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Complete miniature painting workflow: step-by-step from bare plastic to varnished
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Every miniature painting tutorial covers individual techniques: how to dry-brush, how to wash, how to edge-highlight. What fewer tutorials address is how these techniques connect into a complete, ordered workflow: what order each stage belongs in, why that order matters, and what the common pitfalls are at each stage that beginners encounter even when they understand the individual techniques in isolation.
The guide below walks through the complete process from bare plastic to varnished and gamed-with miniature, covering preparation, priming, basecoating, shading, highlighting, detailing, basing, and varnishing, including the key rules and common mistakes at each stage.
- The nine-stage order is not arbitrary — each stage depends on the previous one; skipping stages creates problems that are hard to fix later.
- Thinning paint to a milky consistency and applying multiple thin coats is the single habit that most improves results for beginners.
- A wet palette extends working time significantly and is essential for blending and extended painting sessions.
- Varnish is the final, non-optional stage — washes and inks are fragile without it and will rub off during play.
How do you prepare a miniature before painting?
Preparation is the least glamorous stage and the one most often skipped. It should not be skipped. The quality of the paint job depends partly on the quality of the surface it is applied to, and raw miniatures from the factory are not ready to paint.
Cleaning
Miniatures are manufactured using processes that leave release agents and manufacturing oils on their surfaces. These prevent primer from adhering properly and can cause paint to bead, lift, or peel. Cleaning is simple: wash the assembled or partially assembled miniature with warm water and mild dish soap using an old toothbrush, scrubbing all surfaces. Rinse thoroughly and allow to dry completely before priming.
Metal miniatures benefit from this most, as metal moulding release agents are particularly hydrophobic and cause paint adhesion problems if not removed.
Mould lines and sprue removal
Where the miniature was attached to its sprue, there will be a small nub or scar that needs to be removed with clippers or a hobby knife. Running a finger along every surface of the model reveals mould lines: raised ridges running along the miniature where the mould halves met during casting. These are nearly invisible on raw plastic but become very visible once paint is applied.
Remove mould lines using the flat back edge of a hobby knife (scraping rather than cutting), a mould line scraper, or a fine needle file on metal miniatures. Take time to be thorough; a mould line found after painting requires either repainting or accepting the blemish.
Gap filling and sub-assembly
If the miniature is assembled from multiple pieces, gaps at join points are filled with hobby putty (Green Stuff or similar two-part epoxy putty, or Milliput for harder gap filling). Apply the putty to the gap, press it flush with a slightly moistened sculpting tool or finger, allow to cure completely, and then sand smooth before priming.
For miniatures with large cloaks, backpacks, or components that overlap other areas significantly, consider leaving certain components unattached during painting (sub-assembly). Paint the underlying areas first, then attach and touch up join points. This avoids the frustrating problem of completing a paint job and discovering an entire shoulder section is unreachable because the arm covers it.
Mounting
Attach the miniature to a painting handle: a clip-based handle designed for the purpose, a wine cork with Blu-Tack, or an old paint pot with double-sided tape. This allows you to rotate the miniature freely while painting without touching the model itself. Touching the miniature with bare hands during painting picks up oils, leaves fingerprints that affect paint adhesion, and rubs off existing paint at any stage.
How do you prime a miniature correctly?
Primer is the adhesive interface between the miniature surface and the paint layers. Without it, acrylic paint on bare plastic or metal will scrape off with minimal pressure and will not adhere evenly during application. Do not skip primer.
Most painters apply primer from a spray can (faster, more even coverage) or an airbrush (more control, especially for zenithal techniques). Brush-applied primer works but is more difficult to apply without obscuring fine detail.
Zenithal priming
Zenithal priming is the most useful technique for improving downstream painting speed and quality. The method:
- Spray the entire miniature with black primer. Allow to dry completely.
- Spray grey primer at approximately 45 degrees from above, rotating the miniature so all angled-top surfaces receive light grey. Allow to dry.
