Speed Painting Your 40K Army: Contrast Paints, Washes, and Dry Brushing Explained

By Carter Estes  ·  July 6, 2026

Let me tell you the lie that keeps more armies in their boxes than any other: that you have to be good at painting to have a painted army. You don't. You have to be fast. And in 2026, being fast has never been easier.

I've painted a lot of Aeldari and a small legion of Thousand Sons, and I promise you the models that win Best Painted and the models that actually get played are rarely the same models. A tabletop-ready army — one that looks sharp from three feet away, which is the only distance that matters during a game — comes down to three techniques. Contrast paints, washes, and dry brushing. Master those and you can paint a squad in an evening instead of a season.

The big news: Contrast isn't going anywhere

You may have heard that Citadel Colour is being rebranded as Warhammer Colour. Cue the panic, the doom-posting, the folks stockpiling Nuln Oil like it's canned goods before a hurricane. Relax. It's a label change, not a reformulation. Contrast paints are staying, and Games Workshop has actually expanded the range — 25 new Contrast colours, seven brand-new Shades, and reformulated versions of the rest, plus what they're calling their best white spray yet. New shades like Tyran Blue and Berserker Bloodshade give you more vivid ways to deepen reds and blues than anything the old range offered.

Why does this matter to a speed painter? Because Contrast is the single biggest time-saver in the hobby, and the toolbox just got bigger. If Warhammer Colour isn't your bag, The Army Painter's Speedpaint 2.0 does the same job with its own palette. I keep both on my desk and I don't apologize for it.

Step one: Contrast for the heavy lifting

Here's how Contrast works, and why it feels like cheating. You prime your model white or bone — that best-white spray earns its keep here — and then you brush a single coat of Contrast over each area. The paint does two jobs at once. It wicks off the raised edges and pools in the recesses, basecoating and shading in one pass. Citadel reckons it can cut painting time in half for some schemes. In my experience that's conservative.

Pick your Contrast colours to match your army — Magos Purple and Talassar Blue carried half my Thousand Sons — and lay them down flat. Don't fuss. Don't feather. One confident coat. You'll be shocked how finished a model looks when the shading is already baked in.

Step two: Washes to tie it together

Washes — the reformulated Shades in the new range — are your cleanup crew. Even with Contrast doing most of the work, a targeted wash of something like Nuln Oil into the deepest recesses of armor or a Reikland Fleshshade over exposed skin pulls everything into focus. I believe washes are the most forgiving product in the hobby. Slop them into the crevices, let capillary action do the thinking, and walk away. Where Contrast shades broadly, a wash sharpens the specific spots the eye lands on.

Step three: Dry brushing for the pop

Now the finish. Load a stiff brush with a lighter tone, wipe nearly all of it off on a paper towel — and I mean nearly all of it, this is the step everyone overdoes — then drag it lightly across the model. The paint catches only on the raised edges, snapping every rivet, blade, and bone into relief. It's the opposite of a wash, and together they're a matched set: the wash darkens the deep, the dry brush lightens the high, and your eye reads the whole thing as expertly blended when it's nothing of the sort.

That's the whole trick. Contrast, wash, dry brush. Base the model, hit it with a matte varnish so all your hard work survives contact with dice and drink cans, and you've got a table-ready miniature in a fraction of the time a classic layer-up-from-basecoat approach would take.

A realistic evening

Set yourself up right and this isn't a grind. Ten models, three Contrast colours, one wash, one dry brush highlight. Prime tonight, paint tomorrow, base and varnish the night after. That's a squad a week without breaking a sweat — which is how full armies actually get finished by people with jobs and families and a 40K habit to feed.

We stock the paints, brushes, washes, and hobby tools to make this happen at The Game Station — including the new Warhammer Colour range as it rolls in alongside our Army Painter Speedpaint stock. Swing by the store in Borger or browse our hobby supplies online, and if you're staring down a mountain of grey plastic, come talk to us. Getting armies painted and on the table is the whole point. Let's get yours there.