How to Paint Miniatures: A Beginner's Guide
A practical, no-jargon walkthrough of painting your first tabletop miniature — prep, base coats, washes, and highlights — plus the handful of tools actually worth buying.
Painting your first miniature is less about talent and more about following the right order of operations. Skip a step — priming, thinning your paint, letting layers dry — and even good color choices end up looking muddy. This guide covers that order, start to finish.
1. Prep and prime
Wash the model in lukewarm water with a drop of dish soap to strip mold-release agent, let it dry fully, then prime. Primer gives paint something to grip and establishes your base value. See our priming guide for spray vs. brush-on and common mistakes.
2. Base coat
Apply your main colors in thin, even coats — two thin coats beat one thick one every time. Thick paint pools in recesses and hides detail. If your paint doesn’t flow off the brush smoothly, thin it with water or a dedicated medium until it has the consistency of skim milk.
3. Wash the recesses
A wash (a thinned, ink-like paint) flows into recesses and around raised details, adding instant shadow and depth. Apply it over the whole model or just the recesses, and let it dry completely — rushing this step is the most common beginner mistake.
4. Highlight the edges
Once the wash is dry, mix your base color with a lighter shade and drybrush or edge-highlight the raised areas — the tips of folds, the edges of armor plates, the ridges of a face. This is what makes a model read as “painted” rather than “coated.”
5. Pick paints you’ll actually use
Brand doesn’t matter nearly as much as consistency — see Citadel vs. Vallejo vs. Scale75 if you’re deciding where to start. Whatever you choose, browse PaintMini’s paint library to check what’s compatible with the scheme you have in mind.
Skip the guesswork on your first model
If you’d rather see the finished scheme before you commit paint to plastic, upload a photo of your primed miniature to PaintMini — it generates a painted preview on your exact sculpt plus a step-by-step guide sized to your skill level, free for your first design.
Frequently asked questions
What's the minimum I need to buy to start painting miniatures?
A primer (spray or brush-on), 5–8 base colors, one dark wash, a size 0 or 1 brush, and a cheap wet palette. That's enough to finish a full model to a solid tabletop standard.
Do I need an airbrush to get good results?
No. Airbrushes speed up priming and zenithal highlighting, but every technique in this guide — base coats, washes, edge highlights — works fine with a brush.
How long does a first miniature usually take?
Budget 2–4 hours for a single infantry-scale model as a beginner, spread across a few sessions so washes and layers can dry properly.
See it painted before you touch a brush
Upload a photo of your miniature and PaintMini renders a finished scheme plus a step-by-step guide, free for your first design.