This article was written with the purpose of giving a beginner a guide to painting figures.  It may also serve the purpose of an intermediate or advanced painter to use a couple of different techniques.  This guide is written to be very specific and not to mention methods of painting without explanation.  The methods are few in number, but described in detail.

Don’t be misled when you read articles stating that painting is a three step process, because it is not and those articles will “leave a bad taste in your mouth” once you find out it involves additional work.  I just lay it all out for you here and now.  Be prepared for any single miniature to go through a ten step process to completion.  Below is a list of those very steps with an estimated time for each step per single figure.

1.  Selection  (how fast can you shop?)
2.  Filing & Washing  (20 min)
3.  Assembly  (10 min)
4.  Priming  (10 min)
5.  Painting  (30 – 60 min)
6.  Paint Washing  (5 min)
7.  Highlighting  (20 min)
8.  Detail  (20 min)
9.  Sealer  (5 min)
10.  Transplant  (5 min)

The estimated times are based on my current skill level.  Beginners should add time as appropriate.  There are often a full day of lapse between some steps to allow for certain steps to dry as well.

You should have plenty of light available from all angles such as overhead, left, right, and a close-up desk lamp option.  Lighting should be a mixture of types as well to balance your colors better.  They can range from flourescant, tungsten, soft tungsten, halogen, and natural daylight tungsten bulbs.  Direct sunlight shielded with white shades is also a good source to better balance your colors.  You should have room enough to layout a paper towel, water bowl, paint mixing palette, brushes, and most importantly be at a comfortable height where you are not crouching.

Open your package and lay out all the pieces on your table or paper towel.  Carefully remove any small pieces from their mold if necessary as you should be able to tell which pieces are meant to go on the figure and which are meant to go in the garbage.  Now that all your pieces are laid out, you can start fixing those small factory imperfections such as excess metal otherwise known as flash, or noticable lines along smooth surfaces.  You can achieve this a number of different ways.  You can carefully cut away from yourself and fingers using your hobby knife, use a pair of metal cutters, or file away the excess with your hobby knife file area (or a specific finer files shown below). Once you work away all the excess, you will want to actually wash away all of the grime and oil from your hands off of the figure. 

You can do this by simply running warm soap and water over the figure and lightly scrubbing it away as you would on your own hands.  Make sure you rinse well in warm water afterwards as soap will not be kind to your figure during the paint process.  Allow the figure to dry completely before you start the next step of gluing, usually an hour of air-dry but this process can be sped up by means of a hair dryer or sunlight.

There are many types of glues available, but I will discuss only two.  The first is a gel glue which is noticably thicker in nature.  This is best for very small pieces that hardly have surface to surface to glue to.  The gel acts as a wall to hold the pieces in place.  Sometimes the “wall” is noticable, but for the most part the stability it adds is worth it.

The second type of glue I use is the thicker super glues that take a while to dry, but are very strong when they do fully dry.  You should apply pressure to each piece for at least 15 seconds when using this glue before letting go.  If you find that the pieces are not sticking it could be due to water from the washing being trapped in an area and escaped.  Take your paper towel and dry each piece and try again.

 Once the figure is assembled, you should glue it to a primary painting surface.  I use a combination of small 1” x 1” wood planks and plastic bottle caps.  I use the wood planks for very small feet (like humans) or single surfaces (like unlimited Leech Medics).  I use the caps for all other figures as they allow for the most angle availability when you are painting. 

Allow your glue to dry for at least a day before you go to the next phase of priming.

Prime is used to allow the paint to stick to the miniature.  To see the difference for yourself, paint a few swipes on a non-primed and then on a primed miniature. 

Here again we find there are all sorts of options available for you to prime your figure.  I’ll write about one of those which is typically referred to as spray primer.  Spray primer can be found at department stores for the most part, but can be found at any store mentioned in the overview.  You can purchase the more expensive brands or you can stick with general purpose, both are perfect for this cause.  When selecting your primer, make sure you choose a clean metal spray primer (white or black), or some kind of metal primer (gray, black, or white).  The expensive brands for miniature painting will be fine too as they are engineered for pewter and metal miniature painting. 

To preserve your can of paint, you should spray prime between three to five figures at a time.  Hold the can six to eight inches from the figures and spray in sweeping motions from all angles (top, front, sides, underneath) until you notice a complete smooth surface on the figure.

Allow this to dry at least a day to ensure the best adhesion of paint to the miniature. 

Brushes will be the most simple, yet most important of your painting adventure.  I cannot really recommend one brush, because I find that there is a brush for every step in which brushes are needed. 

 When we get into the painting section, I’ll describe more on brushes.  For now you can get away with having a sable brush (for your base coat), oversize canvas paint brush (for paint washing), detail brush (for your highlights), and a spotter brush (great for fine detail and eyes).  Don’t spend too much money at first, you can always start by just getting any department store brush of small, medium, and large size.  These will get the job done, but in time, you will want more selection.

One of the most often asked questions.  Today I’ll show you two of my favorite (and I’ve tried a lot).  People are partial to their own brands however, so don’t be turned away based on my recommendation alone.  I have thus far kept this article royalty-free, but I don’t see how I can avoid that here. 

