One Nerdy Dad's speed-painting guide helps armies get table-ready faster

Undercoat every model, then lay in base colors across the whole unit before moving on to shading, highlighting, and details. One Nerdy Dad’s speed-painting guide treats miniature painting like a production line: decide what matters at gaming distance, repeat it in batches, and save the fine work for the places that will actually read across the table.

Painting spans both display pieces and gaming armies. When the goal is to turn grey plastic into a playable force, the right workflow is not about rushing, it is about making dozens of decisions once instead of fifty times.

Start with the unit, not the single model

The central move is batch painting: complete one stage across an entire group before moving to the next. That means undercoating every model, then doing base colors across the batch, then shading, highlighting, and detailing in separate passes. It is a simple shift in order, but it changes the job from finishing one miniature at a time to managing a small production line.

Batch size matters just as much as sequence. For more complex schemes, 5 to 10 miniatures is a sensible working group. For very simple three-color armies, 15 to 20 can be realistic. Warhammer Community shows painters working in groups of five or splitting larger units into smaller sub-batches. Tyler Mengel paints zombie models in groups of five and then narrows down to smaller batches of two to keep momentum alive while still adding individuality.

In Warhammer Community’s Leviathan batch-painting coverage, a group moves stage by stage to avoid the dead time that comes from waiting around for paint to dry: while one group dries, another group gets its next pass.

Use paints that do more than one job

Speed painting works best when the paint itself carries some of the load. Contrast-style paints and similar one-coat systems are built for that, because they can basecoat, shade, and sometimes even handle layering in a single application. Vincent Knotley said Contrast can combine basecoating, shading, and in some cases layering into one or two coats, which leaves more time for highlighting and experimentation. Emma Robinson described Contrast as making armies faster than ever to paint.

Games Workshop launched the Contrast range in 2019 and said it had “revolutionised miniatures painting.” In its 2022 expansion, Warhammer Community listed 25 new Contrast paints, seven reformulated Shades, and a new bright white spray primer. Army Painter markets its Speedpaint line as a one-coat solution and later expanded it to include metallics.

Zenithal priming slots neatly into that system. A bright undercoat, usually built from a dark base and a light spray from above, gives translucent speed paints instant contrast to cling to and makes the army easier to read from arm’s length across a table.

Keep the decision tree small

Another big efficiency rule is to limit the number of active colors. That sounds almost boring until you are three hours into a unit and every extra color choice becomes another small tax on attention. By keeping the palette tight, you reduce decision fatigue and keep the brush moving.

That is why the familiar hobby stages still matter: undercoating, base colors, shading, highlighting, and detailing give the process a shape. The painter is not making a fresh creative call on every figure. Instead, the decisions happen once, before the batch begins, and then the entire unit gets the same treatment with only minor adjustments for eyes, weapons, insignia, or other focal points.

A wet palette helps the whole system hold together. It keeps acrylic paints workable for hours, sometimes days, which means a batch can stay open long enough to finish a long session without paint turning on you. Paired with a little prep, setting out tools, thinning paints ahead of time, and arranging colors before the first model is touched, it keeps the work flowing from one step to the next with fewer interruptions.

Paint for momentum, not perfection

One Nerdy Dad says a good workflow can cut completion time by 60 to 80 percent while still delivering tabletop standards that look cohesive and intentional. That is a huge difference when the army is for a game night, a league round, or an event that is closer than the stack of primed models suggests.

Warhammer Community splits painters into two types, “Last Minute Painters” and “Plan and Paint Painters,” and One Nerdy Dad’s approach belongs squarely with the first group without treating that as a flaw. It is built for the hobbyist staring down a backlog, a deadline, or an unfinished unit that needs to stop being a project and start being an army. That keeps consistency and momentum intact across batches of ten, twenty, or seventy-two models at once.