Painting

Paint Your First Army Fast with Speedpaint & The Army Painter

By Chapmen Games · June 17, 2026 · 2 min read

The Army Painter Warpaints

The single biggest reason armies sit half-finished on a shelf is the painting. A full force can feel like a mountain of brushwork — but it absolutely doesn't have to be. With The Army Painter's Speedpaint and a couple of supporting products, you can get a tabletop-ready army done in a fraction of the time, and still be proud to put it on the table.

What Speedpaint actually does

Speedpaint is a single-coat paint that shades, highlights and base-coats in one pass. Prime your model white (or with a light grey-to-white “zenithal” spray), brush Speedpaint over the bare plastic, and the paint flows into the recesses and pools naturally — instant shadow and definition with no layering. A squad that might take a whole evening of careful brushwork can be knocked out in minutes.

Build a small, smart palette

You do not need fifty pots to begin. Pick the four or five Speedpaint colours that cover the bulk of your army — say a base armour colour, a cloth colour, leather and a metal — plus the all-important Speedpaint Medium, which thins the paint and rescues the occasional reactivated patch. Browse the full range in our Army Painter collection.

The Army Painter Speedpaint Medium bottle
Speedpaint Medium is the one bottle every Speedpaint user should own — it thins, smooths and fixes reactivated areas.

The three-step beginner method

Here's the whole method. 1. Prime white. 2. Speedpaint the main areas, working from the largest down to the smallest. 3. Tidy any mistakes, and you're done — a fully shaded, table-ready model. If you catch the bug later, add edge highlights and detail. But ranked up on the table, a clean three-step army looks fantastic exactly as it is.

Prefer the classic look? Dip it

The old-school alternative is the Quickshade dip. Basecoat your models in solid colours, brush or dunk the tinted varnish over them, shake off the excess, and it dries into instant grime, shadow and depth across the whole model at once. It's fast, a little messy, and brilliant for rank-and-file troops. You'll find it in the Army Painter range.

Common beginner mistakes

  • Priming too dark. Speedpaint relies on a light undercoat to glow — prime white or zenithal, not black.
  • Going back over a drying coat. Speedpaint reactivates while wet; let a section dry before touching it again, or use Medium to blend.
  • Buying the whole wall. Start with five colours and a wash. Add more only when a project actually needs them.

Grab your colours in our paint & hobby supplies and get a whole unit finished this week.