FUNDAMENTALS! A Complete Guide to Painting Minis.

welcome to goober town hobbies my name is Brent today's video is meant as a resource for newer painters it's a tutorial where I assume no prior knowledge we're gonna build and paint some minis and I'm gonna show you the stuff that I wish I knew when I was getting started okay let's get to it I love it when people tell me that they're starting to paint minis this is a great hobby and it's something that anyone can enjoy I want tutorials like this one to be accessible and useful to everyone my target audience for this

video is myself from 1998 the kid who's on his way home with his first box of Warhammer minis if I could send one how-to video back in time to that guy this is that video it has all the stuff that I wish someone would have taught me back when I was getting started first tip support your local game store whenever you can this is a great place to learn more about the Hobby meet people and have fun and of course it's the place to go when you need a new paint color right now I bought

the Gods Warren Hunt crew from more hammer under worlds this is a board game from Games Workshop with a low model count these boxes have a complete team of minis with the rules cards for 30 bucks the first step in assembling these models is to get those bits off of the sprues use hobby Clippers and put the flat edge of the jaws close to but not quite flush with that you want then snip it away if the models are complicated and it's worth actually paying attention to the instructions and the little numbers printed on the

sprues be careful not to clip so many bits at once that you forget what's what once the bits are off you can clean them up with a hobby knife use the sharp end to carefully slice off the nubs from the attachment points be careful not to cut into the model or into yourself then scrape the knife backwards along any mould lines that you see to remove them I find that it's easier to do this before the model is assembled if you're working with a model that has these push-fit pins I recommend that you cut them

off and actually glue the pieces together sometimes these pins can prevent you from getting a really good fit okay it's time to glue super glue is an option for models of any material but for plastic models made from polystyrene like these ones are I like to use plastic glue or plastic cement what I'm using in this video is Tamiya extra thin but there are tons of brands that do the exact same thing the plastic cement slightly dissolves the plastic so that the two pieces will meld together be careful not to get any fingerprints in the

soft plastic hold the two bits firmly together for a minute or two until they stick if you're impatient like me a couple of tiny clamps can be a really useful addition to your hobby desk I assembled and glued the whole team one exception is that I didn't glue them to their bases yet I just used the push fit pins for now that will make the bases easier to paint later on now it's time to primer models I'm using spray paint for this but there are brush on options available too if you don't want to use

a spray can go outside and use double sided tape or poster putty to stick the models to a piece of wood or cardboard or plastic or something spray paint i'm using is primer from the hardware store this stuff works just as well as the more expensive stuff any bottle of spray primer can give a good prime and any bottle can give a bad prime here are some guidelines save your priming for a low humidity day preferably this will be a warm day also but it's more important that the can is warm that the air temperature

outside is warm make sure to really give the spray can a good shake the goal is to build up some light dusting of paint on the model start the spray away from the models and then sweep past the tar it's many light dustings is better than one heavy coat don't spray so much that actual liquid builds up on the models a heavy buildup of paint can obscure details worse the solvents and spray paint can dissolve model plastic and make things look melty the goal is for the solvent to evaporate in the air it's okay to

prime using two or three extremely light coats with 20 minutes of dry time in between if it's cold out bring the models inside to try bring the can inside also to keep it warm here's a fun tip although we primed in black I'm going to give a quick squirt of white paint from directly above this is called zenithal priming and you'll see why it's useful in just a moment it's time to get ready for brush painting I highly recommend that you get some handles to help you hold your minis while you paint them you can

use empty bottles or blocks of wood with a bit of double-sided tape or a poster putty several companies even sell handles that are designed for painting minis my personal favorite is the glue magnets onto the bottom of my minis find yourself some handles there's tons of good options for this project I decided to use paints from this filet ho game color introduction box these paints are made specifically for painting miniatures there are several companies that make paint for minis Vallejo is one of my favorites because they've been around for a long time without changing their

