The Slapchop Painting Technique Speedpainting Miniatures Fast

Get your miniatures table top ready in just 20 minutes with the quick and easy painting slap chop technique also known as under painting or grisaille. Is the slap chop technique the fastest painting technique ever?

Shout out to @TheHonestWargamer for this awesome and easy technique

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00:00 Introduction
00:28 Wizkids Frameworks Hill Giant
00:48 Cut & Glue Parts Together
02:04 Save Sprues for Sprue Goo
02:24 Fill Gaps with Green Stuff
03:04 Prime miniature in Black
03:24 Dry Brush in a Light Colour
04:03 Dry Brush using White
04:34 Easy Roller Dice Kickstarter
05:33 The EASY way of Painting
06:32 Army Painter Speedpaints
11:46 Finish off with a Wash
12:10 Miniature Painted in 20 Minutes
12:37 Stick a Fork in ME Im Done

#slapchop #contrastpaint #miniaturepainting

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[nekrataali]

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 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.

[MrVolvobloke]

We used to use this 'zenithal, drybrush technique back in the eighties on historicals but we didn't have the contrast paints in those days so we used watercolour paints. Weird how it's come full circle again!

[rossvolkmann]

Pro-tip for when you're struggling to get him off the painting base at 12:00: the easiest way to break a superglue bond is to pop the model in your freezer for a few minutes. This makes the glue far more brittle and you can just crack it apart without worrying about damaging anything.

[makeshiftminis]

I messed around with the undercoat for the slap trap method a few weeks back. From what I can tell, you can get different effects with different colors. At the time I used dark red as a base coat with a mint green on the highlights. After I put on some skin tones the results looked raw and infected which worked pretty well for what I was working on.

[johnholder]

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.

[MiniatureHobbyist]

Like, Subscribe, Share and leave comments below, please and thank you 🙂

[mattbuckley]

Love the look of this technique regardless of speed. It has a real antique look to it too .... brilliant stuff.

[NLGedonis]

I never thought about drybrushing before applying a contrast paint. Thanks for introduceing this idea to me. I have always struggled using contrast paints and now I can see why.

[BAD-Canon]

I’ve been using this method for about 6 months now. Definite improvement in quality of my work and faster. Means I get to play more!

[Suiberis]

I've actually found it pretty effective and time saving to prime a miniature grey, go over it with a thin black wash and then drybrush highlight white on the raised edges. Helps if you plan on batching a group of 30-50 minis.

[WhangamsWhimsies]

I really glad you showed how to do this with a brush for the initial drybrush. Everything else I have seen uses an airbrush and I don't have me one of those.

[jefferykeown]

I hit upon this technique in the 80s, but we didn't have contrast back then. Had to water everything down. Never went anywhere with it. Nice to see it's rise to prominence in this age.

[SEAKPhotog]

The algorithm sent me. That's a great technique. I haven't painted figures for 35+ years. I would have killed for this technique even though I loved painting them. Cheers!

[Jerry]

I'm a new painter, and your videos have e been helpful. I'm watching you from the little island of Guam by the way. Thank you much for your explanations and tutorials.

[patrickpatrick]

Man, I have painted several models with Slapchop recently and it is saving me so much time. As well as looking pretty solid.

[grimmgunn]

I really enjoy your videos. As an older newbie to this hobby, you have given me some hope. Do you think your speed/contrast paints?
Keep up the great work!

[justinjantz]

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.

[nicholasshopoff]

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.

[vinterbjork]

This model really makes this method shine!

[loweloking]

Grey primer with just white dry brush works very well also with this method.

It’s the same but comes out slightly brighter