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Hi I am new to these forums and to the hobby in general and was wondering if anyone has any good advice or pointers on where to start, mostly interested in D&D but also looking to start with Warhammer AoS as well. Looking for advice on painting.

One of the biggest questions I have is in regards to which paint to use? The hobby stores near me that sell miniatures only seem to stock citadel paint and while I am not opposed to using citadel paint it does cost $6 for tiny individual pots of paint and I was wondering if there were better and/or cheaper options? Also slightly confused about the different types of paint, I guess base and shade are fairly self explanatory (base being just a base colour coat and shade being a wash that adds shade to the nooks, crannies and crevices) but I am a little bit confused by the purpose of the other types like layer, technical and edge as they tend to perform similarly to each other, I also hear people say to thin your paints with water but does this apply to citadel paints as I thought the point of the different paint types was that they were thinned to the consistency at which they are supposed to be used?

Also wondering about brushes, personally I bought some cheap brushes from an art supply store but am finding that they don't always hold their shape and some of the bristles detach and get stuck in the drying paint of the miniature, wondering if cheap brushes will do the trick or I am better off getting more specialized brushes for this sort of thing?

And finally I was wondering about stripping paint from models, at the moment I am kind of in the experimental phase and am trying to find what works and odds are I am going to feth up more than a few paint jobs, wouldn't mind recommendations for good, effective methods of stripping paint from models, preferably something that doesn't involve toxic chemicals that can't be easily disposed of as I am kind of in a small apartment and don't really have the facilities to store and work with toxic chemicals. Either that or a good source of cheap minis to practice on.

Plus any tips you might think are relevant would be welcome as well.

Just about everything a beginner can be found in my.one play list. This should answer most of your questions.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvLuFonzhD6qhefeM4Z9ROxZsp5iNd_9v

Hey, definitely worth checking out those video tutorials, often youtube video tutorials make something obvious that would be hard to understand from reading.
To your specific questions, generally it is worth getting paints which are designed for miniatures for painting your miniatures. If you are doing scenery or something, then any acrylic craft paint will probably be fine, but these are not as good for use on minis (though you certainly CAN do that!).

For mini paint brands, you have got GW, which is the most expensive and as you noted, kinda needlessly complicated for a beginner these days. Their starter sets are good though, just to get started. Then you have Vallejo, which I have not used but is better value than GW and generally highly regarded. Then you have Army Painter which is also good value and their basic paints are pretty decent. They also do a lot of sets designed for beginners. I would say it is good to start with one of the better value brands and stick with them. One point to be aware of is that some of the paint is designed for Airbrushes and therefore is more liquid and thinner. You can brush it on as well and it works fine. These tend to have "Air" on their pot somewhere.

As to paint types, it is a bit overdone with GW. You want basic paints to start with. Some of them like Dry and so on are a bit gimmicky and I find they don't tend to work too well. When you buy new paint you likely won't need to thin it much, and when you start out you probably don't need to worry about it too much. If you want subtle effects and particularly with certain colours like White, it is often better to use lots of thin coats, but myself I tend to use unthinned paint for my basecoats unless I am going for a particular effect. When paint gets old you might need to thin it, but I would use some sort of medium rather than water for that.
You probably want to start off with some basic paints, nothing fancy, and maybe get a wash or two. A black wash is always nice and some sort of brownish wash is often useful. Layer and Base as far as I can tell are just normal paints, with Layer being designed to go on top of a base as a highlight or so on. Technical, Edge and Dry are designed for getting particular effects, but they are usually for doing something very specific like gore or can be achieved easily with the other paint types.

On brushes, this is the one place where I would say you will benefit from spending a bit of money on proper ones. It is also important to take care of your brushes, cleaning them properly and making sure they maintain their shape. I would get a standard brush, a small brush for doing details, and a brush for doing drybrushing and so on. That is what I use for 90% of my painting. I have some bigger brushes for painting large minis or scenery and some very small ones for doing very fiddly detail, but mostly I am using those three. Your brushes will also eventually wear out and you will need to buy more unfortunately. Do not drybrush with a brush you want to continue using for another purpose as it is super hard on the brushes.

As to stripping minis, sorry I did not take note of your flag. What people use for stripping minis varies by what is available in each region, and the material the mini is made from. Metal minis you can strip with whatever works, they will tend to be fine. In the US people use Simple Green, in the UK I have used Dettol. When using Dettol, it is important to only rinse the minis in Dettol, not water, or else the paint will form a sort of tarry sludge when it reacts with the water.
When stripping plastic minis, it is worth doing some research into what is safe to use on them. Apparently, Simple Green tends to be good for most things, and it is non toxic AFAIK. Nail polish remover or white spirits should not be used on plastic.