About eighty percent of every figure that gets paint applied to it from my brushes is from the brand Vallejo.  They are small dropper style bottles that range anywhere from two to three dollars per bottle.  I like the dropper bottles because it is easier and less messy to mix paint colors and if you go to mix it again later, you can be certain that two drops of X and one drop of Y will give you the same color each time. 

The other twenty percent of color applied to my figures comes from the Faskolor brand of paint.  These are also dropper style bottles, but I rarely mix paint colors with them.  These bottles are a bit more expensive, but will last you much longer.  They have weird names of color, but my favorite are the Faspearl X colors.  They absolutely have the richest color to them and are great for that finishing touch of detail.  Faschange X colors are also cool as they can add a nice highlight to some figures of choice.

 Racks for your paint are also important and speed up the process of selection and prevent knocking bottles around everywhere.

Most of you have probably already read a handful of articles and when you get here, you become frustrated because of all the different styles of painting you can do.   I will one way of painting, that not that painful, and is very effective and can make your figures look real good.  This method applies to metal miniatures only, plastic figure painting is handled a bit differently.

 First off, you will get your primed figure which you’ve let dry for at least a half day or so.  This way, the brush bristles will not stick to the primer due to it not being dry yet.

You will want to go ahead and select your color scheme here.  Shake your bottles up real nice and very good for at least 30 seconds to one minute.  The goal is to paint a very thin (by either adding paint thinner, or water) to a drop of each drop or two of paint you want to apply to your miniature.  (Write down your mixtures as you will need them again later)  You do this so that no detail is lost with thick paint covering areas which do not need to be covered or filled up.  Be careful during this process.  It is not critical or anything, but make sure you try and stay as clean as possible, trying not to bleed over into other areas.  If you find the paint is bleeding out of control, then it is too thin, add a drop or two more of paint until you find the right mixture.  A trick of mine is to not try and paint very fine or thin areas with this base coat.  I like to allow the wash (discussed later) to take it’s place, then paint the thinner areas.  Here is what a typical base coat should look like after it dries, which it should do very quickly.

A lot of articles talk about a wash, but most fall short of what type of wash it is referencing.  I choose the paint wash for many reasons.  At the top of the list, it’s easy to clean-up afterwards.  I also have found how much to thin a particular drop of paint with acrylic thinner (found at any hobby store by Model Masters) that adheres to the metals.  I find that a mixture of eight drops of thinner, to one drop of well shaken paint, will do the trick.  Sometimes, if the air is dry or humid, then that mixture will vary from six to ten depending on the circumstances.

 Don’t be afraid of your wash, but at first it is OK to be.  You may want to make your first mixture consist of a high thinner content so as to not completely ruin your base coated miniature.  The idea of a wash, is to allow a dark shade of color (typically black) to seep into cracks where light does not typically shine.  Just look at pictures you have lying around and notice how shades appear depending on the light source.  This is what a wash is out to emulate.

 Once mixed very well with a brush, thoroughly coat your miniature from head to toe, brushing it on primarily using upward strokes so the paint will fall underneath the recesses and grooves.  However you put it on, put it on good with a tick brush.

After about one minute of drying, go back over it with the same brush, accept this time with no mixture in the bristles.  Simply dab your brush into the over-puddled areas that too much of the wash mixture has settled.  After about another 10 minutes, you may want to check on it again and do a bit more dabbing.

Now that your wash has dried (usually over an hour or so), you want to bring back some of that base coat to life.  Re-mix your paint again, and thin it with water or thinner again, but be extremely careful not to mix it too thin.  Simply brush over the larger raised portions of muscles, bends, ties, outer legs and cheeks, clothing with the appropriate color.  After this dries add a lighter color to your mixture, and do the same process again (sometimes this is not necessary though, use your best judgement) accept this time in a smaller area on top of your last area you did.  You would want to do this as to not reveal too much of a noticable line though from one color to the next.

Typically hair and tattered clothing is made to look real using the drybrush technique.  This is where you take a non-thinned drop of paint and a ragged brush and once you’ve dipped the brush into the paint just a tad, you knock off the paint as much as possible onto a paper towel.  Then, you swipe back and forth onto your area.   You may not notice paint being applied at first, but eventually you will see some on there after repeating the steps a few times.  Try and not rush this part as is very delicate, but very easy as well.

Once your highlighting has dried (very quickly), you will want to add very fine detail to teeth, jewels, fingernails, eyes, spikes and so forth to your model.  Again, thin down your paint, but make sure again you do not thin too much because this part is very noticable on key areas.

When detailing the eyes, thin down white and go over the eyeball a lot until it reaches a real good white coat.  Be careful not to allow the white to bleed into where the wash has caused a shadow because this is what makes the eyes look good.  After that, get a thin mixture to use for your eyeball which should only take you about one or two dabs to get on there.

Allow your model to dry for at least another hour to ensure all the paint is good and dry.  To further proect your hard work from handling and dust, apply a thin coat (very thin) of acrylic thinner matte or glossy protector.  Use glossy for metal figures, and matte for most other figures.  Most of the time, two thin coats are better than one.  This will allow you to handle the figure a bit and make it battle ready.

Thank you for reading this article, I hope it helps you in your painting adventure.  Should you have any questions feel free to email me.