Riders of Rohan - Batch 1 in Process

What began as an exercise in "gee, I wonder how well this will work" has turned into a very promising way for me to actually get some of my Lord of the Rings figures painted to a decent level of quality in a reasonable amount of time. For the time challenged like me, this is the holy grail of painting.

In my prior post I detailed my game plan for painting Riders of Rohan. Having come up with a manageable set of steps that produced an acceptable quality figure, the real test would be whether I could produce a batch of figures efficiently. Happily, I seem to be able to do just that - the photo below shows 7 more figures done through stage 3. Stage 1 being priming, stage 2 basic color blocking, and stage 3 being the dip shading followed by a matte clearcoat to knock down the gloss. Knowing that the dip shading helps hide little mistakes, I was able to paint these figs to this point in perhaps a little over an hour. Only the basic highlighting and final highlighting stages remain. When all is said and done I should be able to have completed these figures in less than 3 hours. And they will look very nice. For me, that's fast.

Two other thoughts do occur to me. First, assembly lining a larger batch of figures at one time would make this even more efficient (if a little more boring). Second, I am admittedly picky about the quality of figures I like to use in a game, and I am pretty pleased to see that the shaded figures at this stage of painting (with no additional highlighting) could very easily be used as is. Finishing the bases with these figures exactly as is would still look pretty good.