Edit: Just saw you are from down under. Not sure what options ye have down there for chemicals to strip models. Worth asking locally, and checking that it is safe with the minis you want to strip.

Oh I should also add - ALL models are practice models. And don't strip anything. It helps you track your progress.

Be happy with what you do now. Just do it better next time.

For brushes, I recommend Citadel and Tamiya. I have a Tamiya Extra Fine Brush for tiny details, and I love that thing.

 Ghool wrote:
Oh I should also add - ALL models are practice models. And don't strip anything. It helps you track your progress.

Be happy with what you do now. Just do it better next time.

I do see your point, good to have a reminder of where you came from and a reference for how you are progressing, but some miniatures can be quite expensive so it is nice to have another shot without having to buy new models every time.

Queen Skadi wrote:

 Ghool wrote:
Oh I should also add - ALL models are practice models. And don't strip anything. It helps you track your progress.

Be happy with what you do now. Just do it better next time.

I do see your point, good to have a reminder of where you came from and a reference for how you are progressing, but some miniatures can be quite expensive so it is nice to have another shot without having to buy new models every time.

All miniatures are expensive. If that's a deterrent to painting them, then no one would ever paint.
As you progress into the hobby, you will find that your buying will greatly outpace your painting. If you constantly go back and strip what you painted, you see little progress and you will never have a.fully painted force.

While minis might be expensive, do you really want to paint and repaint the same model 3 or 4 times?
It's much better to move onto another model and apply your newfound knowledge to that and then compare and contrast both models to improve upon your third. Having no visible record of your mistakes and progress is more a hindrance than the cost of a model.

After being in this hobby for 35 years, I don't see the purpose of stripping. There are always more models coming out that will be better and cooler than last year's fare. It's also better to practice on high quality sculpts than stuff like Reaper Bones, despite the cost. Only a pro can make an amorphous blob look like what it was supposed to be sculpted as, where newer painters will struggle.

Paint and practice on the models you find cool and interesting. Don't waste time and money painting something for practice if you won't get any use out of it. One doesn't have to take my advice, but I'm speaking from behind a mountain of plastic, resin and metal (that all of us eventually end up with) which I didn't have time to practice on, let alone paint for what games I needed them for.

YMMV.

For paints look at Vallejo Game Color and Model Color. For brushes get kolinsky sable brushes. Rosemary and Windsor and Newton make good ones.
For stripping, Superclean or Purple Power is the simplest to use and can be used on any material. Wear gloves and safety glasses regardless of what you use, all paint stripping chemicals can dry your skin something fierce.

Queen Skadi wrote:

 Ghool wrote:
Oh I should also add - ALL models are practice models. And don't strip anything. It helps you track your progress.

Be happy with what you do now. Just do it better next time.

I do see your point, good to have a reminder of where you came from and a reference for how you are progressing, but some miniatures can be quite expensive so it is nice to have another shot without having to buy new models every time.

Yeah man I would not advise diving in at the deep end with a giant expensive highly detailed HQ/monster cretaure as those have a lot of detail and can be very daunting. The images on the box have been done by pros who make a living from it and are the masters of their craft so its easy to think you are no good and its a trap. Everybody is garabge at first and all it takes is practice to get decent. Im by no means a good painter but as long as I get slightly better with each minature and learn something it means im improving.

For 40k warhammer, id recommend picking an army that you like the flufff/ look of and buying a box of basic troops For most factions that will give you some 10+ similiar minatures to work with. It might be a good idea to piant each of the first minis from start to finish and reviewing by either keeping a progress blog or mosting on forum for feedback, before moving onto the next one. That way you can see how the techniques you used have worked out and see how your neatness improves. The very first thing thats immediatly difficult and puts a lot of people off is getting thick paint and brush neatness.

Rule of thumb, thin your paints(wet pallette is the go to option for most)
take your time and practice being neat.

As other have mentioned youtube is a great resource. This guy and his videos helped me a lot when I got back into the hobby:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2CKTY1TXQ4YQ3AHvyCgtbQ

Thanks for the tip guys, just wondering what you would recommend in regards to primers? Spray on or brush primer? Anything that is good and easily accessable from most hobby stores?

