Painting board game figures

If you have a modern tabletop game in your collection, you might have unpainted miniatures sitting in a box already. It seems like just about every major Kickstarter board game campaign includes dozens of unique sculpts.

While it can be difficult to get folks to sit down with you and learn a new game, now might be the right time to crack open those boxes and paint those monochromatic miniatures. Painting minis is also a great way to plow through your backlog of podcasts.

I learned to paint a few years ago, and all it took was one box of Warhammer 40, minis and a few dozen episodes of Welcome to Night Vale. Moreover, painted miniatures are a great way to spice up your favorite tabletop role-playing game. Once your regular group gets back together to play in person, you could have customized minis waiting for each of them. So why not use this weird window of time to pick up a new hobby, one that can easily fit into any living space?

But also consider your lighting. Shadows can play with your perception of miniatures and their details. That could cause you to miss a spot, but it can also easily lead to eyestrain. Consider getting a few movable lights mounted on arms. I use two, each one outfitted with lumen daylight bulbs. Also, get a hold of your favorite coffee cup, paper towels, and some water. Everything included in this guide — except the glue — cleans up easily with water if you spill it on a hard surface.

That can be as simple as shaking the bits out of a plastic bag and gluing them together as with Star Wars: Legion from Fantasy Flight Games. But for the price, why not get both kinds? This kit also comes with a cutting mat, which will keep you from damaging your table. You might be compelled to dip into the toolkit and just grab a pair of pliers or a wire cutter. Nippers have a specially shaped edge so you can get right up against the models without damaging them.

Most, but not all, miniatures require this stuff. Read your directions to see if you need cyanoacrylate — Super Glue — instead. I recommend the pre-primed miniatures from WizKids , which come ready to paint right out of the box. It has lots of texture and is a great platform for beginners. The kit also comes with alternate eyestalks that feature transparent spell effects.

Spray paint can be egregiously expensive online. If your local hardware store is open, you can probably find something much cheaper there. I recently bit the bullet and invested in an airbrush. The two big players in acrylic hobby paints right now are Games Workshop and Vallejo. Both sell basic sets of paint that are great for beginners. Games Workshop products can be used, but any black spray paint for priming will do. Make sure you get a thin and even coat, using short bursts from about 15cm to 30cm away, and leave the model to dry for around 30 minutes.

Basecoating is the process of painting the basic colours on your model. The best way to achieve this is to use thin, even layers of paint to smoothly lay down coats of paint.

Getting the consistency is tough, but it should be runnier than paint, and thicker than water. It starts off looking thin and sketchy, but a few coats will provide a good base to work from. At this point your model should look nice and colourful, with crisp bright layers of paint.

You can stop here if you wish, but going further will improve the model considerably. Instead of relying on the way that recesses interact with light to create shadows, you need to pain them in with darker paints. These are thin paints that settle in the recesses of models to imply shadows, amongst other uses.

If there is a big blob of wash resting somewhere, use a bit of water on your brush to spread it a bit further. Focus only on recesses such as folds of cloth, around joints and areas that have lots of nooks and crannies, such as gauntlets. This will leave flatter areas untouched, allowing armour and cloth to remain bright.

Deciding when to cover a whole area or just the recesses will differ on your model, but you can always layer over a wash with the original colour if you want to brighten it up after. When shading a model, you have a few choices beyond just making the paint darker. You can use a contrasting colour, such as green on red, to add extra depth to the shadow.

Bascoating and shading will give you a model that looks perfectly fine for most usage, and this may be where you might be happy to leave your model. It is recommended that you at least tidy up any raised areas that have been washed by going over them with the original colour. This is often called layering, and is the stage where clean colours are built up on the flat planes of the model, in order to strengthen the contrast between the shadows in the recesses and the highlights that will be added later.

Depending on the effect you are going for, you will want to either layer over the raised areas with the same as the lower area or a brighter colour if you want to amplify the contrast. Just like shading, highlighting simulates the effect of light reflecting off the highest points of an object. The process of painting these edges to create this effect is frequently known as edge highlight.

It is a process more finesse than shading, but it should still be easy enough to approach if you keep your paint thin. If you are finding your paint too runny, you can always wipe some of the excess off with tissue paper. At this stage, focus only on the edges that would catch the light: sharp ridges that make up the higher parts of the folds in the cloth, as well as the ridges on armour, especially around the fingers. Avoid highlighting with the tip of your brush as it is quite hard to control.

Instead try and use the flat of the edge of your brush, and drag it along the raised areas - the paint should come off easily onto these edges, saving you from having to be super accurate with a brush tip, which frustrates even the best painters.

This allows you to highlight the strands of hair on the top of the helmet so easily, takes seconds and the results make the material read much better. To save on using extra paints you can always mix in white paint to your basecoat or layer colours to highlight.

This technique involves using a brush with stiff bristles, which hobbyist sites usually call drybrushes.