My name is Drybrush Threepwood, I want to be a pirate

My team is assembled, clean, the base is covered with sand, I'm almost ready to start painting.

When I first started playing tabletop games and painting miniatures, I would already have started, just applying paint to the bare metal.  That works, but it's easy to miss some details, and even worse, paint doesn't always stick to pewter as well or as evenly as it should.  I quickly started using a base coat (coloring the entire figure with one color of paint, then applying the final colors over that).  At first I used a paintbrush and normal paints, but that quickly became tedious.  These days I use spray paint.

Put all your figures on a flat cardboard box, GO OUTSIDE, lie your figures on their backs, spray them from the bottom.  Let them dry about 10 minutes, flip them over, spray from the bottom again.  Wait another 10 minutes or so, stand them up, and spray them from several angles.  What you're looking at there is the first coat of spray from the top.  I needed a few more layers to get every surface, but that's time well invested.  When they're ready, take them off the box.  Sometimes the spray paint sticks them down, use a knife or something to pry them free.  Damaging the box is no big deal, but try not to damage the bases.

Ready to paint now?  Almost.  Time for some drybrushing.
Take your largest, oldest, cheapest paintbrush - it won't be good for much else afterwards.  Dip it lightly into some white (or very light gray) paint - less is more.  Swish it around on some paper until almost no paint is coming off any more:

Then firmly hold a model and do the same swishing motion over your figure.  What's happening is that the paint on the outside of the brush is nearly dry, but higher up and inside the brush it's still most, not quite wet.  It applies a very thin coating, mostly to raised surfaces, while getting almost no paint in deep crevasses.  The end effect should look something like this:

There we go, now this is starting to look like something!  This kind of drybrushing has several benefits.  It helps you see the detail while you're painting, and generally makes the whole operation almost a paint-by-numbers operation.  Also, unless you paint really thick, the final layer of paint will be lighter over the white areas and darker over what is now black, giving a pleasing 3-d fade effect.

Make sure you wash your drybrush well, the paint goes all through the bristles and it's basically totally dry by now.

Next step, I'll finally get started actually painting colors on actual figures, which you may recall as the entire point of this exercise!