formula they have a large product line and they come in these handy dropper bottles just drop the paint onto your palette and get to work okay one more bit of preparation before we get going here I recommend that everyone use a wet palette acrylic paint for minis dries quickly so using a regular plate as a palette is not ideal now what palette is just a damp piece of paper with water reservoir underneath you can buy them or make them yourself the homemade version is just a sandwich box with a wet paper towel and a piece

of parchment paper on top I like to get everything wet then squeegee out the extra water we're just going for damp the paint sits on the parchment paper and water seeping up from underneath keeps it useful for a long time all this preparation is about to pay off let's grab some brushes and get to work in this video I'm using these multi pack Kraft brushes I think these were $4 per pack at Walmart brushes come in a variety of price points but these will do just fine for today that being said if you're at your

local game store and they have a brush with a perfect tip you should buy it so I'm going to paint the five barbarians in this video and save their dog for later painting similar models in a batch can be really efficient you can go through one color at a time assembly line style and by the time you're done painting one color on the last mini the first mini should be completely dry and ready for the next color skin tone is a good color to start with since there is a lot of it on these models

I decided to give these five all different skin tones there's only one color labeled as a skin tone in the paint set but that's okay my next tip is that you shouldn't be afraid to mix colors the wet palette that we just set up is gonna make this super easy on the wet palette I'm making combinations of the skin tone beige and Browns that came in the paint set I'm even trying to light gray and a little bit of red I was able to make a bunch of colors that are real human skin tones the

nice thing about the wet palette is that it will keep my mixtures fresh and viable for the next day or two so I have a lot of time to use them if I really like any of the colors that I find it's a good idea to write down how many drops of each paint went into my favorites then I can mix them up fresh whenever I want okay finally it's time to paint I use a wet brush to pick up paint from the wet palette most paints are too thick out of the bottle if they're

not thinned down a little bit they'll leave a globby texture on the model with big ugly brush strokes a good solution is to water down our paints a little bit and to apply to thin smooth layers instead of one thick layer all paints are translucent to various degrees so it's completely normal that a single thin coat will show the layers beneath even several thin coats will have a hint of the underlying color this is one reason why we did the Cenacle highlight when one of these barbarians is standing out in the Sun some of their

skin will be well with and other parts will be poorly lit or shadowed that squirt of white primer gives a rough indication of where sunshine will land on these characters when we paint over the primer layer some of our translucent flesh tone will be over white some will be over black and some will be over gray the difference in the resulting colors is subtle but it's there and it gives a realistic effect if you primed your models only with white the whole model would look brighter when it was painted if you primed only in black

it would look darker when painted if you only use a single color to prime with light gray or tan are actually pretty good choices I really like this under full priming technique though and there's no reason that a beginner can't do it that simple squirt of white primer does a lot of work for us the zenful highlight is also useful just to help us see all the details on these models if these models have been primed in a single solid color it would be harder to see all the different items strapped to these barbarians the

white picks out some details and it lets me see what each bit is sculpted to be this way as I'm painting the flesh I'm also noticing those other details and I'm thinking about colors I want to make them when deciding which order to paint colors remember that you can be a bit messy with the first colors that you paint but for the later colors you'll have to be more and more careful to color inside the lines this is one reason that I like to paint flesh first it's all over the place and it's also underneath

every other object on the model so carefully painting it all in at a later stage might be tricky okay here we are after one coat of flesh tone and here we are after two coats of flesh tone the next color I painted it's black I'm using this for some armor and also for the big sword and axe I chose to paint black at this point because it's a good undercoat for painting metallic steel or silver next up I want to paint the steel on the sword and the axe to do this I'm going to use

a technique called dry brushing dip a big brush that you don't care much about in paint and then wipe most of the paint off onto a paper towel then if you start brushing the model with this brush each stroke will leave a tiny amount of paint behind I'm dry brushing the axe and the sword the steel metallic color metallic paints don't actually contain metal there are a combination of a regular color like gray or yellow plus some mica dust to make it all shiny the mica dust and the paint medium used to suspend the mica

dust makes metallic paints more fickle than other paints and we have to worry more about them getting glommed up especially in big flat areas dry brushing is a good way to avoid this after a while we've deposited a nice thin layer of steel on the sword blade and the axe head I like to do dry brushing steps relatively early in the painting because they can be a little bit messy the next color up is red you can paint your models any colors you want I figured red is a good accent color for Kaos barbarians I

put it on their boot fur and their hair as a general rule models tend to look nicer when colors are spread around a little bit having read-only on the boot fur might make the composition look imbalanced having the same shade of red on their boots and on their hair doesn't completely make sense but it sure does balance out the models I figure that maybe this crew dyes their hair I'll show you some tricks later on to make these two reds appear slightly different for the cloth I painted gray these models have more muscles than they

have clothes but they all have a gray line cloth at least cloth can be dyed any color but I chose a neutral color for it because I didn't want it to detract from the red and the black I'm using as many neutral colors as I can on these intervening bits next the leather and wood parts got painted Brown this paint set didn't have a purple but it did have two Browns this actually makes a lot of sense Brown is a very common color on minis and sometimes it's handy to have two shades for example when

a belt has a pouch hanging off it or equivocal of arrows it's handy to have two shades of brown I'm making this medium beastie Brown the primary Brown and I'm saving the leather brown color for those places where I really need a second shade I'm also using Brown as an undercoat for a metallic gold paint all paint is at least partially translucent so learning what colors are good base colors is really useful Brown is a great color underneath gold I thought I was going to use a mix of gold and steel for the various metallic

knickknacks but I ended up really liking how the gold looked alongside red and the black on these models so I ended up painting almost all the metallic details gold it's nice to have somewhat of a plan for your color scheme when you're going into a project but if you discover something that you like better along the way go with it part of the fun of this hobby is trying new things and ending up in unexpected places I'm running low on details now time to paint in the bone now that the primer is mostly covered with

paint I'm really starting to notice what details are left as a side note I haven't gone back to fix any errors yet everything has been a single pass maybe two coats of a color but I haven't gone backwards if you go back to fix errors after every color you'll never get anywhere don't worry there will be time for neaten up here soon one of the last colors I used on the figures was the blue for this cloak like I said I want the core colors of the team to be red in black and the blue

really does change how this character presents I'm okay with that in this case though because she seems to be the leader and as a mage it makes sense for her to have a magic cloak that she found in some far-off land for a lot of colors I've been using two thin coats but you'll find that each color behaves differently yellow colors for example are almost always highly transparent while blues tend to give excellent coverage I only needed one coat of paint for this blue cloak this isn't related to the brand of paint this is simply

a matter of what pigment molecules are available to manufacturers there are tons of great pigments available for blue and a less good choices for yellow okay it's time to paint the bases since I didn't glue it with figures to their bases yet I pulled them off to make things easier I love painting bases it makes the model suddenly look much closer to being complete a lot of times I'll save this step is a little treat for myself good colors for bases cause the mini to stand out while also giving them context these bases would have

made sense as a wasteland in a brown or a grey but making them green the red really pop I'm making them a subdued dark swampy green because that fits with a wasteland theme but also because I don't want the base to pull attention from the figure themselves so darker is better in that respect the set didn't come with this color of green so I mixed in the darkest green that it did have with brown and black another reason to start with a nice dark green is because it leaves room for highlights and I am planning

to dry brush on some highlights I put a lighter green onto my brush wiped most of it off onto a paper towel and then dry brushed the base when you dry brush a piece with a lot of texture the paint gets left on the high points so in this case the dark green remains on most of the base but the raised texture gets highlighted with the lighter color then I did this dry brush highlighting step again an even lighter green this time the Goblin green from the paint set this highlighting adds some depth the swamp

texture and makes it look more realistic again I do dry brushing before other steps because it's messy so next I'm doing the details on the bases I still don't need to be too careful here this is a swamp and all of the debris is blending in with amok also if you're doing things right people won't be paying that much attention to the base the focus should really be on the figures face and the base is just there to get a little bit of context and background so quickly I put on brown for the logs grey

