Speed Painting Space Wolves

I wanted to see how fast I could paint a tabletop quality Space Wolf. Without any blue-grays, I decided to use a "pre-Heresy" color scheme of  dark gray with copper trim and muted shoulders. How did I do?

My first step was to basecoat the model. I used Adeptus Battlegrey foundation paint, because it's the only gray I have. It's rather dark, which might work well for this scheme. I used a W&N Series 7 #2 brush for this, and it took me 4 minutes to make sure all the nooks and crannies were painted.

 

Next, I painted each shoulder pad with a foundation paint: Mechrite Red on the right, Iyanden Darksun on the left. The yellow needed two coats to cover well, the red only one. Both of these paints are awesome for coverage - with any other red and yellow I would have needed to layer many times in order to cover the dark gray undercoat. The pad rims and chest eagle got some Dwarven Bronze, and the gun was painted Boltgun Metal. This step took nearly 10 minutes, mostly because I had to change colors multiple times.

 

Any tournament with a traditional 3-color minimum would be happy with this, but I wanted to take it a little further. Out came the "liquid talent," Devlan Mud. After a wash with that, I touched up all of the big flat spots with the base coat colors, and added some Khemri Brown to the base. If I were going to field this model, I would add some sort of basing material, but even without that I'd call it tabletop quality. These final steps took another 5 minutes, including a couple to let some of the wash dry.

All told, this Space Wolf marine took less than 20 minutes to paint, start to finish. Much of that time was spent changing colors, so if I were to paint a batch I'm sure the average time spent on each would be dramatically less than that. I bet I could do a squad of 10 to this quality in under 2 hours.

To improve this model, I would definitely do some edge highlighting, and possibly add some lighter grays to the armor to lighten him up. He's a little drab right now. I would also add markings to the shoulder pads. I could easily do freehand squad markings on the red pad, and possibly some sort of company mark on the yellow.

Update... I added some Codex Grey to his armor, and I think he looks a lot better. I'll probably use this scheme to paint Mike's Wolves.