My Altdorfers are painted crisp-and-clean. The first thing to do is use a white undercoat - nothing says "clean" like bright, vibrant colours. I then paint on the red first, and the blue second (because you can corrent smudges of red with blue, but it's very hard the other way around) followed by the skin tone and black for all the metal bits. After that I paint the metal in Boltgun and apply a hefty drybrush of Mithril for that crisp steel shine. At this point I usually need to touch up the red and blue again (tip: use a light grey over any smudges you made over the red, before applying more red, to reduce the colour difference).
Now the model is in its base colours. I use a special mix of Red Ink and Brown Ink (about 2 parts red to 1 part brown), watered down with a TINY amount of dish soap to break the surface tension, and liberally apply it over the red areas. If you want to, you can then mix red and bleched bone about 3 to 1 and highlight the red, but it will look fine with just ink. On the blue parts, I don't ink, but apply a highlight with blue mixed with white (say 3 parts white to 1 part blue, as the white is very quickly lost in the mix - mess around with it a bit to get a good highlight colour).
For extra contrast on the miniature, I then paint the socks a pure white, and paint all the ribbons and feathers white too, as a fresh undercoat. You can then paint the ribbons and feathers as you please - in my army, ribbons are yellow and feathers are white with a red tip, but you can change this if you want to use these details to set your regiments apart from each other.
Skin areas are given a lick of flesh wash and then it's just a matter of painting eyes and bases. Presto!
Here's a couple of Swordsmen regiments so you can see the result - note that the colours are a bit distorted by my crappy photogrpahy:
