Painting Miniatures

The Tutorial on how to Paint Miniatures.

Whether you paint miniature military figurines or fantasy figurines or you use your miniatures for Dungeon and Dragon table top playing painting them very much enhances the enjoyment you get out of them.

Painting Miniatures is something that I have been doing for years and it brings me a tremendous amount of satisfaction. It is a rewarding hobby in itself, but I don't paint the miniatures just to have them look good as stand alone creations. I paint my miniatures so they can be added to a diorama or scene that I have created.

There is something about a well painted miniature that just brings it to life! This warhorse is the miniature we paint in this tutorial.

This tutorial Will take you through the steps in painting miniatures and will show you some nifty little tricks and tips that will help you to do some really nice work.

If you came to this webpage directly from a search engine and you are also interested in Dioramas I do have some great tutorials on how to make them. What better way to show off your miniatures than to build a great diorama. The How to Make a Diorama tutorial Home page There you will find lots of great diorama stuff including how to make a real professional looking diorama or how to make simple dioramas like a shoebox diorama.

How To Paint Miniatures

So you have some miniuatures and maybe they are something like these. This picture shows a miniautre Bowman, a Miniature Horse and a Miniature Polearm soldier. The penny is in the picture so you can get an idea of the scale. Miniatures come in many different scales and that doesn't matter too much for our tutorial on how to paint them.

What do You need to Paint Miniatures? Here is a list of suggested Materials and Tools

Before we actually start painting our miniatures we need to talk a bit about the tools and how to manage, hold and manipulate your miniatures. The tools you use have a big impact on how your miniatures come out and also have a big impact on your comfort level while you are painting them. Painting miniatures can be very tedious and you should have a selection of tools that makes it easier for you to do. I can't stress this enough! I recommend you put together a small toolbox of tools specifically for you miniature work.

Here are some of the tools I use to paint miniatures. This is a suggested basic set. Let me describe them and what they do.

The Tools from left to right

• Two small files, fingernail files work good for this - this is necessary to trim and polish any excess metal on your miniatures
• Tweezers - Just come in handy
• X-acto knife or small razor knife - Helps in cutting excess metal from your miniature
• Grabber Tool - I don't know what this tool is called but it is great! It has little grabber hooks and in the picture it is holding a miniature. This makes it so much easier to paint
• A small vise - if you don't have a grabber tool a vise works pretty good to hold your miniature while you paint it
• Awl - this is a pointed little tool like a nail with a handle - it really helps to manipulate small parts of the miniature and to move paint around and even define the metal parts a bit
• Needle nose pliers - really handy
• Magnifying glass - must have and if you have one of those big desk sized ones with the light its even better

Note: If you don't have a grabber tool or a small vise you still need to devise some sort of way to hold your model firmly while you paint it. It is very difficult to hold it with one hand and paint with the other. You will just smudge the paint with your fingers no matter how careful you are.

Here's a nice little trick you can use if you dont have a clamp or vise - Wrap tape backwards around a piece of wood. By backwards I mean wrap it so the sticky side is out. Then you can stick your miniatures right to it.

This is a pretty handly little trick because then you can sit in a comfortable chair and you don't have to lean over a table or a vise. You can use any type of tape like electrical, masking, double sided or even cellophane.

Fulcrum 14410-101 Magnifier Desk Lamp, Silver And If you can spring for it this is a great investment in your hobby. A Magnifier with Lamp. Somethng like this makes it so much easier because it frees up your hands to paint. If you plan on doing a lot of miniature painting this is a must.

Continue on to the tutorial on how to Paint Miniatures - The Paints and Supplies

This is a Storm The Castle Project

Table of Contents for this tutorial

1. Miniature Home
2. Painting Miniatures Tutorial start
3. The Paints
4. Preparing the Miniature for painting
5. Priming the Miniature
6. What to paint first
7. More Painting and the details
8. Close-up of the completed Warhorse
9. Adding texture to the base for realism
10. Tips and hints for painting miniatures
11. Diorama and Miniature supply Store

Stormthecastle.com
Castlefiction.com
Epic Fantasy.com
The Medieval Armory
THe Fantasy Guide
The Heroic Dreams Blog

STORES

Posters
Dioramas and miniatures

MORE

Links
Banner Exchange

---------
All Materials, unless otherwise stated are Copyright©
Kalif Publishing and StormtheCastle.com check out my copyright page for information about how to use any work on this site.

If you have questions
or would like to
contribute you can

---------

Earning money with your website