I started this squad with a mind toward speeding up my painting methods for my Sons of Medusa. The majority of the painting went very quickly. I was bowling through most of the major sections, the armor, the metals, paint chips and the like. Then things started slowing down rather quickly as I got into the white detailing and freehand work. I tried to create sharp freehand details that I feel added a lot of character to already striking minis. In the end, the added time was well worth it.
The armor was my main concern when I went into the project. I didn't want to spend hours upon hours upon hours just getting the squad painted Scorpion Green. So to speed it up, I used my airbrush to lay down the base of Scorpion Green. I use a white undercoat so that the green shows nice and vibrant. Thraka Green wash was used selectively, applied using a thin brush to the crevices. It took two coats to get it looking right and because it was done carefully, it made cleaning up the armor much much faster. I went back over the armor joins etc with Scorpion Green to keep the armor lines sharp. When I highlight the armor, I use a glazing method that alters the color slightly each pass to give it a gradual change instead of a harsh hard line highlight. It doesn't take a ton of time, but does require you to play with watering down the paint to get comfortable with it.
Chipping was laid down using the usual method with Catachan Green as the chipped color and Bleached Bone the highlight. It's pretty easy to let this step get away from you, so I was sure to take some time to look at the model between sections of armor to make sure it wasn't too much. It's all personal taste of course, but it's important to keep balance in mind.
Metallics were done using washes to vary the colors. Chainmail was the base, with Mithril Silver added to areas that were to be 'gold'. Golds were washed with Gryphonne Sepia, steels with Badab Black, and some hammer details were washed with Devlin Mud.
The shields saw a lot of personal attention. For larger areas of white I built them up from black using my regular white recipe (also used for helmets), while smaller sections were painted with multiple layers of just white to opaque.
