Getting Started Painting Miniatures

Painting a miniature involves several steps to achieve results that you will be really pleased with. The basic steps are listed below. The temptation is to dive right in an begin painting. This will give results that you are unlikely to be happy with. Take it slow and you will find that the end, in this case, justifies the means.

You will want to wash the figure with soapy water. During the casting process a layer of separation powder or fluid can remain on the miniatures when the two halves of the mold are separated.

Next, mount the figure on its base if the base is separate. I find that either hot glue or super glue work well to attatch the figure to its base. For slotted bases, I apply glue along the narrow ridge that fits into the slot and then insert the ridge until the glue dries. Once dry, I fill in the gaps in the slot with hot glue, to keep the ridge from moving within the slot and breaking the bond.

It may be necessary to remove any uneven areas on the bottom of the figure itself so that it will sit level on the base. Miniatures that use a separate base tend to come in two types, the flat square or rectangle type and the same type, but with a slot in it. The latter type are compatible with miniatures that have no flat base, but rather a long vertical ridge which the miniature is connected to at the feet of the miniature. If you are assembling one such miniature, the ridge will fit nicely into the slot. It will need to be glued there by putting some super glue on the ridge and then inserting into the slot. Super glue works best when a small amount is evenly spread over the entire surface area that will be in contact with the base and form the bond. If putting glue on the ridge will not glue it sure enough, glue can put put on the bottom of the feet of the miniature to give more glued surface area.

Once the miniature is glued to the base, the molding lines, or flash, must be removed. The best technique for this is to take a very sharp xacto knife and scrape along the flash line. The flash, the lead that seeps out of the mold when the miniature is cast, will peel off with not too much trouble if the knife is sharp. Be careful that you are not drawing the knife toward your thumb or hand as these knives are very sharp and can give a nasty cut. In the light of envirnonmental concerns about lead, especially with small children around, either do your flash removal outside where the filings go where they cannot do any harm, or if you are inside, place newspapers under your work and when done, carefully roll them up and throw them away, not allowing any of the lead filings to fall out onto the floor. Learning disabilities have been linked to children having exposure to lead at a young age.

If you are working with plastic or resin miniatures, the process is the same, but more care must be taken to assure that the knife is sharp and that one uses light pressure when removing flash. For metal figures, a small file can be used to get into small areas, but such should not be done with plastic miniatures. If, after removing the flash, one finds pits in the miniature, these can be filled in with Testors® filler or with modelling putty, such as Milliput™. The figure can also be sanded to take off any bumps that result from the molding process.

Once the figure is thus prepared, it is time to prime the figure. I use spray enamel paint, the cheap kind found at hardware stores. Depending on the effect that you want, you can use any color to prime the miniature with, but as a general rule, white is by far the best, or perhaps a light grey. It has been my experience that when a darker color is used, it is very difficult to get colors bright which are painted over it. On the other hand, when using a light or white undercoat, it is often difficult to achieve dark shadows in the depressions on the figure that are to be shadowed. An alternate methood is to paint white and then brush black into the cracks before the base coat is applied. This will allow highlights to be bright and shadows to be darker, higher contrast. If you are doing something metallic, some have suggested spraying the undercoat with chrome or silver. Once it is painted over, one can take a piece of tape that has been made less sticky by sticking it to a piece of cloth or one's pants and then ripped off, which can be stuck to the paint over it once done, which will lift off small specks of the exterior paint, leaving silver specs, as if the paint were peeling. This is good for vehicles or robots. Otherwise, I would advise sticking to white.

When the piece has dried, we are ready to do the base coat. Before starting to paint, it is a good idea to envision what the piece will look like when done. It is best not to charge into a figure without considering the whole color scheme that will be used. Colors should be chosen that will go well together. If something is meant to stand out, one should pick colors that highly contrast them. For a color to contrast with another it must be either brighter or darker than the color to be contrasted against or on the opposite side of the color wheel, which is reproduced below. A short discussion of color theroy will follow.

What are called the 'primary colors' are red, yellow, and blue. They are thus called because all other colors can be made by mixing different combinations of them along with white added to lighten a color or black to darken it. The colors in between these are those that result from mixing the two colors in even proportions. Red and blue make purple, blue and yellow make green, and yellow and red make orange. Purple, green, and orange are called the secondary colors.

These can be mixed with their neighboring colors to come up with even more colors. It is often beneficial to actually make a color wheel for your own use as a guide.

