Painting Miniatures: Focus of series

I see a lot of people asking for help and information on painting miniatures, be it for those dipping their toe into wargames, or folks looking to add some bling to their board games. Honestly I’ve found most recommended sources offering advice that’s all over the place. To be fair miniature painting as a hobby can throw you down a geek rabbit hole.

You’ve got folks out there that focus on speed painting, cranking out tons of rank and file figures in the shortest time possible. You’ve got people presenting high end talent, geared towards those looking to get into competition class painting. You’ve got fans of airbrush painting. You’ve got military history folks talking about that elusive mixture to produce accurate dunkelgelb. Trying to wade through all that content as a painting neophyte can be daunting.

I’ve been into miniature wargaming for a while. I am not even close to a high skill, Golden Demon class type of painter (hats off to you, Ansel Elgort!). Nope. I’m pretty much at the ‘one foot rule’ skill level (looks good enough if you hold it 1 foot away). But I’ve been around the miniature painting block a bit and over the years picked up some tricks and tools of the hobby.

Throughout the next few months I’m going to put up a series of posts walking through the basics of miniature painting. First off, as any long time reader of my blog will know, I’ll be discussing how to paint up your figures to a tabletop standard. That is, figures looking decent enough to place on the game table. These will not be tutorials on techniques to produce phenomenal painted miniatures suitable for Games Workshop-type competitions.

It will however cover the basics and touch on what I call the ‘big three’ techniques of painting. Using these 3 painting techniques, you can produce some nice paint jobs. Nothing fancy, but enough to add some zing to those unpainted figures you might usually push around the tabletop. It will also go through every step of the process, from cutting plastic bits from the sprue (the ‘frame’ for plastic figures which are channels that plastic flows through when poured into a mold), to that final finish of matte spray. I hope folks find the information useful.