for the stones beige for the old skulls and bones and then leather Brown for the piles of moss now that the base is painted I glued the models into their final position super glue is good for this getting the base painted really does make the models look closer to completion and now is a great time to go through and fix up the models all of my colors are still conveniently fresh on my wet palette so it was easy to go through the figures one by one and fix any place that still had exposed primer or

just needed a touch-up at this point all of the core colors are on the models but there isn't much in the way of shading or highlighting and we're missing out on tiny details such as the eyes most folks would say that these models have been base coated what we just got through is one of the more time-consuming parts of the process and the models are only now just starting to look like tiny people from here on out each step is going to be a lot of fun because it's going to add a lot of character

to these minis I also check to make sure that I still liked the color composition in this case I'm liking the red gold and black thing that we have going on I think these colors are distributed pretty nicely around each model and if I didn't like something I could absolutely go and repaint it the next stage in the process is going to be washing and shading so all of the colors will naturally darken if you think that some of the colors are currently too light and too bright the red for example don't worry we're about

to fix that okay let's pull out some washes washes are like very thin paints that run into the crevices of the model I'm going outside of that Vallejo paint set and pulling in some Games Workshop shades and army painter tones realistically I only needed one or two of these but I wanted to show you the difference between them I started with a grex earth shade from Games Workshop this is a brown color I used it on the bases and on the red tassels and hair you can see how it runs down to the low points

and the deepest crevices it darkens everything by a shade or two but what's important is that it really darkens those deep points adding definition and depth it's making the Reds look more real while also making them a darker more reasonable color I also used this a grass earth shade on a lot of the gold bits Brown is a good wash color for gold null moil is a black wash from Games Workshop and it's particularly good for steel metallic bits for the cloth and the flesh I switch to army painter shades the game's workshop formulation is

Ronnie and really penetrates well whereas the army painter formulation is thicker and oozes I like army painter more when the recesses are shallower the high points are more like gentle curves these barbarians are jacked but they aren't shredded they're yoked but they aren't really cut they've got incredible size but their body fat percentage is still double digits extreme muscle definition just isn't quite there I might use Citadel shade on Bruce Lee but I like army painter better for Vin Diesel I use the army painter washes for this sort of stuff because I think it gives

a smoother transition of color I have a couple of different brownish tones from army painter depending on the flesh color for some of the barbarians I used flush shade which is a reddish brown for others I use strong tone which is a very dark brown for the pale mage in the cloth I use light tone which is a light brown a dark wash over a light base coat can really dominate it strong tone on the lightly colored cloth or the fair skinned mage would be pretty aggressive and it might not come out looking great that's

why I'm being careful to use a lighter wash on lighter skin adding washes to models is such a gratifying step it instantly adds that depth and definition that make the minis come to life and it requires very little effort to do as far as skill goes I'm spending some time making sure that I'm not leaving any big pools these will leave weird splotches when they dry other than that I'm just letting the washes do what they want to do I also put some blue tone on the Cape I actually did this to show you something

that you probably shouldn't do on these wide areas with gentle curves using a wash is more likely to cause blotchy staining than to do anything appealing in this case I was able to control it reasonably well and it didn't make the Cape worse but it didn't make it better either washes make a lot of things better but they really don't help with wide open areas so a basecoat plus some washes brings us to a really fun place this is a perfectly legitimate time to call a model done and either put it on your shelf or

play some games with it let's go a little bit farther though and see where we end up let's start by making that dyed hair color look a little different from the boob tassels I'm going to use dry brushing again to do some highlighting I'm starting with fresh from the bottle red this is a good place to start since the red on the model has all been darkened by the washes then I can start highlighting that red even further generally mixing white with a base color gives a good color to highlight with so you could highlight

red with pink mixing yellow with some colors is another way to highlight them this works well for green red and orange in this case I'm highlighting the hair with a dry brush of orange then I'm going in with a dry brush of pure yellow I think this is giving a fun crazy barbarian tribe look which is exactly what I'm going for next I'm going to use the 16th and final color in this filet holbox set silver metallic colors can be highlighted too in this case I'm try brushing just a bit of silver over the dark