- Spray white primer from directly above (straight down). This catches only the very topmost surfaces.
The result is a three-value shadow map on the miniature before any colour is applied. Deep recesses and undersides remain black (shadow). Angled side surfaces receive grey (mid-tone). Topmost surfaces receiving the most light are white (highlight).
When colour is applied over this zenithal base, the colour naturally reads lighter on the white areas and darker on the grey and black areas, even before any additional shading or highlighting is done. Speed-painting products like Contrast paints and Speedpaints are specifically designed to be used over zenithal priming, and the zenithal value map does the volume work almost entirely for you.
How do you basecoat a miniature?
Basecoating is the application of the main flat colours to each area of the miniature: the foundation colour for each material before any shading or highlighting is added.
Thin your paint. Paint straight from the pot is too thick for miniature painting. The correct consistency is roughly that of skimmed milk: thin enough to flow slightly when moved with a brush, but not so thin that the colour disappears. Thick paint obscures fine surface detail, dries with visible brushstroke texture, and produces an uneven coat.
Be patient with opacity. Because thinned paint is slightly transparent, the first coat almost always looks patchy and terrible. This alarms beginners who then apply a thicker second coat to fix it. Instead, allow the first coat to dry completely and apply a second thin coat. The two thin coats together cover far more smoothly and evenly than a single thick coat. Some colours (bright yellows, oranges, and whites) require three or four coats regardless.
Use appropriate brush sizes. Beginners often choose the smallest available brush for basecoating, believing it gives more control. A small brush holds almost no paint, dries out before reaching the miniature, and slows the process significantly. Use a size 1 or size 2 brush with a good point for basecoating large areas; save smaller brushes strictly for fine details.
How do you shade a miniature to create depth?
Shading creates the illusion of depth by darkening the recessed areas of the miniature: the spaces between armour plates, the deep folds of cloth, the underhang of a helmet. Without shading, even well-highlighted miniatures look flat because there is no dark anchor for the lights to contrast against.
Washes
The simplest and most widely used shading method is a wash: a very thin, liquid paint (pre-mixed wash products or highly diluted paint) that flows naturally into recesses via capillary action, collecting in the deepest areas and pooling where gravity takes it. Apply over the entire area or targeted areas using a mid-sized brush, allow capillary action to pull the liquid into recesses, and avoid touching the model until completely dry to prevent tide marks.
Most miniature paint ranges include a selection of purpose-mixed washes in brown, black, sepia, and various colours. These are formulated to the right consistency and flow characteristics and are more reliable than attempting to thin regular paint to wash consistency.
Dark lining
Dark lining (applying a thin, controlled dark line precisely at the border between two colour areas) gives more crisp, controllable results than flooding with a wash. Use a fine-tipped brush with well-thinned dark paint or ink and trace along the dividing line between armour and cloth, between plates and belts, between different material areas. This technique produces extremely clean separation between elements and is widely used in competition and display painting.
How do you highlight a miniature to restore raised surfaces?
Highlighting brings back the brightness to raised areas after the shading has darkened the entire surface. The goal is to re-establish the sense that light is falling on the miniature from a consistent direction (typically from above).
Layering
Layering is the foundational highlighting technique: applying successive thin coats of increasingly lighter colour to decreasing surface areas. The darkest shade covers the entire area; the base colour covers most of the area excluding the deepest recesses; each successive highlight covers a smaller zone, focused on the most raised, most light-catching surfaces. Applied in enough steps with thin enough paint, layering produces smooth gradient transitions between values.
Edge highlighting
Edge highlighting applies a bright colour only to the sharpest geometric edges of the miniature: the rims of armour plates, the corners of pauldrons, the top edge of a helmet. These fine bright lines provide crisp, high-contrast visual pop that reads clearly at arm's length even when the finer body highlighting is invisible at distance.
