The Slapchop Technique! The Best way to Paint Miniatures Fast?

for years painting has been a fog to me difficult to see through and impossible to grasp in my hands and then i took a journey i learned from the painting masters in a monastery on a mountain in turkey and it's there under their tutelage i learned a technique which i will share with you today the slap chop hi i'm rob from the honest wargamer you're gonna love my paints [Music] getting an army on the tabletop really has two competing factors it's how long it takes us to produce versus how viable it is as an army we really want our army to look great and sometimes this takes a very long time we also want our army to be good and unfortunately sometimes armies only really have a window of time in which they're viable to play you can of course play your army that isn't particularly good that's fine but most people when they're at a tournament want something that will work well and give them a great opportunity to play good solid games against their opponents and so the production matter of producing these armies as well as obviously wanting your miniatures to look beautiful compete with each other and this is a problem which the slap drop will solve the basics of slap chopping are very easy start by undercoating your model with a black primer then dry brush a light gray over the top then on the edges of your model you dry brush white then add all those beautiful contrast paints all over your mini to pick out the details then you stick it on a spinny plinth and you impress all of your friends with all your extra time it's time to take yourself out for a nice relaxing coffee so to show that tournament gamers really do struggle to get their miniatures on the tabletop for tournaments i took to twitter so i could show you some great examples of people preparing their armies the evening before events this is will showing me a picture of john painting from his car outside of warhammer world the morning of the event kieran responded with what was a mysterious tweet referencing a picture on a train and then mo the founder of age of sigmar and one of the most gorgeous men in all the world responded here you see three war gamers painting and drinking some beers on a train on the way to an event the fourth member of this picture however is not a war gamer and is in fact just watching these people with what is the most amused face i think i've ever seen i also had a wonderful response from tyler russo who runs the youtube channel billion dollar clown farm which you should subscribe to uh it's currently 2 30 a.m still have to paint all of these it is thursday night technically friday morning now we're waking up uh in six hours the model we're going to paint today is king scraggle from artisan guild it's a 3d print it costs about three pounds in english money and resin to print and i printed it myself i really like artisan guild's designs they look very much like world of warcraft models i'll be painting with games workshops contrast paint now i personally think these are fantastic i've not sponsored or in any way get anything free from games workshop in fact the honest war game is completely crowdfunded we have a patreon which it would be cool if you could join and we don't get anything for free off anyone ever so everything you ever see reviewed by us is independent and free of advertising there are loads of great other videos about contrast paints and similar paints online we really like epic duck studios test bench video that you can see here where mike goes through all of the different contrast paints and how they look on models and if you don't want to pick up contrast paint and want to try something else you can go watch reviews on youtube like the one from google town hobbies where he looks at army painters speed paints i think one of the best resources though about paints that you can do over dry brush miniatures is this review from garfie at the tale of painters it's very comprehensive it goes into paint ranges that i didn't even know existed i'll include a link to all of these pieces of content in the video description below now you know what the slap job is let me show you the technique in action so the first color we need in our tutorial is gray this is vallejo grey it's a light gray and it works really well if you wanted to do you could multiple tones of grey but give it a good shake get it on your wet palate there you go get loads on secure that lid get ready to slap chop introducing my dry brushes this is my medium dry brush yeah it's quite small i guess for a dry brush compared to the other dry brushes i own i've got quite a hefty dry brush which i quite like to use this is my medium dry brush it's good it's from artist opus it's fine you could use it it's there you go it's got a really nice tip very fluffy this is one that's just from a makeup that i stole from my girlfriend's house really nice also works literally as well i just wanted people to think i was cool so i had an artist artist one here's a larger one as i talked about um i've also got some of the smaller ones so you can have a smaller one too basically big one if you're doing a big model medium one if you're doing a medium model small one if you're doing a small model it's really that simple just look at a model and say to yourself wonder what size it is and that's what dry brush to use getting paint off your dry brush this is actually really really important so get yourself a nice paper towel put paint all around your brush in the middle and on the sides so rotate it in the paint then you want to start drying the brush you want to get your wets dry and your dries wet