Waiting for the Order? Maybe It’s the Perfect Time to Start Painting
We had one of those very relatable hobby moments recently: ordering online is often cheaper, but sometimes the store doesn’t actually have the item on hand and just places it with the supplier. Which means… waiting. In this case, probably 1–2 weeks.
And honestly? That might not be the worst thing.
Instead of just refreshing the order status every few hours, we started thinking that this is actually a great excuse to finally make a proper start on painting. If you’ve been hovering around the idea of getting minis painted but kept putting it off, that awkward gap between ordering and delivery can be surprisingly useful.
A simple starter painting plan
The rough idea we discussed was this:
- Prime with a spray
- Drybrush grey or white with a big brush
- Apply Speedpaints
- Finish with Nuln Oil
That’s a very approachable workflow, especially if the goal is to get models on the table without disappearing into a three-month painting rabbit hole.
Step 1: Spray primer
A spray primer is still one of the easiest ways to get started. It gives the paint something to stick to and saves a lot of time compared to brushing on a base coat.
If we’re aiming for the drybrush + Speedpaint route, the primer color matters a bit. A black primer works well if we want stronger shadows and a more dramatic result. Then the grey/white drybrush helps pull the details back out.
This is basically the classic quick-paint approach a lot of us circle back to sooner or later.
Step 2: Grey/white drybrush
After priming, a heavy drybrush with grey and/or white helps define the raised details. A large brush is perfect here, because this is meant to be fast and rough rather than super precise.
This step does a lot of the heavy lifting. Once the model has that contrast built in, Speedpaints can do their thing much more effectively.
You can think of it as setting up easy mode for the next stage.
Step 3: Speedpaints – straight from the bottle or thinned?
This was the big practical question: do we use Speedpaints straight from the bottle, or thin them with water?
For a first pass, we’d generally keep it simple and use them straight from the bottle. They’re designed to work that way, and it’s the easiest way to learn how they behave.
Adding water can change how they flow and settle, and not always in a helpful way. If we want to thin them later, it’s usually better to do that carefully and only after getting a feel for the paint first.
So if we’re just starting out, our advice would be:
- try them unthinned first,
- use a reasonable amount rather than flooding the whole model,
- and see how they behave over the drybrushed undercoat.
That alone should already give a pretty satisfying tabletop result.
Step 4: Nuln Oil at the end?
And then comes the final question: do we finish with Nuln Oil?
It can work, but this is probably the one step we’d be most careful with.
If the Speedpaint has already created shading and contrast, an all-over wash of Nuln Oil can sometimes make the model darker than intended and mute some of the color. That doesn’t mean it’s always wrong — sometimes a darker, grimmer finish is exactly what we want — but it’s worth testing before committing to the whole unit.
A safer approach might be:
- use Nuln Oil selectively in the deepest recesses,
- or skip it entirely on the first test model and see whether the Speedpaint result already looks good enough.
For quick painting, that’s often the key lesson: not every extra step improves the final look.
Our takeaway
If we’re stuck waiting 1–2 weeks for an online order to arrive, that can actually be the perfect window to experiment with a simple painting process.
The plan we’d try first would be:
- spray primer,
- grey/white drybrush,
- Speedpaints straight from the bottle,
- and Nuln Oil only if the model really needs it.
It’s fast, forgiving, and feels like a good way to stop overthinking and just get paint onto miniatures.
Sometimes the hobby gives us delays. Sometimes those delays are just a nudge to finally start the part we’ve been postponing.