Queen Skadi wrote:
Thanks for the tip guys, just wondering what you would recommend in regards to primers? Spray on or brush primer? Anything that is good and easily accessable from most hobby stores?

To be honest, most car/auto body spray primers do just fine as does stuff like Plastikote, no need to spend more than you need to on a specific hobby type spray when these do pretty much the same job.

Spray primer is better though, you get much better and smoother coverage in short bursts rather than a brush on primer.

If there is any good note from a painting perspective, you should have a reasonable number of D&D figures to paint, instead of the person who wants to start an army and is looking at over 100 models to paint! So, theoretically, you could really labor over most models.

First, you have to find your method, as some tutorials may be too advanced, so stick with the simple techniques first. The easy and quick method that results in a good finish is a simple paint for each area (don't go nuts, keep your palette simple), use a wash to darken the recessed areas, and then dry brush highlight to make raised areas pop - you are done!

Buying models specifically for practising certain techniques can be helpful. Have you seen those big packs of jungle/farmyard animal toys? If you want to practise priming, base coat, drybrush, eye-detail, stripes, blending... you can do it all on these. They don't have the detail in the sculpts that you get on 'proper' models, but that's not the point - they're for you to try things out without worrying about the result.

Youtube tutorials are a good place to learn, but two things that often get ignored. Firstly, there's no single 'correct' method - try things and see what works for you. Second: Colour Theory - it's basically cheating when you get your head around this. You don't need to understand it completely, just enough to know how to mix a highlight and a shade from your base colour. So before you buy any more paint, read this and watch the first video. When you know how to derive shades and highlights from a single colour, you don't need to buy 5 different shades of green.

Now, with your pack of 50 farm animals, a basic set of paint colours and a cheap set of synthetic brushes, you're ready to start making mistakes. You will damage your first set of brushes very quickly. Over time, you'll learn how to look after them better, but be prepared to buy another set within a week or two. Once you've got paint inside the ferrule, it's hard to recover the sharp point.

Spray priming is generally better than brush, but watch this video first:




Once your model is primed, you need a base coat. This is the flat colour that you can slap on in a rush, but you must use properly thinned paints. Thinning paints is a balancing act. Too thick and you'll obscure detail. Too thin and the paint will flood the model, run where you don't want it to go and not stick to the model. The problem is that your combination of paint manufacturer, brush, atmospheric conditions, age of paint, wet/dry palette etc. is pretty much unique to you and they all affect how the paint reacts to being thinned, so you need to experiment. Experiment with extremes to find the limits of how far you can push things. What happens if you don't thin your paints at all? What happens when you thin them too much? As a general rule, you want the paint thinned enough so that it doesn't form a blob on the tip of brush, but not so much that it flows all the way up the bristles and into the ferrule (if that happens, rinse the brush immediately, because it will dry up there and you'll lose the point of the brush). Sometimes you want the colour underneath to show through a little bit, other times, you don't - the only way to get this right is to experiment with your paints.

At the same time, learn about your brushes. What's the largest brush you can use on this part? What's the finest detail you can achieve? Generally, you want to use your largest brush that fits because it will give you more working time before the paint dries in the bristles. When it comes to comparing brushes, it's the sharpness of the point and how the paint flows from the bristles that really counts, not the size number that's printed on the handle.

Now you've got a base coat of colour on your tiger or donkey or whatever, you'll want to shade and highlight it. If there's a lot of texture on the model over a large area, a wash and drybrush is a perfectly acceptable technique.

If you're working on a smooth surface (maybe there was a dolphin in the pack?), I highly recommend this video by Kujo Painting. He paints to a very high standard, so I'm not suggesting you try to replicate his results. However, his videos show the paint on the palette, how he mixes them, how he controls the amount on the brush, and how he applies the brush strokes to the model. The 'fat glazing' technique is good for beginners because it's quite forgiving. One really nice thing you can see here is how the density of paint left on the model varies in a single brush stroke - you see more colour at the end of the stroke than at the beginning. Sometimes its useful to think about your brushstrokes as pushing and pulling paint around in a similar way to how a sculptor pushes clay around.


Personal opinion about Citadel Paints: They're expensive, but they work for beginners and experts alike. However, once you've got past the beginner stage and you've encountered things like glaze medium and flow-aid, you'll realise that the Base/Layer/Edge categories are unnecessary. You will start to mix your own colours (using the colour wheel) and consistencies (going by feel or by a recipe, whichever works for you). Your paint jobs will become unique to you and you'll start to develop your own style.