How to Start Miniature Painting: Beginner Tips and Essential Techniques  

Getting started with miniature painting can feel overwhelming, especially when you're trying to figure out which paints, brushes, and techniques you actually need. If you're new to miniature painting, learning a few basic steps like priming, base coating, and highlighting can make the process much easier. In this beginner's guide, we'll cover the essential miniature painting tips you need to start painting with confidence. 

There’s something incredibly satisfying about watching a grey miniature slowly come to life. A little colour gives it personality. A wash suddenly reveals details you barely noticed before. A few highlights make the armour, fabric, or scales stand out. Before long, that tiny piece of plastic has become something completely your own.

That’s one of the best things about miniature painting: you can make it as simple or as technical as you want.

Maybe you’re staring at your first unpainted miniature wondering what “priming” even means. Maybe you’ve already painted an army and you’re experimenting with glazing, lighting, Non-Metallic Metal, or smoother blends. Either way, every painter starts with the same fundamentals.

So, where do you start, and where can miniature painting take you?

What Is Miniature Painting?

Miniature painting is exactly what it sounds like: painting small-scale models and figures. You’ll commonly see painted miniatures in tabletop wargames, role-playing games, board games, and display collections.

But painting doesn’t have to be only about getting models ready for a game.

For some people, the goal is to get an entire army painted and onto the table. Others might spend several evenings perfecting a single character. Some painters try to recreate the colours shown on the box, while others create completely original colour schemes.

There isn’t one correct way to enjoy the hobby.

And you definitely don’t need to consider yourself an artist before picking up a brush. Like most skills, miniature painting gets easier as you learn how paint behaves, how different techniques work, and, most importantly, as you practice.

Your First Miniature: Understanding the Basics

If you’re completely new to miniature painting, all the terminology can make the process sound more complicated than it actually is.

At its simplest, painting a miniature can be broken down into a few basic stages:

Prime → Basecoat → Shade → Highlight → Details → Base

Priming

Primer creates a surface that helps your paint adhere properly to the miniature. Primers are available in different colours, with black, white, and grey being common starting points.

Your primer colour can also influence the painting process. Black can make shadows and darker colour schemes easier to build, while white or lighter primers can help brighter colours appear more vibrant.

Basecoating

Next comes the basecoat. This is where you establish the main colours of the miniature: blue armour, brown leather, green skin, red fabric, silver weapons, or whatever fits your chosen colour scheme.

The goal at this stage isn’t perfection. You’re creating clean areas of colour that you can build upon later. One of the most useful habits to learn early is applying multiple thin coats instead of one thick coat. Heavy layers of paint can cover the tiny sculpted details that make miniatures interesting.

Shading

Once your base colours are down, shading starts giving the miniature depth. Washes and shades are particularly beginner-friendly because the thinner paint naturally settles into recesses. Suddenly, folds in fabric, gaps between armour panels, muscles, scales, and other small details become much more visible. It’s one of those steps where a relatively simple technique can create a surprisingly dramatic difference.

Highlighting

If shading creates the darkest parts of your miniature, highlighting does the opposite. Lighter colours are placed on raised areas and surfaces where light would naturally hit. Even simple highlights can make a miniature appear much more three-dimensional. As your skills improve, highlighting can become increasingly sophisticated, from simple edge highlights to carefully placed volumetric lighting.

Details

Once the main colours, shadows, and highlights are in place, it’s time to focus on the smaller details that give your miniature its personality. This might include eyes, belts, buckles, weapons, symbols, jewelry, or other tiny elements of the model.

You don’t need to paint every tiny detail perfectly. Focus on the areas that help define the character and draw attention to important parts of the miniature.

Basing

The final step is the base. While it might seem like a small part of the miniature, a finished base can completely change how the model looks and help bring everything together.

Basing can be as simple as adding texture paint, sand, or grass, or as detailed as creating snow, rocks, ruins, vegetation, or other scenery. Think of it as the miniature’s environment: even a simple base can help turn a painted model into a finished piece

Techniques Every Miniature Painter Should Know

Once you’re comfortable with the basic process, miniature painting becomes a huge playground of different techniques. You certainly don’t need to master all of them at once. Instead, learning one new technique at a time can gradually change how you approach your miniatures.

