Basic Miniature Painting Techniques

The order they stack in

These techniques are not alternatives. They are stages, and on a typical model you use four or five of them in sequence: prime, basecoat, wash, layer or drybrush, edge highlight, and optionally a glaze to tie two colours together. Each stage assumes the one before it is dry.

You do not need all six on every model. A tabletop standard is basecoat, wash, drybrush, done — three techniques and about twenty minutes. The rest are what you add when you want a particular model to stand out.

1. Basecoating

Laying the first flat colour over primer. It sounds trivial and it is the stage beginners get wrong most often, because the instinct is to use paint straight from the pot and cover in one go.

How it is done: thin the paint to roughly the consistency of milk, load the brush and wipe the excess, and apply two or three coats, letting each dry. Thin coats preserve detail. A single thick coat buries rivets and dries with visible texture.

What good looks like: solid, even colour with no primer showing through and every raised detail still crisp.

The common failure: paint that thickened on the palette halfway through, so the last half of the model has a different texture to the first. That is the problem a wet palette exists to solve.

2. Washing (shading)

A thin, heavily-pigmented, low-surface-tension paint that flows off raised areas and collects in recesses. One pass over a flat basecoat produces instant depth: dark in the cracks, lighter on the surfaces.

How it is done: a loaded but not dripping brush, touched to the recesses and allowed to run. On smaller models an all-over coat is fine; on larger flat areas, target the recesses, because a wash pooling on a flat panel dries as a visible tide mark.

Why it matters: no other technique gives as much visual return per minute. It is the single step that most reliably makes a flat model look painted. The options are ranked in the washes roundup.

3. Layering

Reapplying the base colour, or a slightly lighter mix of it, to the areas that catch light — leaving the wash visible in the recesses. This is how you rebuild brightness after a wash has darkened everything.

How it is done: thinned paint, applied to progressively smaller areas as you go lighter. Two or three steps is plenty: base, base plus a light tone, and a final small highlight.

The skill involved: keeping each layer thin enough that the edge between layers is not a hard line. This is the technique that most rewards practice, and it is where a good detail brush starts to matter.

4. Drybrushing

A stiff brush, a tiny amount of paint, nearly all of it wiped off, dragged across raised texture so the pigment catches only the high points.

What it is for: fur, chainmail, stone, rubble, wood grain, anything with lots of small raised detail. On a textured base it does in ten seconds what layering would take ten minutes to do.

What it is not for: smooth armour panels, where it leaves a chalky, scratchy texture that looks exactly like what it is.

Brush note: drybrushing destroys brushes. Use a cheap stiff one kept for the purpose. The full technique, including how dry is dry enough, is in drybrushing miniatures.

5. Edge highlighting

Running a fine line of a lighter colour along the sharp edges of armour plates, blades and plating. It is the technique that makes a model read crisply at arm’s length, and it is especially effective on hard-surface designs.

How it is done: a brush with a good point, thinned paint, and the side of the tip dragged along the edge rather than the point dabbed onto it. Brace both hands, rest your wrists on the desk, and move the model rather than your hand where you can.

Where people go wrong: highlighting every edge. Pick the edges that would catch light from above and leave the rest — an all-over edge highlight reads as a wireframe.

6. Glazing

A very thin, translucent film of colour applied over a dry area to shift its tone without hiding what is underneath. Mostly medium or water, barely any pigment, built up in several passes.

What it is for: softening the transition between two layers, warming a shadow, unifying a highlight that went too bright, tinting a flame or a glow effect.

Why it is last: it is a correction and refinement tool. You cannot judge whether an area needs a glaze until the layers under it exist.

Putting them together

On a first model, do three: basecoat, wash, drybrush. That produces a perfectly respectable tabletop finish and teaches you paint consistency, which is the foundation under all six techniques.

Add edge highlighting on the second or third model, layering after that, and glazing when layering starts to feel limiting. If you want the full beginner walkthrough with model choice and a first-session plan rather than a technique reference, start at how to paint miniatures for beginners, and keep the common beginner mistakes to hand.

Two more worth knowing early

Stippling. Dabbing the tip of a stiff brush straight down rather than dragging it, leaving a speckle of colour. It is the easiest way to produce a rough, irregular transition — rust, corrosion, worn stone, dirt at the base of a cloak — and it is far more forgiving than trying to blend those effects smoothly.

Sponge chipping. A torn piece of packing foam or a cosmetic sponge dipped in a dark metallic, dabbed almost dry onto edges and corners, produces convincing paint chips in seconds. Keep it to the places wear would actually happen: edges, raised plates, feet, and around hatches.

Both are “random texture” techniques, and both share the same rule: load the brush or sponge, then remove almost all of it on a towel before it touches the model. Applied wet they look like splatter rather than wear.