The Best Washes for Miniatures

What a wash actually does

A wash is heavily thinned, flow-enhanced paint. Surface tension pulls it off raised areas and into recesses, where it pools and dries darker. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why a wash gives you shadows without any brush control at all: physics does the placement.

This is the single highest-value step available to a new painter. A basecoated model looks like a toy. The same model after one wash looks painted. Nothing else in the hobby produces that much visible improvement in ninety seconds.

How we picked

• Flow. Does it find the recesses on its own, or does it sit where you put it? This is the thing that separates a good wash from thinned paint.
• Versatility. How many color schemes does this tone flatter rather than fight?
• Tide-mark behavior. Washes dry unevenly on large flat panels. Some are much more forgiving than others.
• Cost per milliliter. A wash goes on thin, so a bottle lasts a long time — but the price gap between ranges is still real.

Brown or black, and why you need both

A wash shifts the hue of everything it touches, not just the value. That is the whole decision.

Brown warms. Over bone, leather, skin, gold, green and most reds it reads as grime and age, which is exactly right. Over a cool blue-gray it reads as dirt, which is usually wrong.

Black or neutral dark deepens without warming. It is the correct wash over silver, steel, white, blue and gray. Over pale skin and bone it is far too strong and makes the model look soot-stained.

Two bottles. Brown for organic and warm, black for metal and cool. You will not need a third for a long time, and most painters never buy the sepias and greens at all.

How to stop tide-marks

The most common wash complaint is a visible dried ring in the middle of a flat surface. The cause is always the same: too much wash on an area with nowhere for it to flow to.

• Target the recesses, not the panel. Touch the loaded brush to the crevice and let capillary action run the wash along it. Do not paint the whole shoulder pad.
• Blot the brush before you touch the model. A brush dripping with wash floods; a damp one places.
• Keep a clean damp brush to hand. Touch it to a pool while the wash is still wet and it wicks the excess straight out.
• Let it dry flat. A model stood upright drains the wash downward and dries a dark line at the bottom of every panel.

Gloss-coating before washing is the advanced version of this fix: a gloss surface has lower friction, so the wash flows further and pools less. Worth knowing about, not worth doing on your first army. More on the sequence in the basic techniques guide.

Wash or one-coat paint?

A wash adds shadow and leaves your basecoat color. A one-coat paint like Contrast or Speedpaint adds shadow and the color at the same time, over primer, with no basecoat at all. They are not substitutes — they sit at different points in the process.

Most painters use both: one-coat paints for the bulk of a model, a wash afterwards to deepen the recesses further. If you are deciding which one-coat range, Speedpaint vs Contrast has it.

Can you make your own wash?

Yes, and badly, which is why most people stop. Thinning ordinary paint with water gives you thin paint, not a wash: water reduces pigment but does not reduce surface tension, so the mix still sits where you put it and dries with hard edges. A real wash needs a flow improver to break that tension.

Paint, water and a few drops of flow improver does genuinely work and is very cheap in volume. It takes trial and error to get the ratio right, and a pre-mixed bottle costs little enough that for a first army it is not worth the experimenting.