Painting Space Wolves the quick and easy way: Part 1

Introduction
The goal of this tutorial is not to paint 'Eavy Metal standard or award winning minis, it is much simpler. How can you paint your Space Wolves quickly and easily so that they look nice on the battlefield?  Fortunately it's not particularly difficult or too time consuming.  I decided to paint my Space Wolves grey because I'm not that keen on the official colour scheme but with a few changes you could adapt this tutorial to the normal scheme.

Space Wolf Grey Hunter ready for battle!

Getting started
The first step of course is to clean and assemble your figures. It's worth investing a bit of time at this stage as flash and mould lines do look really ugly later on if you don't remove them. It's also a good idea to glue sand to the bases now because then you can spray undercoat it when you're doing the rest of the model. Gluing and painting the base later is more time consuming in the long run.

Space Wolves undercoated with Uniform Grey

The next step is undercoating. If you're a beginner you may like to check out the post I did on undercoating before you do this.  For quick and easy painting, a coloured primer from The Army Painter is a must. This gives you the undercoat and the base coat in one fell swoop which speeds things up by saving the bother of base coating.. I used Uniform Grey but they make Wolf Grey as well for those of you who like the studio colour scheme.

Shading the easy way with washes and inks
The next step is to put in some shading. I do this by liberally applying a wash to the models. I used Army Painter Strong Tone Ink On these models but any black ink or wash should do. If you don't have a commercially made one then thin down some black paint with water and use that, making sure it gets into the recesses. The figures should now look something like this, a bit grubby but very 3D with the shading! Most importantly you can see the detail clearly.

Black ink adds shading and brings out the details

Proper painting starts!
Now begins the fun part; adding colours. It helps immensely if you don't need too many different colours. These Space Wolves just have red, yellow, brown black and metal.Using a limited number of colours has several advantages. One, you don't need to have so many paints which is important for the beginner on a budget. Second, it as stops the figure looking gaudy; gaudy is virtually always a bad look.  The last is so obvious that I think it's easily overlooked. The fewer colours you use, the quicker the painting.

Another trick to painting quickly is to paint batches or groups of models together. Personally I find three or four is a good number. Whilst one is drying you can paint the next. Keep using the same colour until it's on all the models. Concentrate on being neat and getting a smooth coat. When you've finished go back and tidy up any mistakes.

Space Wolves painted the quick and easy way

So there we are: three Space Wolves ready to do battle for Russ and the Emperor! They won't win any painting awards but as a group they look just grand for the battlefield and they didn't take forever to do. There's plenty that could be done to improve them and in part 2 of this tutorial we'll do just that.

Final thoughts
There are many fantastic miniature painters out there on the Internet. Many who are far more talented then me in fact and have armies of beautifully painted figures that grace a 40K battlefield.  Hours of work have gone into the figures and each one is a miniature work of art. Pun intended. If you want a tutorial on that method there is a rather good one here on an awesome Space Wolf blog.

It can be inspiring to  admire these figures but it's also a bit disheartening if you don't have the time or the skill to paint to that standard - and most of us don't.  I think this is partly to blame for the numerous armies I've seen over the years which are unpainted or simply black undercoated figures. People think every figure needs to be 'pro painted' and are afraid to even start. Hopefully this tutorial will help you get started with painting your army.

If you want to improve the models you painted before to a nicer tabletop standard, check out part 2 of this tutoral on painting Space Wolves the easy way.

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