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I am really enjoying getting back into miniature painting. Painted in my teens about thirty—god I feel old—years ago and picked it up again last year. My technique is already SO much better than then and has improved fast because there are now so many resources out there on the internet. Especially Youtube videos. And this site is great for posing questions - I've got some very helpful advice here.

But I'm very curious how other people have taught themselves or been taught to paint. There are some really incredibly talented people on here. Have you all learnt by watching videos and reading about painting? Or through trial and error? Or do you meet up with other people and learn from friends? I'm pretty much painting on my own and learning from videos and even though they're great I keep coming up against things that I can't get from videos:

Thin your paints - okay, but how much is just right? Do I really need to thin on a wet pallet or not? Am I even using my wet palette right?

Apply thin layers - great - but WHERE should I be putting them exactly to get the effect I want?

Look after your brushes - I am trying everything I see on the videos but no matter how hard I try the hairs still keep splaying out after a while. WHY?

I'm seriously interested in finding a painting course to watch a master close up and try to learn how they paint. Has anybody got any experience with painting classes/workshops? Are they worthwhile and does anybody know of any in western Europe?

It feels like I'm mentioning him a lot at the moment, but have you watched any of Angel Giraldez's videos?

https://www.youtube.com/c/AngelGiraldeZ

OK, they're mostly in Spanish with English subtitles, but if you want to watch a master painter up close that's a good place to start.

For me, I started painting minis when I was about 13-14, having moved on to fantasy stuff from Airfix models that I used to build with my dad. So my early stuff was largely painted with Humbrol enamels, and was literally just a base coat and done!

I played Hero Quest / Space Hulk / Warhammer etc with about 3 or 4 of my friends, and we would compare notes on painting and so on. But none of us were very advanced. I remember being blown away by my friend's undead army that featured a lot of skeletons with a black wash on them!

I did a bit more painting in my mid 20s, and was reading painting tips in White Dwarf, various GW pamphlets:




And a GW book (which I seem to have lost my copy of now)




Nowadays, I tend to watch painters' tutorials on YouTube, like Angel Giraldez, Squidmar, Miniac, Zumikito, Juan Hidalgo, Duncan Rhodes, Lyla Mev...

By painting a lot, and trying new things.

Best way to learn how to paint?
Paint. Paint more. And paint even more.
You can only learn so much from watching and reading. Eventually the onus is on you to just sit down and plug away.
The more you paint the better you get at it.

I started painting before the internet was widespread let alone YouTube. I initially learned through other hobbyists and a lot of trial & error.

Today YouTube is my main source. There's more miniature painting / modeling information on YouTube than any one person could absorb in a life time.

Here are some good YouTube channels to check out.

Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy
JuanHidalgo Miniatures
Pete the Wargammer
Ninjon
TableTopReady
Sonic Sledgehammer
The Brush and Bolter
The Painting Coach
Warhipster
Andromeda Studios
InfernalBrush
Grimdark Compendium

And there's SOoo many more.

oh also the best way to get better at painting, is go to painting nights, or start weekly painting nights at your local game shop on like Friday, Saturdays or Sundays.

Painting in a group of people is an amazing way to get better at painting as you basically get to share knowledge.

Two more to add to the above:

Not_Darren_Latham
Trovarion

I started in much the same way, using GW's painting videos and later Duncan Rhodes when he went solo. Darren Latham was the one who kicked my painting up a gear, though. Unfortunately, he was forced to stop posting painting tutorials by GW and close his channel, fortunately some enterprising soul has put them back up again.

I'm now getting into Trovarion's content and he seems to be excellent. Bear in mind, everyone has slightly different (or sometimes vastly different) ways of painting and of using the paint, so you'll likely develop your own preferred techniques as you get more competent.

Trial and error.

Cheers,

CB

Painting is really something you have to learn yourself, and I find that th best way is mostly through imitation of others. So you should take in the advice of your teachers, whether that's formal art teachers, or people doing tutorials online, but the best way is to simply attempt imitation of others. Whether that's colour schemes or simply techniques like non metallic metal etc. This also applies to non miniature art. I love Renaissance art and often try to apply the principles to my own miniature painting.

