My golden rules of painting (why do I keep breaking them?!)

I have spent a fair bit of time thinking while painting (what else can you do other than listen to music?) and it keeps occurring to me that there are small "rules" that I know I should be following when I am building and painting models. A lot of the time I seem to ignore them against my better sense. I will try and lay out my largest sins here-

1: Use more water. The number one rule and the one I always seem to break. I don't think you can ever use too much water with your paint. I am constantly having to remind myself to keep it wet. the paint just flows so much easier with a fresh brush and wet paint. Why is it that I will battle a brush that is too dry and low on paint to keep applying paint badly when I could refresh the paint and water the brush?

2: It is not a race. When you are up against a deadline, real or self-imposed, rushing does not help. More haste= less speed as we all learnt as kids. If it is going to take an hour to basecoat a model, it is going to take an hour. Either make more time to paint or accept you won't finish it in time. If I find myself rushing the model usually suffers for it and the time actually saved is marginal due to having to retouch areas.

3: The basecoat is everything. It may look like crap relative to the finished model and take a lifetime but in my experience getting a neat and tidy basecoat makes everything else so much easier. Even if you end up having to repaint some sections due to having to force paint into recesses this is much more preferable to leaving bare metal (that the primer may have missed). A good basecoat makes inking so much easier and reliable and, once highlights catch the main focus, a plain or underpainted area is not so noticable as long as it is neat and tidy.

4: Work from the inside out. If you are painting a guy like this orc with a helmet, it is a hell of a lot easier to paint his neck first then the outer parts of the helmet. I find it so easy to just start on the most obvious part of a model such as a shoulder pad or face than the inside of the armpit socket or elbows (on a marine for example) Then when you have a beautifully basecoated shoulder pad you find you have to go back and mess it up getting the the interior.

5: If you find an error, fix it: It is annoying as hell to find a little bit of flash hanging onto a finger like a Floridian voting chad. If you cut it off you end up with some shiny metal and need to do a cover up job, usually needing two or more coats due to coverage. If I don't fix it at the first opportunity it will still be there when I come to highlight and then I will be even more annoyed at myself for not sorting it out.

Here endeth the lessons for now. The model shown is an old orc model that I finished this last week. I was trying to play around with the monochromatic paintjob of just mainly metal. I used loads of washes on the armor and then spent an age doing the fine highlight in Mithril Silver. This model was bought many years ago to be a D&D character but I never got round to him. He almost got ebayed the other week, but I decided that was not his fate as the model is great.