How To Paint Miniatures

I'm going to show you how to paint miniatures. Miniatures vary in scale from the very small up to the quite large and vary in genre from the games workshop, science fiction space marine, right through to your 1920s adventurer with the dog, varying in scale right down to, if you can see the difference in the scales there, a man riding a bike. That's an N Gauge scale model right up to sort of much larger 135 scale military figure.

The range in scale of these miniatures is vast. So, let's have a look at how to paint some of these different types of miniature. I'm starting with these pieces of the kid here and because it's of such a small scale and because this plastic is relatively matte finish, I wouldn't bother undercoating it.

There's some very fine detail on that and that would be lost if you gave it a layer of undercoat. It's better to leave of that layer of undercoat and give it a couple of layers of varnish so that when it's being handled to play these table-top war games, the paint doesn't come off. So, I'm just giving it a coat of this brown color here which is a snake-bite leather color sort of similar to the desert camouflage.

And what you will find though, if don't undercoat is, while the paint is still quite wet, it won't n gauge the plastic very well, but if you just push paint around a little bit on the plastic as the paint dries, it becomes more tacky. And now, you can see that there are little holes in the paint forming, that's because of a lack of undercoat. But if you keep just pushing the paint around on the plastic surface until the paint gets to its level of tackiness where as it stays on there, that will be fine.

So, I'm just going to cover the whole, the whole of this piece in the paint. The thing is well it is the paint will not adhere to the plastic because the paint has been watered down a bit. So, I've got to a stage here with this uniform where some of the highlights are picked out.

I'll just show you quickly how to do the face, I've got this color which is the strangely called walnut brown, but it's actually a very good flesh color. This is a similar technique to the one I used with the fabric of the uniform. I'm literally going to just paint the face so I'm just literally just coating this face with this color called walnut brown which is actually flesh color.

Obviously, you'd go on to do the hands in the same manner, just coating that. What I do then, once this actual flesh color is dried, I'd take a brown color which you can use this gauge dirt one or this brown color and do wash exactly the same as I did on the uniform previously. Those darker brown colors will go into the recesses and pull out all the detail.

Beyond that, if you want to give him a bit of stubble, you could just put a bit of grey round there. Eye details and things like that, you'd need to use a much finer brush. Obviously, the finer the brush, the finer detail you can do on the figure.

And that's how to paint miniatures. .