When purchasing paints, it is important to make sure that you have one of each primary color as well as black and white. I suggest buying brown, metallic silver, and metallic gold as well. This will give you the basis of what you need to get started. As said above, if you have little experience with painting and/or color theory, it would be good to take a piece of white construction paper and make a color wheel of your own so that you will know what colors that you can get out of your basic paints, also called pigments. Start by making a circle of red, yellow, and blue in a triangle. Then mix one part of red with one part of blue to make the purple, which we will make a filled circle of between the blue and red. Do this as well for blue mixed with yellow, and yellow mixed with red. The wheel can be furthur expanded out by mixing 1:1 the red and purple, the purple and blue, and so on around the color wheel. These colors are called the tertiary colors. In all we have made a pallete, or color selection, of 12 colors from our original 3.

As said before, white can be added to any of these to get a lighter, softer color. As it gets lighter, it is said to become more pastel. When black is added, the color becomes darker and less intense or "saturated". Brown can be added to make a color more earthy or subdued. Silver and gold are interesting colors in and of themselves, but they can be added to mixed colors to give them luster or even to make them shiny. If a small amount is added, the color will get a satin finish to it. If one wishes to paint a red silk hat on a figure, mix up a color of red that is just darker than the color that you want the hat to be. When you add silver, it will lighten the color slightly. Mix in a very small amount of silver and mix thoroughly until no streaks of either of the original color remain, leaving a well blended satiny red. Experiment to see what you get by adding more and more silver to the mixture. You might want to add a blob of metallic and satin red next to the red circle on the color wheel to remind you later of colors that you can mix with red and silver. You could also do this with red and gold to see what you get. The key point here is experimentation and to be able to see at a glance what colors that you have available to you when you sit down to plan the coloring of features for a figure. It makes it easier to visualize what the piece will look like when you are done. Continue by mixing silver and gold to each of the other colors on the color wheel if you desire.

Having a basic understanding of paints and how colors mix to get other colors, we can hold up a miniature and plan our painting. It is best not to rush into a piece and start painting. Once a miniature is painted, it is a shame to have to remove paint that took much time to put on in the first place. On the other hand, miniatures are often not cheap, so you want to get the best possible effect. If you happen to paint an area and later change your mind, all is not lost. If the paint is still wet, you can get a paintbrush saturated with water and brush over the area, letting the water in the brush mix with the paint to make a thin wash, which will drip away the color. Care must be taken not to ruin other painted areas. Even after acrylic paint is dried it can get an undesireable bumpy surface if it gets wet before it is spray sealed. More on this later.

If the paint has dried already and you are not at all pleased with the outcome of the piece and want to start all over again, this is possible. Soaking the miniature in Pine-Sol® or other pine cleaner for a day will do an excellent job of removing either acrylic or enamel paint. I would recommend using a major brand of pine cleaner, as the cheaper brands apparently have less pine oil. The pine oil is apparently what removes the paint and sealant. I have removed paint with pine-oil cleaner that I never would have guessed that I could have gotten off.

I understand that one can also remove paint with oven cleaner, but have not used that for some time, and I cannot remember the exact results that I got. Spray the oven cleaner onto the figures and then use a mildly abrasive scrub brush to take the paint off. If there is still paint remaining, repeat the process.

If the area that you want to correct is small, you can either paint over it or scrape the paint gently off with an xacto knife. Painting over mistakes will tend to make buildups which obscure fine detail of the figure. Scraping must be done with caution so as not to take off detail or make deep scratches or gouges in the miniature.

Once you have decided on a color scheme, you can begin to paint the base coat. If you are going to do any washings later, you will want to pick a color that is slightly lighter than the color that you want to end up with. This is because the wash will tend to darken the base color before you are done.

I like to start with the deepest, hardest to get to areas first, working my way outwards to the most easily accessible areas. Some painters have described it as painting items on the miniature "in the order you would get dressed." Since shoes go on after socks, paint the socks first. This works fairly well since if you get paint on the shoes when painting the socks, this area will then get painted over anyway when you paint the shoes.

This part of painting the miniature reminds me of the old paint-by-number paintings. You just fill in the colors. You are trying to get a nice, opaque covering of each area. If I am going to wash with inks, I normall will go ahead and do all of the base colors before proceding. If you intend to wash with paint, it is best to do one section at a time by doing the base coat, washing, and then drybrushing, as you will be working with variations on your base color and won't want it to dry out before you get done.

This is an example of blackwashing, which can be used as an undercoat over which to paint so that you can get bright brights and dark darks. One can also use this as a quick accent to a miniature that you want to use in roleplaying games or otherwise but don't have time to paint before using them. It brings out the highlights, and can be done quickly once you learn how to drybrush well.