How to paint Skaven - efficiently!

I am back from our Gaming Day (much fun, big success - expect photos soon) and back from my trip to Ingolstadt. On the menu today: Painting Skaven without going nuts.

I've painted quite a number of Skaven and still consider myself sane. You may now ask: How did I do that? The answer lies in spray painting the model with brown instead of black or white and to paint a lot of models at once. Also, you might consider ordering some seasons of your favorite TV show from Amazon (I always recommend The Big Bang Theory) before you start - because it's still not magic and will take a while ;-)

Spray painting your Skaven brown will reduce the paint time dramatically

Alas, I can only provide you with a written guide. But I plan to do a step by step guide in the future (since you can never have enough rats on the table), so you can see how easily this can be done:

1. Build your Skaven
2. Use sand and glue or textured paint, e.g. those from the Vallejo range to cover the base
3. Spray Paint your Skaven with brown paint. I suggest Army Painter's Leather Brown
4. Paint everything on the model with its base colour (e.g. metal parts with Chainmail, cloth with Scab Red, skin with Elf Flesh etc.)
5. Wash the whole model (e.g. skin with Ogryn Flesh wash, red and brown parts and the base with Devlan Mud wash, everything else with Badab Black wash)
6. Let the miniature dry and drybrush every part from the model with a brighter colour than you used in step 4 (e.g. red parts with Blood Red, metal parts with Mithril Silver etc.)
7. Finish the details on each miniature
8. Decorate the base if you want to

The reason this way is great is because brown is a perfect basic colour for almost every other colour, especially for red, skin tones, and brown obviously. So you'll need much fewer layers of paint until the miniature is done. I hope this helps. Do you know other ways to stay sane while painting hundreds of Skaven?