The technique for straight, fine edge highlights: load the brush with a small amount of paint, wick most of it off on a paper towel, and drag the side of the brush bristles (not the very tip) along the edge. The side of the bristles produces a thinner, straighter line than the tip.
Dry-brushing
For highly textured surfaces (fur, chainmail, stone, rough wood, and similar), dry-brushing is faster and more effective than layer or edge highlighting. Load a wide, flat brush (or any mid-size brush) with highlight paint, then wipe nearly all of it off on a paper towel until the brush barely leaves a mark when wiped on the towel. Sweep this brush lightly over the textured surface. The paint catches only on the uppermost texture peaks while leaving the recesses untouched, perfectly simulating directional light over an irregular surface.
How do you add fine details and weathering to a miniature?
Fine details (eyes, gems, insignias, small markings) are painted in this stage. The reason to save them for last is that they require precise brushwork which is easier on a surface that is already fully painted and dry.
Eyes are the most anxiety-inducing detail on humanoid miniatures for most painters. The approach that works most consistently at miniature scale:
- Paint the entire eye socket with a very dark brown or near-black.
- Fill the eyeball area with an off-white or light ivory. Do not attempt bright white; it reads as too stark at this scale.
- Dot the pupil with a dark colour. Keep it small and centred.
- If adding a colour for the iris, a small stroke of the iris colour between the pupil dot and the white is enough.
The eye does not need to be anatomically perfect to read correctly at arm's length. The dark socket, light eyeball, and dark pupil provide the necessary visual information; perfect anatomical proportion matters less than the correct value contrast between the three areas.
For weathering details at this stage: paint clean details (insignias, gems, eyes) first, then weathering effects (chipping, rust, mud), so weathering sits on top of clean paint rather than the reverse.
How do you base and varnish a finished miniature?
Basing places the miniature in a specific environment and provides the final context for everything above it.
Standard materials: PVA glue applied to the base, sand or fine grit pressed into it, then paint over with earth tones and dry-brush with lighter tones for texture. Static grass tufts (pre-made tufts glued in with PVA), small rocks (cat litter, aquarium gravel), and cork chunks for larger terrain features. Apply base materials last so that excess material does not end up on the painted miniature above.
Varnish is the final step and should not be omitted. A thin coat of matte or satin varnish across the entire miniature seals all the paint layers against the physical damage of game use: picking up, moving, colliding with other models. Washes and inks in particular are very fragile without a varnish coat on top. Most painters use matte varnish (which removes any incidental gloss from wash products) with selective satin or gloss varnish applied to gems, eyes, and liquid effects that should appear wet.
What habits and rules make the biggest difference in miniature painting?
- Use a wet palette. Parchment paper over a water-saturated sponge keeps paint workable for hours rather than drying in minutes. Indispensable for blending, mixing, and extended painting sessions.
- Wick the brush before every stroke. Press the loaded brush side-on against a paper towel to remove excess paint and moisture before touching the miniature. Uncontrolled excess liquid causes flooding in recesses, tide marks, and runs.
- Do not touch drying paint. Acrylics appear touch-dry within seconds but are still curing beneath the surface. Going back over a stroke that is two to four seconds old tears the pigment layer and leaves a rough texture that is hard to recover cleanly. Paint a stroke, leave it.
- Keep a dedicated brush for rough work. Dry-brushing, metallic paints, and washes destroy brush tips fast. Preserve your best brushes for fine detail and edge highlighting.
The colour matcher at Miniature Painting Forge helps identify specific paint names and codes across different brands when looking for the right base colour, highlight, or shadow. The Highlights & Shadows generator suggests a shade and highlight for any base paint across all major brands, useful when planning the highlight-shadow pairs for each stage of your workflow.
What are the most common beginner mistakes in miniature painting?
- Not thinning paint. Using paint at pot consistency produces thick coats that fill detail and dry with a rough, uneven surface. Thin with a small amount of water to a milky consistency before every stroke.
