You may have noticed we do a lot of miniature painting commissions. Also, that some are quite large. Managing large miniature painting commissions is a skill set all of its own. Here are some of the tactics we’ve come up with, over time.
If you work in manufacturing, I expect you will find none of these to be surprising.
Multiple full-time painters
Nothing quite like taking a multi-week job and splitting it across multiple painters.
The pros are:
the commission gets done faster
if one painter misses work, the others can compensate
it’s good team-building to make painters, er, work in teams. This pays forward in morale, and people supporting each other.
However, the cons are not trivial:
Communication is key. If it fails, there will variances that need to be fixed, afterward.
there can still be variances. Over time, painters develop their own styles and hallmarks. You can’t mix painters with too much variance, or it will be noticeable in the finished army.
Better painters end up carrying weaker painters. Weaker painters, instead of growing, become reliant on those better painters to help them with their problems.
Technology
You want paint to dry? Build a dryer. We once built a crate out of styrofoam and plugged it to an AC’s hot air output. It had a row of PC fans running to draw the air out. It could dry any number of figures in a minute or two. Any number.
Painters didn’t like using it (it broke up the flow of their work which made focusing difficult). So we put fans at every table. The painters work in air conditioning (a must in hot, super-humid Sri Lanka), so the fans blow drier air. That’s not as good as hot dry air, but it still makes a difference.
Armies, especially Warhammer 40k armies, tend to have a dominant base color. If this the case on a painting commission, we spray that color over the whole army. Not with an airbrush - with a spraygun. The kind you use to paint cars. We go through a garage-grade air compressor once every five years or so.
Wherever possible, if we can use a machine to make our lives easier, we do.
Supervision
Nothing saves time like catching mistakes early.
Further, nothing saves time like not wasting time. I don’t sit when I do staff meetings, there’s no point getting comfortable - I’m usually done in under 15 minutes. The longest I’ve done is about half an hour.
We save time on management by using shared Google documents for our dashboards. We track what we have to do, what’s due when, and how we’re progressing. Anything a client asks for gets written down. This is also why we confuse you writing from a single email address. It creates a single archive that we can refer. Knowledge management saves time.
Ancilliary Specialists
Everything that’s not painting-related, we put specialists on. Specialists can optimize, and this frees up painters to sit and paint. Building minis? Specialists. Priming minis? Specialist. Packing minis? Specialist.
If you want to see an army built in a day, give it to someone who’s been building armies for a decade or so. The Ten Thousand Hour rule is real.
Specialist Painters
This I have problems with. It works well: painters with an aptitude for painting tanks, will always paint them faster, and better, than those who don’t have that aptitude. The catch though is that the skill base erodes because painters get less practice and what they specifically should be practicing. It’s not an issue if you address it, but that's just another thing to keep your eye on.
Give it to an All-Star
Our whole shtick is treating miniature painting like a consistent manufacturing process. If we do ‘x’ then ‘y’ will always happen within at least the known bounds of ‘z.’
The reality however is that the biggest multiplier is the painter themselves. Are they happy? Did they just fall in love? Do they like the subject they’re working with? I have a painter who paints Captain America faster than any other Marvel/DC figure. He paints Marvel/DC faster than he paints Warhammer. He just prefers them because he likes the characters and their stories.
The fastest painters are always the most inspired — and there is no corresponding increase in error rate. Our most inspired painters have the least errors.
All-Stars are as real in painting as they are in sports. They will always pull of something insane.
Paintedfigs is a miniature painting service. You can send us your figurines to paint, and we also have painted miniatures for sale. We paint mainly Games Workshop (Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, Space Hulk, Bloodbowl, and so on), Star Wars, Warmachine and Hordes, and pretty much every Kickstarter and board game under the sun.
And we do so at the lowest rates on Earth (we’ve checked).