i'm in the process of slowly building up a 40k army. after becoming more familiar with the 40k rules i'm ditching my tau ideas in favor of an imperial fists space marines army.
only problem is, it takes forever to paint a single miniature with this scheme, since the main color i'm using for the armor is GW's golden yellow paint. over both white and black basecoats it takes several different coats to get a nice, strong, solid yellow color. right now i'm basecoating the entire model black, then re-coating anything that i'm painting golden yellow with white. i started my current WIP with this scheme friday night, and it is already over the 10 hour mark with the helmet. back armor plates, feet and power supply to go with the golden yellow, and i still have highlights to do on some of the front and arm plates. once those are done i still have to finish the flamethrower and detail work (purity seals, holster, etc.) at this rate fielding an army is going to take a very long time to paint, as it's likely going to take me about 5 days per mini. at that rate a ten-man tactical squad is going to take roughly 50 days to paint, to long for someone who wants to get his army up and gaming ASAP.
i have a few ideas on how to counter-act this, one is finding a paint of the same or similar shade that's more pigmented, like the new GW foundation paints, or some model railway paints that i've heard work in a similar way.
another is to airbrush the model with golden yellow, then paint all the details, the joints between armor plates, crevices, etc. i'm reluctant to do this, as i really like working over black basecoats, it's just soo much easier to leave the dark, narrow crevices of a model the color they start as indstead of trying to get in there with a brush while avoiding already painted areas.
my third option is to ditch the imperial fists for the plainer-looking (IMO) ultramarines, who i can churn out pretty rapidly.
i'm very finicky about my paint jobs. i won't do anything that involes flat colors, if i'm applying a paint it means i'm going to be applying a highlight or shade of some sort, with few exceptions, so going that route to speed things up isn't really an option.
