Miniatures Painting
Part of the joy of wargaming is that you get to paint your miniatures yourself. Once you've got the product you purchased home, you can add the paint necessary for the historical games you want to play. When painting miniatures, you'll want to first note if you want to go for speed, doing a lot at once, or if you want to paint each one with intricate detail.
In general, the process goes:
Cleaning
Assembling
Cleaning again
Priming
Adding a base coat
Adding in details (skin, uniform, weapons, etc)
Highlighting
Shading
Potentially adding in weathering (if that is right for your figure)
Then creating the base terrain, done last so if you spill, you can paint over it. This is just a loose overview of what painting a miniature would entail, in order to actually do the painting, you'll first need to know what equipment you need.
Painting Equipment
Brushes
As a beginner, you can get by with just a couple from your local craft store, so you can learn the techniques and come to grips on how to best paint your minis. But, as you get more experienced and want to upgrade, you'll want to get a higher quality set.
A few of the popular ranges of brushes, to suit different budgets include Artis Opus, Army Painter, and Windsor & Newton Series 7. Remember, you don’t need lots of brushes, so it can be as economical to buy just a few good quality expensive brushes, rather than whole sets.
There are now many specialist holders/clamps for holding figures while painting, but you can just use an old wine cork or bottle top to fix your figure to, to help you hold the figure for easier positioning and control.
Paints
Most often, water soluble acrylic paints are used to paint miniatures since they dry quickly, have a wide colour range and are water based, so if you mess up, it's easier to correct the issue. A few of our favourite paint ranges include:
Painting Techniques
Painting techniques range from basic to advanced, including things like layering, how to paint something to make it look like it's glowing, and blending paints. We've put together a few short guides on how to paint some of our favourite miniatures (as if we could pick just a few!), feel free to drop us a note with any questions about any product in our shop.
Basic Techniques
A few of the basic techniques you should try to master include:
Base Coating
Washes and Shading
Dry Brushing
Edge Highlighting
Layering
If you need want some guidance on basic painting techniques, you can check out Creative Twilight who has a number of guides on all sorts of painting. We also love Goobertown Hobbies' comprehensive video that covers all of the basics.
Intermediate Techniques
A few of the more intermediate techniques you should learn once you've mastered the basics include:
Glazing
Wet Blending
Two-Brush Blending
Object Source Lighting (OSL)
Non-Metallic Metal (NMM)
We love Miniature Landscape Hobbies' tips on how to speed up your miniature painting.
Advanced Techniques
Advanced Non-Metallic Metal (NMM)
Object Source Lighting (OSL) with Multiple Light Sources
Advanced Freehand Designs
Volumetric Highlighting and Shading
Reflective and Transparent Surfaces
Little Wars TV has a great couple of videos on how to paint for historical accuracy. And if you need more information on how to paint specific techniques, it's beneficial to search for them on YouTube as you'll find a tonne of good information, like this one about Object Source Light painting.
Skills Improvement
The main thing you can do to bring your skills into order is to practice! The more you practice painting the miniatures for your games, the better your will become at it. You can watch a number of tutorials to help you paint better and gain inspiration, pick up a painting guide book, watch videos from specialist websites, or look at YouTube channels dedicated to the practice. Painting Panzers has done a lovely review of our miniatures and will be putting up some painting guides for our products in the future, so keep an eye out there.
No matter what you do, the paint you add will be perfect because it will be yours! It can be helpful to get a few practice miniatures to paint before you dive into the miniatures you'll use for games so that you can be confident in your ability. It's also helpful to join in with the community online so that you can get tips and advice from fellow wargamers, whether you're painting for Napoleonic War Games or if you're working on some Bolt Action pieces.
Display Options
Whilst you may want to play with your miniatures all the time, it's likely that your range of miniatures won't be in use all the time, so it's important to invest in a solid display or storage solution. Not only will this protect them in the long term and make it so you don't have to shop and paint a whole new range often, but it also makes a great display in your home!
We recommend glass display cases, from either specialist places or budget friendly alternatives like Amazon or Ikea, and Feldherr storage boxes for displaying and storing.
Since you've gone and gotten yourself organised enough to have a display case, you may as well organise your paints and supplies while you're at it. We recommend having a storage box or cart with all of your supplies in order to keep note of what paint and supplies you actually have and don't accidentally add some that you already have.
No matter what miniatures you have, tackling painting them requires practice, patience and attention to detail. You'll be able to find all the help you need on various forums, YouTube channels, and wargaming websites, but if you can't, give a shout, we love to help out our fellow wargamers. Happy painting!
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