Since we’re linking YT channels, here’s mine:
https://youtube.com/c/GhoolsWorld

I learned from the pamphlets in my starter paint sets. One from Ral Partha, and other from the Space Marine Paint Set.

I think it will always be a balance of how well you need your minis to look, your tolerance level, and the effort you are willing to put in. I had to do a lot of armies fairly quickly, as I had 3 boys and I was the resident painter, so needed to do them well and quickly. One of the the best tutorials for what I was willing to put into each mini was from the IoB set from the GW group.

Base paint the mini in the predominant color the finished mini will be (saves a lot of time, as why paint the mini and then paint the same area all over again?); use just a few number of contrasting paints - don't go nuts using 10 colors per mini, just 5-6, tops; use washes to drive the recesses into shadow and then a quick drybrush highlight to make the raised areas pop and you are done.

While these would not be competition level paint jobs, they are more than table-top quality and with proper basing, your armies can look stellar.

I'll agree that it feels like few people really try to describe what thinning your paints should be like. It took me a long time to figure why this is useful. It's less something you can see or measure and more something you need to feel. You're looking to get the paint to flow over the model at just the right consistency. This consistency can vary between what colours your using, what layer of paint you're on and what kind of effect you're trying to achieve. And that's something that's hard to describe.

Also, if your paint is too watery and your brush soaks it up: Run the brush over some skin to take off the excess.

As for wet pallets, it's really just there to keep a blob of paint wet. That way your not constantly dipping out of your pot and thinning it over and over again.

The bristle splaying issue can come down to a few factors; quality of brush, overloading brush, allowing paint to dry on brush, allowing paint to dry in the ferrule, resting a brush on the bristles in the water pot, trapping bristles when you replace the plastic sheath after painting.

Any one of those will lead to bristles splaying out. I've found that you definitely get what you pay for and for me GW brushes (especially the current black handled brushes) have a horrible tendency to splay even when brand new and rinsed in water first time.
Though strangely some of my sharpest brush tips are OLD GW brushes, red mottled handle, blue mottled handle, black handle with coloured bands; tbh the stc synthetics they released are all holding their shape really well too, though I only use them for metallics.

As for learning how to paint...I started about 25 years ago in high school and was terrible at it, thick paint everywhere, white undercoat, toothpick for fine detail and using one old brush, previously used for canvas painting, for everything from base coats to 'fine' detail. I thought I was awesome and I still have those miniatures somewhere. However the paints back then (the coat d'arms ones) were reasonably thin and so by pure luck I managed to paint a model without it being a clumpy mess and actually won a painting competition without it being a clumpy mess. I still have that miniature too.
What I learned came from practice and emulation, the old issues of WD were a goldmine of information with step-by-step paintjobs that showed where to place your layers (not just base, shade, chunky highlight, highlight, edge highlight). Over time it just became second nature to see where highlights would naturally fall and if I couldn't tell I'd paint something in a single colour and shine a desk lamp on it. I also learned that there's nothing wrong with messing up or by painting something just to paint it, seeing how you've grown can be just as useful as learning proper techniques.

Thinning your paints takes practice, best video advice? Thin the paint however much you think it needs, load up your brush (not too much) and draw straight lines on the back of your hand/palette paper, if they're thin and smooth then the consistancy is probably where you need it to be. If they're lacking pigmentation except where your brushstroke ends then they're probably too thin, if they have definition (they cast their own shadow) then they're too thick. Too thin is better than too thick but will make controlling the paint a pain but it will take practice.

I hate to keep hammering the point but practice really does make perfect, and if you don't want to ruin a model then buy a palette pad (can get decent a4 ones on Amazon) and practice in that (I'd suggest a sketch pad but paint absorption doesn't reflect how paint would interact with a model).

I learned the basic techniques in traditional art so applying it to gaming models was pretty simple. Once you look at it with a little base knowledge miniature painting is just a high school Art 101 class, with a handful of high-end competition painters making it to first-year college art major level. There's nothing particularly new or innovative about any of it, master the fundamentals of painting and miniatures are easy. Even the weathering stuff that doesn't come from traditional painting is all just techniques from 20-30 years ago in model railroads and scale models.