- Impatience with opacity. Thin paint looks patchy on the first coat. The instinct is to apply a thicker second coat immediately. The correct response is to let the first coat dry completely and apply a second thin coat. Two thin coats cover better than one thick coat.
- Using brushes that are too small. Tiny brushes for basecoating produce slow, patchy results because they hold too little paint and dry out too fast. Use larger brushes for large areas; save smaller brushes for where their precision is genuinely needed.
- Avoiding colour diversity in shadows. Shading blue cloth using only dark blue limits the depth available. A purple or violet glaze in the deepest shadows adds chromatic complexity that the eye reads as real depth.
Which techniques have the most impact on miniature painting quality?
- Pigment direction. Acrylic paint deposits most pigment at the end of the stroke. Start strokes in shadows and pull toward highlights when applying light colours; reverse when applying dark colours. This creates more natural gradient deposits.
- Brush pressure control. Light pressure produces thinner lines from any brush. Practise varying pressure mid-stroke on paper before applying it to a miniature.
- Glazing for smooth blends. A glaze is extremely thin, transparent paint applied to subtly shift colour or blend a transition. A thin wash of mid-tone colour across the border between a highlight and a shadow smooths the line between them. Multiple thin glazes blend transitions that would take significant skill to achieve through direct layering.
- Value sketching before colour. Establishing the light and shadow pattern in greyscale first (through zenithal priming) removes one dimension of difficulty. Once value is decided, adding colour is applying transparent colour layers over the value structure.
Conclusion
The complete miniature painting workflow from preparation through varnishing is a sequence of stages that each depend on the previous one. Skipping stages (most often cleaning, priming, or varnishing) produces problems that are difficult to correct after the fact.
The techniques within each stage are learnable, but the habits that make them work (thinning paint, wicking the brush, not touching drying paint) are what separate miniatures that look right from ones that look laboured. These habits are not difficult to establish, but they must be consistent.
Frequently asked questions
The correct order is: preparation (cleaning, mould line removal, gap filling, sub-assembly decisions, mounting on handle) then priming, then basecoating (blocking in flat colours), then shading (washes and dark lining to create depth), then highlighting (layering and edge highlighting to restore light areas), then details and weathering, then basing, then varnishing. Each stage depends on the previous, and deviating from this order typically creates work that has to be redone.
Paint at pot consistency is too thick to flow smoothly over the small sculpted details of a miniature. Applied thick, it fills recesses, obscures detail, and dries with a rough, textured surface that catches light incorrectly. Thinned to a milky consistency with a small amount of water, it flows smoothly, settles evenly, and dries flat. Two thin coats applied properly cover more smoothly than one thick coat and preserve the sharp surface detail that makes miniatures legible at normal viewing distances.
A wet palette is parchment paper over a water-saturated sponge. Paint placed on it stays workable for hours rather than drying in minutes as it does on a dry surface. This allows you to take your time mixing colours, apply paint in multiple thin coats without rushing, and blend directly on the palette without the mix drying mid-stroke. The commercial versions are inexpensive; DIY versions using plastic containers, wet kitchen sponges, and baking parchment work equally well.
Use a three-step approach: paint the entire eye socket area very dark (near-black or very dark brown); fill the visible eyeball area with an off-white or light ivory; dot a small dark pupil in the centre. At miniature scale, anatomical accuracy matters less than the correct value pattern: dark socket surrounding a light eyeball with a dark pupil. Keep the pupil small rather than large. At arm's-length viewing distance, this three-value pattern reads clearly as an eye even if the individual elements are not perfectly precise.
The most common mistakes are: using undiluted paint (produces thick, detail-filling coats); impatience with multiple thin coats (trying to fix a patchy first coat by applying a thicker second immediately); using brushes that are too small for basecoating (tiny brushes hold too little paint and dry out before they reach the model); and being unwilling to add colour diversity to shadows (shading only with darker versions of the base colour limits depth compared to cool chromatic glazes).