I did this job for Wizkids. Making paintmasters. Of course back then, I had to paint resin cold cast prototypes by hand and those got sent to China so they could match my paint jobs on the assembly line. Tampo printing sometimes but mainly just solid colors plus a wash or a drybrush. Everything you do is a "paint application" and most figures are limited to 6 or maybe 8. My strong point other than being fast and being reliable and basically on-call 24/7 was that I could get a lot more done with less apps than anyone else. I did Heroclix, Mechwarrior, all that jazz. You may think "but those paint jobs were usually pretty mid at best" and you would be right, but a Golden Demon winner couldn't have done any better. Source: was a finalist 2 years. The thing is, let's say we assign a 10 pt scale of quality. If you give the line a 9/10 paint job then the final mass produced item will probably be a 5/10,
If you want the white eyes to have pupils, you already used 2 of your apps. If you want brown hair with a shade, that's 2 more. The skin is an app. Now you have 1-3 more apps for everything else on the whole model.
The reason that the Heroclix fantasy often looked better than the Marvel heroes is because I could design the color scheme with this in mind, to work well. Whereas Spider-man has to look like Spider-man. A good example is Frank Miller Wolverine. He needs multiple browns, flesh, white, black, steel. Since his eyes are just white without dots, you can save an app and use it for a brown-black wash over the whole figure that makes all the brown and the flesh look better.