steel of the sword and the battle axe if I were gonna take these models to a really high standard I would go through and highlight every color I would try to make sure that the parts getting hit by the Sun were several shades lighter than the sections of the model and shadow but I think these models are very close to being ready for the table so let's forge ahead with a few last details paint the crazy evil eye coming out of this lady's palm had a few weirdo details in a few other places and we're

onto the eyes eyes the eyes on these minis are tiny and they are the hardest thing that I'm going to do in this to tour eyes are so important our brains are trained to look at the eyes of any person or any creature that we meet we've learned to read so much in the shape the focus the dilation and the direction of someone's eyes painting eyes on these models will instantly define their characters and they are so very very small I need to get truly prepared to paint these tiny details I need to be at

the proper level of rest and caffeination so that my eyes focus properly and that my hands don't shake I'm a coffee drinker so about half a cup in the tank is appropriate for me I need to have a tiny brush with a sharp tip and I need to have bright lights need to pay attention to my posture for painting minis in general you need to find a comfortable ergonomic posture that allows you to stabilize your hands and see your work here are two suggestions sit up straight elbows on the table heels of your hands pressing

into each other and into your painting handle or sometimes I leaned back in my chair bracing my elbows on my ribcage and pressing my hands together find something that works for you I did use the multi pack brushes for the eyes but this would have been a great time to pull in a more expensive brush with a really sharp tip even with all that advice eyes are still tiny and we do need a strategy the strategy that I like is to darken the eye sockets with a bit of wash then I add a white oval

then I add a black dot that takes up most of the oval I don't try to distinguish between iris and pupil on something that's small it's really just the contrast between the black and the white that you see not the colors themselves again dark eye sockets white oval black circle if I make the oval or the circle too big I like to continue on and then come back at the end with a bit of flesh color to neaten the boundary and see if that makes things turn out okay the eyes I painted here aren't amazing

but they mostly work one of the eyes on the mage is a little crazy but you know what I'm okay with that whole crazy eyes tetra I'm ready to declare victory here the last thing I'm gonna do is to protect our models with some varnish especially if we're gonna be playing with them what's seal in all that good work that we did brush on varnish exists but it was a nice day so I used a spray varnish again throw on light dustings until you get the effect that you want I start with a gloss varnish

gloss varnishes give great protection but that Sheen can be a bit much so I do a second coat with matte varnish it's good to know that you can always change the shinier models if you don't like it in this case I'm just dulling that gloss back down to a nice matte and they're done for now at least there's no reason why I couldn't keep painting over a coat of matte varnish I might come back to these models someday I could add a ton of highlights or maybe draw on some tattoos who knows this was a

simple paint job but I think the models came out looking pretty cool they are absolutely ready for the table and I would be proud to play a game with his crew like I said I think everything in this video is completely appropriate for a brand new painter a lot of painters don't learn about wet palettes or zenithal highlighting until later but these things are super easy to implement and they really do give you a leg up on your painting journey I chose these particular models for this tutorial because they're cool but also because they provided

opportunities to demonstrate a variety of techniques I plan to keep making videos that focus on these foundational skills I really love it when new people get into the Hobby and I want to do everything I can to help and encourage folks who are just starting out please let me know if anyone has suggestions for other techniques that I should be showing to newer painters or if you have ideas for anything they're models that would be good for this sort of thing and if you're a new painter yourself hit me up with your questions I'll do

my best to answer them individually or even make some videos if there's a lot of interest in a particular topic one more thing before I close this painting hobby of ours is a ton of fun it's a long road and there's no end but you'll be surprised at how much progress you make over the years and how good you get be proud of each mini you paint and be proud of your progress if you still have the very first model that you ever painted or if you're about to paint your very first model save it

don't ever sell it don't give it away don't lose it and don't repaint it save it someday you'll want to look back and see how far you've come well there we go this video was a lot of fun to make and I do hope that it was useful if you liked it do me a favor like subscribe comment all that good stuff more importantly this time if you know a newer painter who might find this video helpful share it with them that would be amazing ok that's it that's all for this time thank you so

much for watching [Music] you [Music]