2 active time: 2-4 hours depending on color complexity and batch size.
Session 3: Drybrushing
Wait until all the contrast passes are fully dry. Contrast needs to be fully set before drybrushing: if the medium is still active, the dry brush will drag and streak it. A full 24 hours after the last contrast layer is safe. An hour is usually fine for the armor; give skin tones and cloth more time.
First drybrush pass (mid-tone highlights): Load a stiff drybrushing brush with a highlight color slightly lighter than your armor base: if the armor is dark gray, use mid gray; if it’s brown, use tan. Wipe the brush until nearly nothing comes off on a paper towel. Drybrush lightly across all raised surfaces on every model. Rotate through all 40 before reloading the brush. This pass takes 20-30 minutes for the batch.
The drybrushing guide for resin covers the specific adjustments for resin surfaces: go drier than you would on plastic, and the result on sharp geometric edges is actually cleaner.
Second drybrush pass (edge highlights): Mix your highlight color with a small amount of white. Load the brush very lightly. Apply only to the very topmost raised surfaces: armor peaks, helmet crowns, the very highest fold points on cloth. This is a fast pass, 10-15 minutes. It’s the step that makes the batch look finished.
Session 4 (Optional): Detail Passes
For a fully painted army, the contrast-plus-drybrush result is genuinely tabletop ready at this point. If you want to push the front rank further:
Eyes: A dot of white, a smaller dot of color, an even smaller dot of black. 2 minutes per model that gets this treatment. Skip the back rank if you want.
Metal edge highlights: Draw a thin line of bright metallic along sword edges and axe blades. 1-2 minutes per model.
Bases: Paint bases with texture paste or PVA-and-sand in a batch, paint the whole batch of bases in one color, drybrush the batch of bases, add tufts. Batch the bases just like you batched the minis.
What “Tabletop Quality” Actually Means
Tabletop quality means the model looks painted when viewed at arm’s length during a game. It means the major color zones are clear, the lighting reads correctly, and the models look like a coherent visual unit. It does not mean every detail is picked out, every face has realistic skin rendering, or every armor plate has layered highlights.
This workflow produces tabletop quality reliably. A unit of 40 minis painted this way looks better at the game table than 5 showcase-quality minis surrounded by 35 bare primer. A fully painted army, even at tabletop standard, reads better than a half-painted one at any quality level.
When the army is done and you want to work on individual showcase pieces (heroes, monsters, centerpiece characters) the wet blending and NMM guide is the next step up in technique complexity.
Products Referenced
- Citadel Contrast Paints starter set
- Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 starter set
- Army Painter Dry Brush Set
- Masterson Sta-Wet Premier Palette (wet palette)
- Tamiya Fine Surface Primer (Black): for zenithal base coat; covered in the zenithal priming guide