Thanks for the advice, master
@Crowsfoot.
just tried it and I think it worked!
Stumbled over this video... It's a bit older (3 years) but I thought I'd share it here, cause that guy explains nearly exactly what I'm thinking... And what I'm trying to achieve within my army...
Yeeeeaaaah....I can't say that I agree with this guy's perspective on armies. He's definitely approaching painting armies as someone who knows nothing about the game. By that I mean, he is catering to the random people who might walk by and stop to look and say, "Cool looking army!" He wants people to continually be looking from piece to piece and checking out each individual one. But for the actual players, he'll be engaging with, it becomes rather important for them to be able to tell, at a glance, which unit is which, and (most importantly in my opinion) which models are characters. If I looked at the example he showed of the elves (Right after the Dwarves), I would have no way in telling which ones were characters other than the magic caster (and only because she is modeled so vastly differently from the others). If every model is unique, then nothing stands out. The overall army begins to look like a pointillism portrait.
When you move out and look at the army as a whole though, it will look like a ragtag bunch of misfits that came together for a brawl. Or as Acrocanth said, they look like Militia.
A unified army will have a certain amount of organization to it. Not just "Blue shoes here, blue gloves there, blue hat on this one, etc." Most organized armies (such as Dwarves or Empire) will take pride in what army they belong to and even further, which unit. You can achieve uniqueness within the unit by giving each model things like different colored hair, poses, etc.
Now that certainly doesn't apply to all armies, Beastmen or Orcs and Goblins for example, might be wearing whatever rags and weapons they scavenged off of the last battlefield, but there still should be some unifying elements throughout the army. Lizardmen (I feel) fall into a middle-ground area where you could go either way. There are certainly a wide variety of lizard colors and that would make sense in a Lizardman army, but the other option, of having unified warriors, bred for a specific purpose, makes thematic sense as well. I have chosen to go with the latter because I don't want to be continually explaining which models are what. (Or give my opponents any excuse like, "Oh! I didn't realize THAT one was your General! I wouldn't have done what I did otherwise!")
I started my Warhammer hobby with an Empire army. I based them from Middenheim and I wanted the large bulk of my army to represent those colors, but over time I have also added units from different provinces (like a handgunner unit from Hochland or a Spearmen unit from Nordland) to represent how the various provences come together to aid one another and form the Empire. If every single model was painted in different colors (as he suggests - again outside perspective) nothing about them would say "Empire".
While I may not particularly like his method, the differences of approach to the hobby is what keeps it so interesting. I also find much motivation and inspiration from people who do things differently from me. It challenges me to keep pushing what I can do and the way I think about my next painting projects. Good job in your research!
