To Sprue or Not to Sprue

[Remalis]

Question to you about undercoating conventions for mass Gribblies... A friend of mine is painting up Necrons. He undercoats warriors while on the sprue. Then clips and cleans them up after. BUT they are Necrons... some extra mold lines are going to hide pretty well with some black paint and a quick metallic drybrush if you're lazy.
Nids though... any missed mold lines will stand out and spoil them.
For my current batch of gargoyles, I intend to clip and carefully clean each part of mold lines, and then partially assemble before the first undercoat goes anywhere near them...is this common wisdom though?
What's the hive consensus here of approaching rank and file?

[WestRider]

I do at least partial assembly on everything. There are some bits that painting on the sprue can work for, but with anything that comes in halves (like Gaunt/Gargoyle bodies), I find the cleanup to get them to go together smoothly takes way more time than any savings you might get from painting on the sprue.

If you get a good basecoat down, any details you can't reach with a brush probably won't really be noticeable anyhow.

There are exceptions, usually bigger stuff with layered detail (the Dimacheron comes to mind), but for little guys, just build then paint.

[Davor]

I did my Gargoyles on Sprue. I was trying something different. So I primed on Sprue and painted and then touched up after putting them together. I suck at painting so it looked the same on sprue or not.

[Remalis]

Davor Lol... oww ...bit harsh on yourself :-)
I can see from many of your other posts you feel much the same way as I do about about my own painting skills...
I'm usually pretty happy with what I turn out.....Then I look at the talent in the painting section here.

Next I flip the table, snap my brushes and weep in the corner for a while. :-p

I'm doing this first set of gargoyles off the sprue. We'll see how I feel about the next ones...

[Davor]

Never snapped a brush yet, but almost through minis against the wall Remalis.

Speaking of brushes bought some new ones so hoping they will be better. Just like buying new dice, hoping they preform better than the last bunch.

[Moontyranid]

i still have half a mini in the wall. metalmodels and plasticwalls dont really match.