now it's important not to touch the same area so there you go you can see i'm moving it around the paper towel making it dry that's right that's what you want to do don't do it over the same area or you get paper inside your brush and eventually that'll get on your model and that's a huge mistake there you can see it's nice and dry now do a thing that lots of painters do is just rub it on your hand so people know you paint stuff that way when you go to like a warhammer world or something people know that you're a cool person with your paint on your brush it's time to start dry brushing and it's really just rubbing it up and down a miniature obviously it's nice to start from the top of a miniature sometimes but i pretty much go from wherever i can see i normally don't go for the bottom of the miniature first that feels like a mistake i normally start at the top and i work my way down i often when doing this think of like a log flume or a water slide i just think of descending my weight down it and just generally trying to avoid all of the murky areas as you would on a water slide the gray dry brush is a really heavy dry brush i'm trying to avoid the recesses so that that can stay dark and already give us that contrast and then i'm making as much of the area a light gray as possible so that the contrast paint picks that up later i already know that i'm going to do the edges with the white dry brush which will come later so i'm very confident that i don't need to over brush those areas so for this next section i'm intentionally going to put too much paint on my brush and as you can see as soon as i've applied it it's almost painted it thickly on this is a big mistake and you don't want to do this if possible but ultimately this laptop method is really about how you want to do things if you accidentally add too much paint that's fine it's really organic and it'll add a nice kind of chaotic element to your miniature as you can see the chair is completely gray and those are the areas that are going to be picked up by the contrast paints later here is our big toad our magical frog our powerhouse of thought and wisdom and we are going to make this bad boy grey it's also a good way to test actually how wet your brush is to be honest so i can kind of understand why they do it but don't tell them that now just start to dry brush your mini just think about where the light may be coming from i guess just don't basically dry brush under armpits or on his butt those are huge mistakes don't do in his mouth those are dark areas think about inside your ear it's dark don't paint there don't be mad the final bit of our miniature is a magic energy ball it's pretty intense now we know that we want this part of the mix to be very very light because it's magic so we're going to also be applying a light color to it later so we're going to really heavily dry brush this miniature because we want it to be very very bright the more you dry brush to miniature the more the contrast will be bright so just think about that when you're doing your minis as you can see there it is a light magic ball as light as my conscience when i go to sleep at night okay for the next stage of slap chopping you must do a white dry brush i really like vallejo white it's the first paint made by vallejo it's actually the first paint ever made zero zero one and so it's a really good paint to use because i wouldn't use the number one paint also known in other countries as blanco here's our frog full of magical energy still he's grey and let's get those edge highlights in this is where we're really going to pick out the tone of the model so just look for the edges of the mini so just look for the raised areas and just do a lighter dry brush you're not pushing in as hard and you're just trying to gently glide over the tips of the mini this area is a really good example of where the white really contrasts with the gray and the black at the back and you can see the tonal shift which the contrast will pick up when it's applied so with the white dry brush done we've effectively created edge highlights all over our mini in minutes maybe even a minute you've got so much time to do other things like read my tweets here's our seat causing a little bit of a problem for us because we do want to get the raised areas of the vines but at the same time we'd also like to get the raised areas of the seats so just gotta be a little bit more careful with where we dry brush again just avoid the recesses and just aim for the edges super simple it's the edge highlight all edge highlighted and again just minutes of work super simple super easy just make sure you get those edges it's really really key you can also on the tips of those spines you could just brush up so that you know that the top of those are a little bit lighter than the bottom of those really easy okay the magic energy ball now as we've said we want this to be really bright so we're going to make sure we do lots and lots of white kind of over brushing on the white really in the central piece because again like we've said we want it to be a lot brighter than the rest of the miniature and there you go really easy nice and bright exactly what we want for when we add the paints on let's add some contrast okay first contrast paint we're gonna use is play bearer flash it's a great color to use on our magical frog especially it's got a nice little tone of yellow mixed in with it now before we actually put any paint on our miniature let's talk about thinning down our contrast paints you really don't have to at all but all of the contrast kind of have different consistencies and also when you do thin down your paints