Exploring the Slap Chop Painting Method

One of the biggest hurdles of playing a fully painted army is finding the time to paint them. This has led us all to find more efficient methods of painting our miniatures to an acceptable tabletop standard. With the recent introduction of Citadel’s Contrast Paint line as well as similar paints from other brands, there has been a lot of effort to find the best use for it to get squads or even armies painted to tabletop standard quickly and with as little effort as possible. One painter, Rob the Honest Wargamer, championed a great concept that has caught on and is spreading like wildfire around the mini-painting community. I have embedded the video from Youtube at the bottom of this post.

What is Slap Chop Painting

Slap Chop relies on a greyscale undercoat similar to zenithal priming in that you are applying a gradient from black to white under the layers of paint that will be most visible to the end user. However, this method is different from zenithal priming in that it doesn’t take the direction of light into account nearly as much as zenithal priming does. If you want to learn more about the differences between these two undercoating techniques I have an article about that here.

The slap chop painting method takes advantage of the transparency of contrast paint to allow this undercoat to show through affecting the final tones much more than with contrast paint alone.

I refer to Contrast paint throughout the article, but this can be done with Army Painter Speedpaint, Scale 75 instant color, etc.

Check out the two most popular brands of this type of paint

Citadel Contrast Paint World Wide Amazon UK and EU Element Games North America Noble Knight Games

The Army Painter Speedpaint

There are four basic steps in the basic Slap Chop Technique:

Prime the mini in black
Drybrush light grey all over the model
Drybrush the highlights white
Paint the miniature with contrast paint

For this article I have painted up a vengeful wizard model, I got the STL file from being a subscriber to the One Gold Piece Patreon and printed it on my Anycubic photon mono. If you like it check out their patreon, no I don’t get anything if you subscribe, I just really like the sculpts that they create.

Step 1: Prime in Black

When you prime in black you establish the deepest shadow areas of your paint job once you add the paint in the last step. Some paints don’t show over black so depending on your paint scheme you might want to start with a dark grey instead of black. You can prime with a rattle can or with an airbrush for this step, whichever you have on hand.

Step 2: Drybrush light grey all over the model leaving black only in the deepest recesses

Using your favorite large soft drybrush, paint the model with light grey so that it covers the majority of the model leaving the black showing only in the deepest recesses of the model. Paint this layer mostly from above so that it leaves black at the bottom where the shadows naturally happen but make sure to get places that zenithal undercoating wouldn’t get like the bottom of arms. This is setting up the mid-tones for your paint job, where the contrast paint will do its thing to establish highlights and shadows. If you leave it black the contrast paint will look black.

This step should not be done with an airbrush, it will not give you the dark patches in the recesses that you are looking for with this method of painting.

Step 3: Drybrush the highlights with white

Use your largest softest drybrush to add white paint from the top down. If you drybrush in a roughly top down direction you will end up with highlights that show the direction of the light source, in this case, the sun, and this will push the contrast even more giving your minis more pop on the tabletop.

Step 4: Paint the model with contrast paint

This fourth step is where all of the careful undercoatings on your mini pay off. put on a regular coat of contrast paint and watch the magic happen. You will have deeper shadows than with contrast paints alone. You can see in the side-by-side comparison just how different this method can be. There is slap chop on the left, zenithal in the middle, and pure white primer on the right. In my opinion, bright colors look much better on pure white, but darker colors look better with zenithal or slap chop.

But wait! there’s more! Taking Slap Chop to the Next Level.

This method grants great tabletop-quality paint jobs, but sometimes you want to add a little extra to your paint job. Here are some ways that you can take this technique to the next level.

Change up the colors of the undercoat

These paints work by being much more transparent than standard acrylic paint. With contrast paint, the color affects the results of the top coat much more. The same color can become warmer or cooler based on the color that you prime with. I painted the mini in the image below with a pink and teal undercoat. Teal from below, and pink above, to show how it can change the top colors. Some of the dark colors like the wood of the staff look unchanged, however bright colors like the potion bottle on his waste really look great with the transition between colors. On the other hand, I don’t like what it did to the flesh tone on his face, not that I am a fan of crusader skin to begin with. I find that this method is also situational and you can take full advantage of it if you choose.

Spend a few minutes edge highlighting with similar light colors

You can make the paint on your models really pop with just a few highlights to catch the eye. Edge highlighting doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming, focus on the most important aspects of the model first and you are finished when you feel like stopping.