Miniature Painting for Beginners: From Primer to Display

Miniature painting transforms gray plastic or resin models into characters, monsters, and armies with personality. The hobby looks intimidating from the outside, but the core techniques are learnable in a few hours. A painted model, even imperfectly, always looks better than bare plastic on the table.

Essential Supplies

Paints: Citadel (Games Workshop), Vallejo, Army Painter, and Scale75 are the major brands. Start with a basic set of 10-15 colors: white, black, red, blue, yellow, green, brown, flesh tone, metallic silver, metallic gold, and a few mid-tones. Acrylic paints are water-based, non-toxic, and clean up with water.

Brushes: you need three to start. A size 1 round brush for details, a size 2 for general painting, and a size 4 or larger for basecoating large surfaces. Synthetic brushes are cheaper and work fine for beginners. Kolinsky sable brushes (natural hair) hold points better but cost significantly more.

Primer: spray primer (Citadel Chaos Black, Army Painter matte white, or Rustoleum 2X primer) provides a surface for paint to grip. Bare plastic repels paint. Priming takes 30 seconds and is the single most important step. Black primer hides missed spots and creates natural shadows. White primer makes colors brighter. Gray is a versatile compromise.

Other essentials: a palette (wet palette keeps paints workable for hours), water cup, paper towels, and decent lighting. A desk lamp with daylight bulbs prevents color distortion.

The Basic Process

Step 1: Assemble and prime. Glue your model together (plastic cement for plastic, super glue for resin and metal). Spray prime in thin, even coats from 8-12 inches away. Let dry completely (15-30 minutes).

Step 2: Basecoat. Apply solid flat colors to each area. Armor gets metallic silver. Skin gets flesh tone. Cloth gets whatever color you choose. Thin your paint with water until it flows like milk: two thin coats always look better than one thick coat. Thick paint obscures details.

Step 3: Wash. Apply a wash (thinned dark paint, like Agrax Earthshade or Nuln Oil) over the entire model. The wash flows into recesses, creating instant shadows and definition. This single step transforms flat-looking models into ones with apparent depth. Let dry completely before proceeding.

Step 4: Layer/highlight. Re-apply the basecoat color to raised surfaces, leaving the wash visible in recesses. Then apply a lighter version of the basecoat color to the most prominent edges and raised points. This creates a highlight that simulates light hitting the model from above.

Step 5: Base. The base is the small platform your model stands on. Apply texture paint, glue sand or flock (fake grass), add small rocks. A finished base makes the model look complete rather than floating on a plastic disk.

Techniques to Learn Next

Drybrushing: load a brush with paint, wipe most of it off on a paper towel, then lightly drag the nearly-dry brush across textured surfaces. The remaining paint catches on raised edges, creating fast highlights. Excellent for fur, chainmail, stone, and terrain.

Edge highlighting: use a fine brush to paint thin lines along the sharpest edges of armor, weapons, and fabric folds. This technique makes models pop on the tabletop but requires a steady hand and thin paint.

Wet blending: apply two colors next to each other while both are still wet, then blend where they meet with a clean brush. Creates smooth gradients on cloaks, wings, and large flat surfaces.

Glazing: apply extremely thin translucent layers of color to tint underlying paint. Build up color gradually. Useful for creating smooth transitions between shadow and highlight.

Painting for Tabletop vs Display

Tabletop standard means the model looks good from arm’s length during a game. Basecoat, wash, and one highlight layer achieves this in 30-60 minutes per model. For armies of 50+ models, tabletop standard is the practical target.

Display standard means the model looks good under close inspection. Multiple glazed highlight layers, freehand details, non-metallic metal (NMM) techniques, and object source lighting (OSL) can take 10-40 hours per model.

Start at tabletop standard. Improvement comes through repetition, not perfectionism. Your 50th model will look dramatically better than your first regardless of technique used.

For more tabletop hobby content, see our Warhammer 40K Getting Started and Tabletop Terrain Building. For the games themselves, check Best Dungeon Crawl Board Games.