Mildew

Dry brushing never seems to work well on SM infantry figures (works well on tanks however). One way to 'speed paint' SM marines and also do edge highlighting is to actually undercoat in the highlight colour and then paint the mid tone on. You just paint the large areas in, and paint up to the edge highlights (its a lot easier than trying to paint a perfectly straight line), its more a system of painting by numbers technique than perfecting a steady hand :D However this would take about the same time to do as edge highlights (its just an easier way of doing it), so would slow you down. Doing 200 marines at once is a daunting task and bordom could kick in if it starts to take too long. I'd look for two colours, a mid tone and highlight tone, then a wash with the GW black wash over the entire figure to help filter the paint and provide the darkest tone. The two blues shouldn't be too different from each other as you're aiming at painting straight from the pot, and not mixing to achieve a 'heavy metal' level of artistry. Alas I'm not in your area to suggest any craft paints, but they usually do need to be watered down and sometimes suffer coverage issues when watered down with the lighter colours. I'd undercoat in 'black' as this will help tone down the usually brighter craft paint hues, and if you miss anything it will hopefully look like shadow. How do I know all these 'cheats', because I've the painting skills of a chimp

If you're not confident about your painting abilities...you could try something different. First work out a way to get a 'basecoat' finish your are happy with (thats also speedy). Probably an airbrush/wash finish on your minis (the forum crowd here can probably come up with a way to this). Don't worry about any detailing, just cover the figure and get the tone you are happy with. On what paint to use, yup the foundation paints are good, but its going to be real expensive to cover that lot even with just one coat. Looking around for a cheaper airbrush friendly (foundation isn't that friendly) near match might be a good idea. Then 'try' a few figures getting all the detailing on. If you are unhappy, or get frustraited...then you can seek the services of a professional painter to 'finish' these minis (it would be a lot cheaper that way). On the tanks/APC front, see if there are any 'model' societies in your area, these guys know how to weather armour VERY well....so you could get them to finish your armour. Spraying is going to be hard as it looks like you have fully assembled all your infantry, so I'd suggest making a rack of a piece of wood with 10 nails/screws sticking out of one side with about 3" inbetween each. Then securely add half a wine cork to each screw to form a platform to 'blu tack' a mini and its base onto your spraying rack. Then its going to take a quick spray from front/below (as near as you can get), and rear below. Then frontabove and rear/above and finally front rear if needed. You can also look at washing the minis on the rack if your bluetack is good and the minis with stick around for this. So look to experimenting on 'how' to achieve the perfect armour on both your infantry and tanks, then decide what to do. To paint that lot ups is going to also take an assembly line to do. But a little experimentation, trail and error could work wonders for you and your project. So are you looking for a way to airbrush in a few a number of coats as possible and how to wash the minis for the best effect? Then you got 300 bases to worry about :D

Sorry, I'm oldschool. When the first article in White Dwarf came out on the Badab War, before there were anything but RTB001 Beakie Marines, they were the Tiger Claws. That's my story and I'm stickin to it. Recent fluff and codexes have changed the name to Astral Claws, and I object, because the first marine I ever painted was a bright orange beakie Tiger Claw. Call it nostalgia if you will. If it's a nice effect generally, I'll probably stay with the scheme. I just purchased some Tamiya clear orange to try out. You go for it :devil: As another 'old git' RT player I'm also revisting doing the first ever SMs I ever painted. You may get a few newer 'purists' moaning at them, but you'll get more kudos from the old RT era players (now if only we could get GW to do a limited run of the original beakies...lol). A realistic looking orange is difficult, too bright and it looks all 'Day Glo'. I think you've pulled it off pretty well (as its one of the hardests colours to do well. I wouldn't pontificate too much at the moment and just drive on to finish the figure...THEN decide. After you have added all the detail, it may radically change the look (or lightness/darkness) of the figure. You may want to check out this http://www.fightingtigersofveda.com/index.htm Its a DIY chapter, but follows the old Tiger Claws paint scheme. Go to the visitors gallery to see some good (and bad) stuff. BTW You 'old git' :P