The Slapchop Painting Technique Speedpainting Miniatures Fast

I think this is the best model you've painted so far. You really nailed the details on the face. 😎

Okay so for people wondering about who came up with this method of painting a.k.a Slap Chop/Grisaille/under painting/Veneda/Verdaccio/dead layer/whatever you want to call it:

This is the traditional way of painting because it's useful for making smooth blends, it's easier to draw then paint, and it's cheaper. Paint used to be really expensive. A lot of the names for colors come from the materials they were made from. "Cobalt Blue" is named so because it was literally made from cobalt. Imagine you're in Italy during the 1500s. In order to make Cobalt Blue, you have to get cobalt mined in sub-Saharan Africa and wait for it to be shipped by sail boat from the Gulf of Guinea around the coast of Senegal/Sierra Leone/Liberia, up to Morocco and the Canary Islands, before it finally goes through the Straight of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea.

Then you have stuff like Crimson Red or Vermillion, which (during the Renaissance) was made from drying out dead insects and crushing their scales before mixing it with white chalk. Some hues could only be made this way. Cochineals were used like this, and they only come from one place: Central and South America. Attempts were made to import and raise them to Ethiopia and Australia, which failed. So our poor Blood Angels players would have to wait for a harvest of cochineals from the Aztecs, who were at war with Spanish invaders, and then peel the scales off these bugs to dry out to make pigment.

Which brings us to under painting. Rather than use expensive, hard to get paint and mixing different pigments together to get the values you wanted, it's much easier to use do your painting in black, white, grey, and maybe another color like yellow or green that could be made from readily available materials. Artists would use Carbon Black or Burnt Sienna to do most of the work. Just go light some wood on fire, turning it to charcoal, then crush it up to make black. Or grab some dirt, toss it on the grill, and use that. Or crush up some lead and mix it with chalk. Then, once you have your under painting done, you can just glaze over it with the expensive pigment bought for you by the Pope worth more than your house. You get the effects seen here in the slapchop method, without using a literal boatload of paint.

You could also make paintings by drawing out the whole thing using oil-based crayons. Since they used linseed oil just like oil paint, it would bond to whatever you painted over it. Much, much easier process than trying to paint those really fine details using a brush....which was also expensive because the hairs in it came from weasels in Russia. Better to avoid unncessary wear and tear on your tools by simply shaving down an oil crayons into a point. Draw out all of your fine details, then you can just glaze over the black and white with whatever hue. The shavings can then be used to make more crayons, so you're not wasting material.

We're spoiled as fuck in today's world where a lot of this stuff is now made synthetically. You can still get pigments made using traditional methods, but most people prefer the $10 tube of synthetic blue to the $100 tube (no, really) of Cobalt Blue. Plus, changes in shipping have drastically lowered the cost of goods that exist far away.

A lot of miniature painters have typically just bought five different shades of blue, then used those to build up their layers, because that's the method we all used to learn how to paint since we had to learn it from gaming magazines and rule books.

tl;dr--don't get upset over who invented what, because you're wrong unless you're arguing over artists from the 1200s.

I like the way you speed Up the Video, this way we see all the steps and it's not a 1,5 h video.....obviously xD

Hello are you doing commissions

I wonder if this will work with wooden figures?

Polygon stole parts of your video and then covered your watermark without giving credit to your video.
You should go claim it.

Drink every time he says "uhhh" or "obviously"

Great tutorial! Obviously!

Already convinced a few friends to try this with me! Fingers crossed.

Can i use the mechanicus standard grey instead of black as the base color?

Just Amazing 🔥no more words needed 👏🏽

If I have an already black prop, would I skip the priming part and head straight to the drybrushing?

May I ask what is the name of the green paste you used to close the small spaces left in the miniature?

When doing flesh tones, instead of priming with black use purples or blues along with pinks and yellows

Well, your method as convinced me.

Hi I bought a Warhammer 40k paint and tool set - I dont wantr to open box yet as I cant see any contrast paints in there - Does slapchop only work with contrast paints?

Mini looks great!
And thanks for the run down of this method.
Been painting casually for years now and never heard of this method! Will have to try it out soon.

I use this method...but, ny models tend to be tad dark for my liking. So using this method as a Base, then use highlighting

Good work!

That helped.... I just bought a bunch of speed paints - and I did not dry brush enough... not by a long shot.. Can't wait to get home and give another go on other models.

Really impressed with the end result, looks amazing

Gunpla builders call their piles backlogs.

Wizkids needs to do a wargame.

Where u get paint rack in backgroud?

No no, shame pile was the correct term.

Fan-fu@$ing-tastic!!!

sorry but is that the menu music from caves of qud he is playing in the background?

I'm a novice painter and I think my results are really good for my skill level. But I needed something faster for goons. Since I have Zombicide Undead or Alive waiting to be painted. And there are a lot of "8x" of each zombie. Can't wait to get the "horde" painted with this method!

Yes, in 20 minutes. as a slow painter. And that includes all the drying, the preparation, the paint swaps, and speeding up 5x in the montage, and skipping most part, for a full 10 minutes video. Nice.

"i should stop saying obviously so much" proceeds to say obviously another 30 times lol

Thank you.

Have to admit this does look really good. Do you thin the speed paints, or straight from bottle?

Nice. Thanks!

Wizkids mislabeled their British Prime Minister figurine as "Hill Giant" I guess XD

by now you've probably been told this but just in case: if you want a silver contrast paint, i found any metallic paint at a ratio of 1:3 paint to lahmian medium, works nicely :)

I can not wait to try this. I have been struggling to get my bad guys to look like bad guys and I think this is going to help so much. Thank you for showing you paint labels so I can go get some of these to try and recreate what you've done and learn how to do it with other models. Slap Chop method dry brushing... I've already learned so much lol.

Really appreciate the tip on lights for skin tones.... I'm a newbie and currently trying slap chop on my ork komandos..

Been experimenting with light and dark primers...and digging this method alot! Cheers!

👍👍👍

Nice job

That is incredible- at a glance I would think that was 20-40 hours or work to get that shading! Great work, and thank you for sharing!

@Miniature Hobbyist, what is the height of this figure?

i kinda want to do a celshaded/borderlands style scheme using the slapchop method. lightly drybrush black after the white

Wonderful technique, I am a beginner and I understand this style well. Is the speedpaint = just thinned color, or something more special ?

Thanks for the great video

I need that pot holder. Where is it from please ?

Is it works with common vallejo paints, but overdilute them? :)

Well done. How do you think it'd look if you'd used a brown base coat instead of black?

you got a new subscriber

Awesome technique must try it myself Jon

hi, one question, what machine did you used?