Miniature painting

A miniature is a small sculpted figure, typically 28–35mm tall for wargaming figures and up to 200mm for display busts and pieces. Painting one well means solving the same problems as any figurative painting — form, light, colour, texture — at a scale where a brush hair is a visible tool mark.

The craft divides by purpose. Tabletop standard means painted to look good at arm’s length on a game board, in batches, quickly: clean basecoats, a wash to define recesses, one or two highlights. Display standard means a single model painted over many hours with blended transitions, painted light sources and freehand detail, to be looked at closely. They use the same materials and almost nothing else in common, and a great deal of beginner frustration comes from applying display-standard expectations to a tabletop-standard project.

What makes it unusually rewarding is the feedback rate. A tabletop model takes an evening, so you complete something and learn from it every session — which is a much faster loop than most crafts offer.

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   Step 1: Thin your paints

   If you take one thing from this page: acrylic miniature paint from the pot is too thick. Thinned to roughly the consistency of milk, it flows into detail and leaves the sculpted texture visible. Unthinned, it fills the recesses, obscures the detail the sculptor put there, and dries with visible ridges. Two thin coats always beat one thick one.

   You will know it worked when: Detail stays visible and the surface is smooth.

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   Step 2: Prime the model

   Acrylic does not adhere reliably to bare plastic or resin. A thin, even primer coat — spray or brush-on — gives the paint something to grip and unifies the surface. Black primer makes shadows easy and colours dull; white makes colours vivid and shadows hard; grey is the sensible default.

   You will know it worked when: Paint that stays on and behaves predictably.

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   Step 3: Use a wet palette

   A shallow tray with damp paper over a sponge, keeping acrylics workable for hours instead of minutes. It costs £15 or can be made from a takeaway container, baking parchment and kitchen roll, and it changes the experience of painting more than any brush upgrade.

   You will know it worked when: Paint stays wet long enough to thin and blend.

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   Step 4: Learn three techniques in order

   Basecoat (flat colour, thinned, two coats), wash or shade (a thin dark medium that flows into recesses and defines them), and drybrush or edge highlight (a light colour on raised edges). Those three alone produce a perfectly respectable tabletop model.

   You will know it worked when: A finished model that reads well at arm’s length.

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   Step 5: Finish a whole model before starting another

   A shelf of half-painted figures is the hobby’s characteristic failure state. Base it, varnish it, call it done.

   You will know it worked when: A completed model, which teaches more than three abandoned ones.

The single insight that separates competent miniature painting from beginner work is that a miniature is very small and will usually be seen from 40cm or more away. At that distance, subtlety disappears. The eye reads shape from contrast, and a model painted with realistic, gentle tonal variation looks flat and muddy — while one painted with contrast that would be absurd on a life-size figure looks correct.

This is why the standard method is basecoat, shade, highlight rather than blending from the start: it deliberately exaggerates the difference between recess and raised surface so that the sculpt reads. Recesses go darker than they would in life; edges go lighter.

The next step up is choosing a light source. Rather than highlighting every raised edge equally, decide the light comes from above and slightly to one side, and highlight only the surfaces that would catch it. This is called zenithal lighting when done systematically, and it is the difference between a model that looks painted and one that looks lit.

Everything beyond that — wet blending, glazing, non-metallic metal, object source lighting, freehand — is a refinement of the same principle: putting light and shadow where you have decided they should be, rather than where the sculpt happens to suggest.

• Brushes — Two matter: a size 1 or 2 for most work and a size 0 for detail. Counterintuitively, a larger brush with a good point is better for detail than a tiny one, because it holds more paint and keeps a finer tip. Kolinsky sable holds a point best and is expensive; good synthetics are now close and cost a fifth as much. Never let paint dry in the ferrule — that, not use, is what kills brushes.
• Paints — Acrylics formulated for miniatures, in dropper bottles or pots. Ten well-chosen colours beat fifty random ones: a dark, a mid and a light of two or three colours you actually use, plus black, white and a flesh tone.
• Washes and shades — Very thin, heavily pigmented and flow-modified so they run into recesses. The single biggest visual improvement per minute spent, and the reason a beginner model can look good after one evening.
• Contrast or speed paints — A more recent category: high-pigment paints in a flow medium that shade and basecoat in one coat over a light primer. They compress three steps into one and are genuinely transformative for painting large numbers of models.
• Wet palette — Keeps acrylics workable. The highest-value cheap purchase in the hobby.
• Varnish — A matt or satin protective coat. Gaming models get handled constantly and unvarnished paint chips within a few sessions.
• Light and magnification — A daylight lamp and a magnifier. Painting under a warm household bulb makes colour judgement unreliable.

• Tabletop standard — Painted to look good at arm’s length on a table, quickly and repeatably. What the overwhelming majority of painting is for, and the standard most tutorials quietly are not aimed at — which is the single biggest source of frustration for beginners.
• Batch painting — Whole units at once, one stage at a time. A production discipline rather than an artistic one, and the only realistic way an army gets finished.
• Display and competition — Single models, unlimited time, judged closely. A genuinely different pursuit sharing the tools — blending, freehand, scenic bases — with its own competitions and its own conventions.
• Contrast and slapchop — Modern speed methods that do most of the shading with the paint’s own behaviour over a prepared value underlayer. They changed the entry point of the hobby substantially and are worth understanding as a method rather than a shortcut.
• Non-metallic metal and object-source lighting — Painting the appearance of metal, or of light coming from within the model, entirely with ordinary paint. The two techniques that most define competition work, and both are illustration skills rather than model-making ones.
• Historical figures — Painted to a documented reality, with the research that implies. A separate community with a separate literature, and standards of accuracy that fantasy painting does not have to meet.
• Scale models and dioramas — Vehicles, aircraft and scenes, where weathering and context carry the piece. Overlaps heavily in technique and barely at all in culture, and diorama building is the natural progression from a well-painted single figure.