Table-ready painting — Bench & Table

What "table-ready" actually means

The old standard was simple: three colours, minimum. Not about quality — just proof the model isn't bare plastic.

In practice people game the letter of it while ignoring the spirit — three colours slapped on badly still technically qualifies. Aim for the spirit instead: a model that reads clearly from arm's length, not the bare minimum that passes on a technicality.

The fastest way to clear that bar without even three separate coats: a zenithal spray alone. Prime black, then light grey and white from steep angles so the recesses stay dark and the raised edges catch light. That alone gives a model enough visual structure to read as painted across a table.

Contrast and Speedpaint, fast

One coat standing in for basecoat, shade, and highlight all at once.

These paints are transparent pigment in a high-flow medium. Put a wet coat on and it pulls off the raised areas and gathers in the recesses on its own — so one pass leaves a shadow, a midtone and a lighter edge without you placing any of them. The shading comes from the paint, not from you.

That also tells you where the method is strong and where it isn't. Texture is what it needs: fur, cloth folds, skin, scales, chitin, chain, rope. Big smooth surfaces — vehicle panels, a flat shield, large shoulder pads — have nothing for the paint to gather into, so it dries wherever it happened to sit and goes patchy. Do those areas the normal way and use contrast for everything else.

What to prime

The undercoat is doing half the work. Black kills the effect outright — the paint is transparent, so it has nothing to glow through.

Undercoat	Result	Use when
Wraithbone (warm off-white)	Warmer, richer	Skin, leather, bone, reds and browns. The safe default for most models.
Grey Seer (cool off-white)	Cooler, more muted	Blues, greys, cold armour, anything you want dialled back a shade.
Flat white	Brightest, most saturated	Yellows, oranges and reds, which need all the light they can get from underneath.
Zenithal or slapchop grey	Shading twice over	You want more depth than the paint gives on its own — see slapchop below.

Step by step

The whole method is one confident pass per section, then leaving it alone.

Shake the pot properlyThirty seconds, hard. The pigment settles out of the medium between sessions, and a badly shaken pot goes on as weak tinted water.
Use a bigger brush than feels rightA medium brush, loaded heavily. A fine detail brush holds too little to finish a panel in one go, and running dry mid-panel is what leaves streaks.
One pass per sectionFlood the area, guide the paint into the recesses, then stop. Work section by section — one arm, one cloak, one leg — and finish each before starting the next.
Wick off any pool immediatelyIf paint gathers into a dark blob on a flat area, touch a clean damp brush to the edge of the pool and it drinks it straight back out. This only works in the first minute or so, while it's still wet.
Do not go back inOnce a section starts to dry, leave it until it is completely dry. Touching a half-dry edge is what makes hard tide lines, and it's the single most common way this method goes wrong.
Second coat only if you want it darkerWait until the first is fully dry, then repeat. Each coat deepens the colour and closes up the highlight, so one coat is usually the right answer on infantry you're batching.

Touch-dry is roughly 15 to 30 minutes, depending on how heavy the coat was and how warm the room is. That's long enough to move to another model, not long enough to paint over the top of it — see reactivation below.

Thinning

Thin these paints with their own medium — Contrast Medium, Speedpaint Medium — and not with water. The flow behaviour is the product; water dilutes the medium along with the pigment and you lose the pooling that the whole method depends on. Same reason they don't belong on a wet palette.

Roughly 1:1 paint to medium gives you a glaze: much lighter, still shading itself. That's the mix for tinting over metallics, and for going gently over an area you don't want at full strength.

Two things worth the extra minutes

One edge highlight afterwards. A single edge highlight in a normal layer paint, over dried contrast, buys more apparent quality per minute than anything else you can do to these models.
Contrast over metallic. A coat over silver instead of over primer gives a candy-metallic — red over a steel basecoat reads as deep lacquered red, and it's the cheapest way to get convincing gold, brass and coloured armour.

When it goes wrong

Symptom first. Most of these are the same two mistakes — going back into drying paint, or asking the paint to shade a flat surface.

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Hard line across a panel	You went back over an area that had started to dry.	Let it dry fully, then a thin coat of the same colour over the whole panel to even it out. Full write-up on the troubleshooting page.
Dark blotches on flat areas	Paint pooled where there was no recess to run into.	Wick it out with a clean damp brush while wet. Next time, less paint on flat panels — or basecoat them normally.
Colour came out weak and washed out	Under-shaken pot, or too dark an undercoat eating the light.	Shake hard and add a second coat. Yellows, oranges and reds want white underneath.
Everything went flat and muddy	Too many coats, or the coat was thinned with water.	Nothing to undo it in place — put the shading back by hand with a drybrush or an edge highlight.
Painting over it lifts the colour underneath	Reactivation. The dried film re-wets when you work over it.	Wait longer, and use less water in the paint on top. Varnish first if you're layering properly over it.

Reactivation was bad enough in the original Army Painter Speedpaint that it was the line's main complaint. Speedpaint 2.0 mostly fixed it: Tale of Painters' testing found it hard to dissolve with a wet brush after 20 to 30 minutes, and bleeding through a light colour painted on top stopped after about two hours. Citadel Contrast is less prone to it, but the same waiting rule keeps you out of trouble on either.

One last step whichever brand you use: these dry satin to glossy — Vallejo Xpress Color is the matte exception — so a matte varnish at the end is what makes a batch look deliberate rather than shiny.

The dip method

Paint bright, dip once, done.

Prime and basecoat brighter than normalThe dip darkens everything a shade or two, so compensate going in.
Dip the whole modelHold it with pliers or forceps, not your fingers.
Shake off the excessTap it firmly against the inside of the tin. Too much left on pools in every recess and looks muddy.
Dry somewhere dust-freeOne to two hours. A stray hair or dust mote sticks to wet dip and stays there. Wipe any pooling with a cosmetic sponge, not a paper towel — the fibres stick.
Varnish once dryDip finishes glossy on its own. Base the model after dipping, not before — dip flows onto an already-painted base and muddies it.

Slapchop

A hand-drybrushed stand-in for a zenithal spray, then one coat of colour over the top.

Prime black
Drybrush a mid-grey heavilyOver the whole model.
Drybrush a pale grey or white lightlyAlong the raised edges and corners, from above. This is the zenithal step, done by hand instead of with a spray can.
Paint Contrast or Speedpaint over the topIn single passes. The drybrushing underneath is already doing the shading; the paint is only adding colour.
Details lastEyes, teeth, whatever's already mixed on the palette.

This spread through The Honest Wargamer's videos. Treat the name as a label for the combination, not a fixed recipe. Expect around 24 minutes a model at a reads-fine-across-a-table standard — between the experienced and moderate tiers below.

What to actually expect

Ranges, not promises — skill and model complexity both move these a lot.

Experienced

15–20 min. Per infantry model, batch painting.

Moderate

30–60 min. Per model, tabletop standard.

Beginner

1–2 hr. Per model, first few units.

A single Combat Patrol or Spearhead box: 10 to 20 hours start to finish.
Three full armies (125+ models) via the dip method, one documented account: about 30 hours.