Helping People Who Hate to Paint

Do you require painting figures to play or not? This is a very emotional subject to a lot of people and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find a resolution here in this article. What happens when you have the one "paint hater" who outright refuses to paint his or her figures citing dislike for painting, poor painting abilities, slow painting speed, and/or the lack of time? Generally, you can't make someone paint.

What I'd like to do instead, is focus on what you can do to help find an acceptable middle ground, even if it means that you end up painting some of their figures. Ultimately, this is a negotiation, probably a multi-party negotiation, which means that the first thing you need to do is figure out your relative power position and your desires.

Now you're thinking ... I didn't realize this was going to be so complicated. Take a look at your gaming group and separate them into three groups:

1. Paint Haters. These are the people who absolutely refuse to paint or play with the fully primed armies ... all the time. They may or may not care that their opponents strongly desire fully painted armies all around, this won't change their mindset.
2. Paint Insistors. These are the people who steadfastly hold that the game can only be enjoyed when all figures are WYSIWYG and fully painted to an acceptable standard. They also insist that unpainted opponents ruin the game for them.
3. Generally Indifferents. I imagine most people fall into this category. They'd prefer fully painted armies, but desire games even more.

The reason for this is that if most of your gaming group are insistors, and you only have one paint hater, it might be easier to marshal support to get the sole remaining army up to snuff. Unless you want to provide all of the help yourself, it's in your best interests to get other people to help out. Alternatively, especially if you have enough people in the group, where you can simply dictate terms, e.g., paint or don't play. Be careful of this approach though as you may very well end up burning bridges.

On the other hand, if you're the sole insistor in a group of paint haters, good luck on changing the behaviors of others. In this case, you need to determine whether you value the fully painted experience (albeit alone) more or playing games.

Anyways, on to painting. If the painting side of the hobby doesn't appeal to someone AND they're slow AND the end results aren't very good, then it's not hard to see why people don't want to invest the time it takes to paint miniatures. Couple this with potential resentment from other players that they have to play against unpainted minis and this can set up some bad dynamics. There are a couple of things you can do:

1. As a group, figure out what is acceptable as "tabletop quality". You're going to have to find a compromise here, after all if the reluctant painter can't be persuaded to paint, the default outcome is bare plastic or black-primed figures.
2. Figure out the techniques or combination of techniques that allows a player to crank out a large quantity of figures at that level of quality. If you're aiming for fairly low standards, then you can take all sorts of shortcuts. (see below) This may also require some negotiations with the paint hater. Maybe their vision is quartered yellow and blue pattern with lots of iconography. In this case, he may have to settle for mono-blue with some yellow edging.
3. Trade painting for other services. Your reluctant painter may hate to paint, but is anal about scraping mould lines or loves doing conversions. I hate doing the later and would be willing to trade my painting his figs for his help to prep my plastics.
4. Chip in some time to help. Painting can be monotonous (130 orks anyone) and doing it in the company of some other people can make the work seem a lot lighter. If you can get a number of people to help out, then you can process figures a lot faster. If your "acceptable standard" is pretty low, you can probably get a couple of people together for an afternoon and crank out a large number of figures.
5. Regarding techniques. If you can find a good colored spray primer and a workable wash and a few secondary colors, you can turn out figures very quickly. Here's a Tau test figure I put together:

It's primed with a Rustoleum Camo Khaki spray. The Scorpion Green was painted on with a brush. The figure was then washed with a brown for the armor and Badab Black for the undersuit. In subsequent figures, I ditched the Badab Black on the suit and washed the entire figure with the brown (Liquitex Raw Umber), The gun is washed with 2-3 coats of Badab Black and I'll probably do the same thing for the backpack. Better yet, don't attach the backpack yet. Spray prime it black first and then glue it on.

Is it done? No. Does it have many details? No. Would facing off against this be infinitely better then seeing the same hordes of black Firewarriors or more grey plastic. Absolutely.

Here's another quick figure. If you're not super anal about getting the undersides of the carapaces, you could probably get 2-3 people to crank out 100 Tyranids with a simple red basecoat on the carapaces, brown wash, and simple basing job. Again, will this look Golden Deamonish when you pick it up? No, but will it look a lot better than the grey plastic horde running across the table. Yep.

Notes

Last updated	10/26/08
Author	Michael Kan
Pre-requisites	None
Related Articles	Paints and Washes for Miniatures Speed Painting Spray Paints Getting to Tabletop Acceptable Quickly