Drybrushing

Drybrushing involves loading a brush with paint, removing most of it, and lightly brushing across raised surfaces. Because the remaining paint catches primarily on raised details, it’s especially useful for textured surfaces such as fur, stone, chainmail, terrain, and weathered materials. It’s fast, relatively easy to learn, and can produce impressive results.

Layering

Layering involves gradually building lighter or different colours over previous layers. Instead of jumping directly from a dark shadow to a bright highlight, you create intermediate colours between them. The more controlled your layers become, the smoother the final transition can appear. This technique is one of the foundations for more advanced miniature painting.

Edge Highlighting

Look closely at painted armour and you’ll often notice thin, bright lines running along its sharpest edges.

That’s edge highlighting.

By carefully applying a lighter colour to edges, you increase contrast and make the shape of the miniature easier to read. It works particularly well on armour, weapons, vehicles, and other models with defined surfaces.

Glazing

Glazing takes paint control a step further. A glaze is a very thin, translucent layer of paint that subtly changes the colour underneath rather than completely covering it. Painters can use glazing to smooth transitions, enrich colours, create shadows, or adjust highlights. It requires more patience than something like drybrushing, but learning to control glazes opens the door to much more refined results.

Better Painting Isn't Always More Painting

As your skills develop, one of the biggest improvements often comes from knowing where not to paint. It can be tempting to highlight every edge, blend every surface, and add details everywhere. But too much visual information can make it difficult to know where to look. Instead, think about where you want the viewer’s attention to go. Maybe the brightest highlights should be around the character’s face. Perhaps the weapon should have the strongest contrast. Areas that are less important can remain darker or less detailed.

This is where miniature painting starts becoming less about simply following steps and more about understanding light, contrast, colour, and composition.

A beginner might ask:

“Where should I put a highlight?”

An experienced painter might instead ask:

“Where is my light coming from?”

It sounds like a small difference, but it can completely change how you approach a miniature.

The Tools You Actually Need

Walking into the painting section of a hobby store for the first time can be intimidating. There are different brushes, paints, primers, palettes, tools, and accessories everywhere.

The good news is that you don’t need everything immediately.

A basic setup can be surprisingly simple:

• A few appropriately sized brushes

• Acrylic miniature paints

• Primer

• Water

• Paper towel

• A palette

• Good lighting

• A miniature to paint

Once you know that you enjoy painting, you can start adding tools based on your needs.

A wet palette can help keep acrylic paints workable for longer periods. A painting handle can make holding small models more comfortable. Different brush shapes and sizes can give you more control over specific techniques.

Better tools can make certain tasks easier, but they don’t replace practice.

Finding Your Own Painting Style

Spend enough time looking at painted miniatures and you’ll quickly realize that not everyone is trying to achieve the same result.

Some painters love extremely clean highlights and smooth blends. Others prefer dramatic colours and exaggerated contrast. Some aim for realistic armour and weathering, while others use bright, stylized colour schemes.

You also don’t have to recreate the official colour scheme shown on a miniature’s box.

Experiment.

Change the armour colour. Try unusual skin tones. Create your own faction. Paint something realistically, then paint the next miniature with completely exaggerated colours. Part of the fun is discovering what you enjoy painting. 

As someone who enjoys painting, this is the part that I find especially interesting. You can learn all the techniques, but choosing colours and deciding how you want something to look is where your own creativity starts to show. 

Your Best Miniature Is Probably Still Ahead of You

Your first miniature probably won’t look exactly how you imagined it.

That’s okay.

Keep it anyway.

A few months later, put it beside your newest miniature. You might notice cleaner basecoats, stronger contrast, smoother highlights, better brush control, or simply more confidence in your colour choices. Progress in miniature painting often happens gradually enough that you don’t notice it while it’s happening.

That’s something I can relate to from painting in general. You don’t always notice yourself improving while you’re practicing, but looking back at an older piece can make that progress surprisingly clear. 

Whether you’re painting your very first model, finishing an army, experimenting with NMM, or working toward competition-level display pieces, there will always be another technique to try and another way to improve.

And that might be the best part of miniature painting.

There’s no real finish line. Just another miniature waiting for some paint.