One of my biggest pet peeves about miniature painting is the setup and tear down.
As a busy dad with a full time job, I don’t often get a lot of time to paint miniatures, and when I do I end up getting frustrated by having to get out my brushes, palettes, a cup of water, paper towels and all the little things that I need to get the job done.
With Speedpaint Markers from The Army Painter, you don’t need most of that. Just pop the top, get the paint flowing and put paint on the miniature. When you’re done, put the top back on. That’s it.
No cleanup. No mess.
After trying them for the first time, I love Speed Paint Markers. They were so easy to get out, paint and put away. I’d love to have a full set of these. I’d end up painting a whole lot more if I had them!
Something to note: These days, I’m a Contrast Paint/Speedpaint painter. Any more, I just want tabletop-ready minis. I don’t submit to competitions, and I’m not interested in incredible painted detail. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good-looking finished mini, but I love having painted minis more than I love having *perfect* painted minis.
Anyway, the three-marker Speedpaint Marker Introductory Set set gives you a great way to try out their Speedpaint Markers with three colors: Orc Skin, Blood Red and Zealot Yellow. The colors are fantastic — a deep green, red and yellow — and I love seeing them in a starter set like this because every painter is going to use those three colors often.
The Orc Skin green is actually a bit deeper than I’d probably choose for orc skin, but it had great coverage and looked fantastic. Zealot Yellow dropped a deep yellow/orange into the recesses and left a lighter orange on the highlights. Blood Red was perfect, and I loved using it on this model to add bloody details on the model.
I picked some orc models from Dungeon Classics on MyMiniFactory. I printed them in ABS-like resin on my Anycubic Photon Mono. Speedpaint is recommended to use on top of a white primer, so I hit them with a matte white primer, and we were good to go.
Of course, I only have the three markers, so I did have to get my other paints out to finish off the miniature. But I pretty quickly had a finished model ready to hit the tabletop, and I used three Speedpaint Markers for a bulk of the model. That made the process pretty fast. I was done with the whole model in about 30 minutes.
Depending on where you purchase them from, Speedpaint Markers run about $6 each. For comparison, standard dropper bottles of Speedpaint run about $5.39
I picked up the introductory set of three Speedpaint Markers for $18. The Speedpaint Marker Starter Set, which includes 10 colors, sells for about $64. (Note: The Starter Set’s 10 colors include the same three colors as the Introductory Set, so if you end up getting both, you’ll have some repeats.)
All in all, it’s well worth it for me considering the ease of the markers will help me paint more. I hope they continue to release more. Army Painter’s Speedpaint 2.0 line now contains more than 80 colors, and the more they can get into markers, the better as far as I’m concerned.
A few small things:
• Markers are obviously thicker than a skinny brush, and it’s a bit harder to access small spaces with the marker tip and the marker itself.
• The tips are fairly fine, but you probably have finer brushes. Be careful of small details and spaces.
• Both of the above are no big deal, and you can certainly come in with a fine brush (even dabbing your brush on the tip of your Speedpaint marker) to get small areas and fine details.
• There’s not a lot of paint in Speedpaint Markers. Each Speedpaint Marker has 6 ml of paint. A standard dropper bottle — including Army Painter’s Speedpaint dropper bottles — has 18 ml of paint, so you’re only getting 1/3 the amount of paint.
• Of course, there’s far less wasted paint. Every time you use a dropper bottle, you need at least a drop of paint.
I’ll definitely be picking up more when I can!
