I've been watching alot of painting vids lately and while im really impressed with some of the more technical paintjobs, im really fascinated with how slapchop works so simply, it seems too good to be true, so are there any drawbacks that I haven't found yet or that these videos dont cover?
Yes, lots.
Slapchop is a halfassed version of painting a mini in grayscale first, and then using transparent paints on top. It's been done for years and gone by many names before "slapchop" was a thing. Running down an actual list of problems with it...
Slapchop encourages brainlessly applying the drybrushing first. This means you'll end up with highlights in areas where they don't belong. Once you've dry brushed from black up through grey and then white you can stop and selectively fix it with black and gray shades. It's not a problem to do this, but it eliminates supposed time savings as you're going back and doing more work.
Slapchop encourages sloppily color. You can of course just not halfass this, but that's not what it's sold as. The problem is is that because of the paints you're using, fixing anything means going back and painting it gray again, and then having to go back and correct it. This is once again another time waster.
Slapchop works well on heavily textured models, especially those that are organic. Kroot, Nids, and so on. It quite often looks like shit on anything with large flat surfaces(vehicles, space marines) without a lot of practice thinning the paints and understanding the quick drying times of contrast/speed paints(they generally dry very quickly and can leave flatter surfaces very streaky and uneven) and end up looking like shit resulting in you having to go back and experimenting with it or just correcting it with normal paints, which again can be time consuming.
I've linked this before, but this is an example of an expert painter intentionally painting in grayscale and then using transparent paints. He added "posh slapchop" to the title after that term became popular for SEO. But you can see what I mean about specifically painting the highlights in grayscale prior to using the speed paints.
Is slapchop and drybrushing the exact same thing? I dry brushed my base then go in on the trim with layers of thinned out paint. I feel too autistic to drybrush the whole thing and I enjoy the hours long process it is to paint one dude. I also am not going to have enough minis for an army for a long while so idc to take my time. Also need more paint, gf got a ton of it but acrylics are insanely thick so we couldn't use those.
No. Dry brushing is just dry brushing. With regard to slapchop, it's just drybrushing in grayscale prior to applying your transparent paints like I mentioned above. This is a good example of drybrushing in color, to add the edge highlights in blue, rather than painting them individually, as well as stippling to add shadows and highlights on the flat surfaces.
edit: You also don't need the artis opus overpriced bullshit drybrushes for it either. You can dry brush with your regular brushes(it's a good use for shittier older brushes) or just buy some cheap short(or cut them yourself) goat hair mop brushes(because that's what the artis opus brushes are. you don't need the stupid glass jar and sponge thing either but I think you can figure out how to substitute a sponge).
