No, it’s not a review of the entire Speedpaint line. I doubt I could afford them all, unless you wanna sponsor us, Army Painter…

Hey everyone, it’s Kaiden. Welcome to… I don’t even know what this is. It’s a quick review of some Army Painter Speedpaints, and a painting guide on how to dirty up your bland rocky terrain pieces. Shorter and looser then my normal stuff.

Let’s start off with the Speedpaint. I don’t normally like Speedpaints or Contrast paints, but building up highlights on the tiny fiddly details of some 25mm dwarves (Thorin’s Company from the MESBG) I have’s faces, boots, belts, etc is just too frustrating, so I’m using Speedpaint on them instead.

So my 6 six Speedpaints arrived the other day, and I’ve had the opportunity to test them out. They are: Crusader Skin for well, skin, Dark Wood for a brown, Hardened Leather which is more of a brownish orange, Grim Black for black, Gravelord Grey for a grey, and Fire Giant Orange (didn’t realize how orange Hardened Leather was so I bought this to mix in for dwarf hair). I assume everyone reading this already knows what Speedpaint is, if you don’t here’s a link to them: https://www.thearmypainter.com/speedpaint/. Now, I’ll break down the ones I got:

Crusader Skin is a good Caucasian skin tone, but it doesn’t stain the flatter areas quite enough for my liking. This is one I’m definitely gonna replace with a Citadel Contrast paint.

Dark Wood is a great dark brown, and that’s about it. Does what it’s supposed to do.

Hardened Leather is actually a really cool rusty orangey russet tone. Works great for a lot of my ginger-haired dwarves (Gloin, Bombur, and Nori for example). One of my favourite Speedpaints, even if it won’t be used as much as Crusader Skin and Dark Wood.

Grim Black: It’s a black Speedpaint. Nothing else to say really.

Gravelord Grey is meh. It dries a little grungy, doesn’t stain the flat areas enough and settles in the recesses too much for my liking. It’s workable, but not as good as the other Speedpaints. Oh well. Maybe I’ll get a Citadel Contrast to replace it.

Fire Giant Orange is good, it does its Speedpaint thing. I only got it cause I didn’t realize how orangey Hardened Leather was, and planned on mixing the two to get the ginger hair colour. So now it’s pretty much useless. Oh well.

So that’s the Speedpaints. I tested them out on a weird wizard fox thing that I think is an Arcanaloth and the skin, hair, boots, and gloves of one of my dwarf minis (Bombur). Both minis turned out good, though Bombur’s boots and face look a little off cause I applied two coats to get a stronger colour, and it just sunk into the recesses more and didn’t strengthen the colour much. Still, he looks fine.

On to the terrain. On my local game store’s website, I was browsing through terrain when I came across Gale Force Nine’s Battlefield in a Box terrain line. It’s very affordable (unlike most terrain), prepainted, and generally exactly what I need for the Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game (MESBG). It’s not very big terrain pieces like Warlock Tiles, it’s mostly ruins, trees, small houses, etc.

I bought myself the Wartorn Village Ruins set. It’s the ruins of an old stone house, which consists of some nice archways and broken walls, and a fireplace + chimney combo. Honestly it would work great for a ruined fortress (though you’d have to buy a couple boxes), or indeed any ruined stone structure. It’s well painted, with good contrast and detail, but doesn’t have the moss and weathering a ruin would have. I fixed that by stippling on a bunch of moss effects and adding some dirty weathering. Here, have a quick painting guide:

HOW TO DO WEATHERING, DIRT, AND MOSS EFFECTS ON RUINED STONE TERRAIN BITS.

1. I started off by painting all the dirt around the base of the terrain, which had just been done in the same grey as the stone by the manufacturers. This is the perfect place to use Speedpaints, as it’s the kinda shit you just want to get done and not waste any time on. Since Speedpaints must be applied over a white undercoat to work, I hit all the dirt areas with a coat of thinned Corax White then applied Dark Wood Speedpaint once it was dry. I wasn’t worried about getting a bit of Speedpaint on the edges of the stone, it’ll just help out the muddy weathering we’re gonna do later. If you want to do this with normal paints, you can just apply a basecoat of a dark brown (Rhinox Hide, Dryad Bark, or Thondia Brown) and a wash of Agrax Earthshade, followed by a drybrush of a lighter brown (like Mournfang Brown).

2. For the moss effects, just stipple Deathworld Forest over the stone at random with a big drybrush. Then do a slightly lighter stippling of Elysian Green on the largest areas of Deathworld Forest, to provide some variety. After that, splodge some Athonian Camoshade onto the same areas to intensify the green. You can feather it out to smooth the transitions if you want. This Athonian Camoshade step is pretty optional though, and unless you want some really intense areas of moss you can leave it out. I think it might actually have looked better without it.

3. The muddy weathering effects are pretty simple: Just slap some Agrax Earthshade around the base of everything, and splodge some on at random on the rest. Don’t go overkill with this though.

There you go, free tutorial as well as a review. Aren’t you the lucky ones. That’s my review of the Wartorn Village Ruins terrain set from the Battlefield in a Box line. Here’s a picture of it after all my moss and weathering effects had been applied:

And that’s it from me for now. Hope you enjoyed this article, drop a like, comment, join our Discord at https://discord.gg/jZVegD3fUR, and see y’all later!

Yeah I meant to put this out like 5 months ago. I’m really behind on writing stuff like this.