you are able to get very different effects on your miniature the thinner it is the more translucent it will become which is really nice for building up different effects and styles on your miniature with the same contrast paint so here you can see a more thin down version of the contrast paint being applied to the miniature before we put a more pigmented version on later on in the painting process here you can see the difference between the thin down contrast paint and the unthinned contrast paint and obviously it's a lot more bright and vivid when you don't thin it down but you might want it to be pale so you could have it thinned down and that's the real difference between having thinned and unthinned contrast paints so i've just added some more over the top to build up the saturation and let's carry on and there you go there's our magical frog this frog is mean he's keen and he's partially green the next paint is griffon orange it's lovely it's bright i use it for lots of different textures including cloth and skin and i'm using on the toga here a thematic blue next it's our magic color it's one of the thinner contrast paints but it goes on really nice just picking out key little areas which i think work really nice with this color and we'll tie in with our blue orb at the end of the build process all done in probably under a minute oh boy do i love nasdrag yellow this is the cheap paint this is where you can pretend you're doing non-metallic metals but really you're just applying a contrast paint now sure it doesn't look quite as good as actual non-metallic gold but in the time that we spent on it i think it looks really fantastic just make sure this paint doesn't pull as it sometimes can and it will look really nice for gold especially on this aztec themed slam let's use skeleton horde to pick out the horns on our miniature don't forget if you put quite a lot of this at the tip of a horn as opposed to at the base or thin down the contrast at the base and then drag it towards the top you'll end up with a very horn-like colour about four parts vulpas pink to one part blood angels red that's going to give us a really nice colour to put on our lips do some little recess shading in our eyes and bring the color out in our tongue now after applying the contrast i thought the color was a bit too vivid so i just washed my brush off i added some water to my brush and then i just dragged it over the areas and thinned it and watered it down and it was much nicer we're using agrostunes to represent leather on our model and there's a very small amount just around his ear and then we're going to apply that in under five seconds moving on to the chair we're actually going to use the dry brush to represent stone on our model and so we've already saved ourselves loads of time and now we're going to be adding some gauge of fur onto those vines which i think is an amazing color i use this for wood and vines and things like that all the time i find this process so fast and so rewarding because i'm done i put the paint on and i'm done i really won't have to reapproach it unless i want to later skeleton horde is also one of those paints that you'll use a lot really really good for bone apply it nice and thickly it really is a thin paint you really don't need to thin it down at all and it just looks really good over a dry brush dunes is what i will be using for the leather on this miniature but i often times use snake bite leather having looked at the final model maybe i would have gone back and done snake bite leather but i'm still really happy with how it turned out to show you can also do some effects with the contrast paints i've just used that plague bearer flesh from earlier i've just applied it into some recesses just to create a kind of moss effect and that's our chair seat palliquin done easy-peasy really did not take long at all onto our magical glowy orb as we know we've already dry brushed this up very very bright because we know we're going to be putting that thematic blue over it applying this really thickly all over the model because i know i'm going to come back to it and do a second layer once it's dried i'm just going to add a second layer into the ball area avoiding the kind of magical swirls and then just quickly do the hands in plague bearer flesh again to finish our model off and we based this magical bad boy and here is the final product really not bad for a few hours work and it's so fun and easy to do fast easy stress free why wouldn't you want to slap shop your miniatures these techniques can be used on any miniatures from any system slap chop is truly universal thanks for watching my first ever painted tutorial i hope you enjoyed it i'm going to do more in the future if you like it so please leave me some comments on things you would like to see if you are going to paint in adventures using the techniques you saw i'd love you to tag me in it or use the hashtag slapshop thanks to everyone on the small game of patreon for helping support me this far in my creation journey [Music]

Channel: The Honest Wargamer

Views: 872,675

Keywords: the honest wargamer, warhammer, 40k, age of sigmar, professional, painting miniatures, miniature painting, painting miniatures for beginners, how to paint miniatures, painting warhammer, miniatures, miniature painting tutorial, mini painting, painting tutorial, miniature painting techniques, squidmar, contrast paint, speedpaint army painter, ninjon, goobertown hobbies, slapchop, maniac, warhammer weekly, how to paint warhammer, vallejo, how to paint age of sigmar, painting tips

Id: bH3WGHw9eDw

Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2022