I learned mostly by trial and error, beyond the little paper pamphlets that were included with starter GW paint kits / free in store. Had a leg up given I already came from an art background, familiarity with acrylics and watercolours helps. There weren't a lot of resources available 20-30 years ago. Most folks just muddled through.

I'll toss Goobertown Hobbies and Tabletop Minons into the list of channels I wish I'd had as a young'un.

As for painting classes, they're a blast. Great way to learn stuff and get motivated to work on both techniques and projects. Europe's not my corner of the world so I can't help you out with direct recommendations, but your local hobby shop is often a good place to start. See if they have any painting nights or class offerings.

Jandgalf wrote:
Thin your paints - okay, but how much is just right? Do I really need to thin on a wet pallet or not? Am I even using my wet palette right?

Hitting that goldilocks zone is difficult to teach because 1, it's based on how the paint feels flowing off the brush, and 2, it's different for every single paint. Yes, paint. Not brand, every single pot. Sometimes it even varies within the same pot, if it's not 100% mixed or you pull drier stuff off the lid/lip. There are *gasp* actually paints you might want to use straight out of the bottle. It also depends on what surface you're painting. If it's a big flat panel or underside of a cloak you can get away with a thicker coat versus a heavily textured filigree pauldron or something. Paint will also change consistency as it sits out on the wet palette!

Wet enough that the paint flows off the brush easily, has a smooth consistency. Dry enough it doesn't bead up on the model nor run off anywhere you didn't try to place it, and won't take 100x layers to get opaque. Whenever you're confronted with a new paint, take a little onto the wet palette and see how it behaves. Does it puddle? Does it sit there like a blob of toothpaste? Draw a little out with the tip of a brush. How opaque is it, how smooth is it? The paint's behaviour will tell you if it needs more water.

Jandgalf wrote:
Apply thin layers - great - but WHERE should I be putting them exactly to get the effect I want?

Get a bright spot lamp or flashlight, a semi-dark spot, and shine that light over your model. Take a pic if you like. It'll show you where the volumes are and how they naturally respond to overhead lighting, which is what our eyes generally expect to see. Learning to paint volumes is a skill, don't be afraid to check out some more traditional art videos for 2D work. The principles are the same. We exaggerate the dark shadows and bright highlights because minis are, well, mini. It helps sell the illusion. Zenithal highlighting your primed models also works as a 'cheat sheet' for where to start shading & highlighting.

Jandgalf wrote:
Look after your brushes - I am trying everything I see on the videos but no matter how hard I try the hairs still keep splaying out after a while. WHY?

If you're cleaning your brushes and taking care of them and they are still splitting, it's most likely a quality issue. As mentioned above, a lot of the 'mini painting' branded brushes are trash tier. You can get better, cheaper brushes by going to a fine art store. I'm quite partial to my Raphael 8404's. Brushes are also a consumable product, in that they won't last forever. Depending on how much and how aggressively you paint, they'll need replacing. Demote the old brushes to increasingly rough tasks like paint mixing, base coating, drybrushing, weathering, glue application etc. and save the new, good brush for fine work.

Learning by doing for me. To me "how" is a lot less relevant than "why", however.

I barely improved from putting on a single layer of paint for twenty five years and only refined my painting so much with no intention of getting better results on anything but a handful of characters that I wanted to look better than what I'd normally produce. Then I continued the same on a higher level with increased depth for another five years. I've only actively looked into getting good at painting in the last five years. Painting has always been a chore to me rather than a joy.

However, I love sculpting. I love the endless possibilities, shaping models to look exactly how I envision them, and I actively learned to get good at it from the moment I picked up my first pack of green stuff. The thing to realize is no matter how good I am at sculpting and no matter how invested I am in the miniature I poured my love into, the final look is going to be let down by the paintjob unless I also learn how to paint well enough to do the sculpt justice.

I never felt the need to look at painting guides or videos. I just do my thing and I'm happy with it. If I need to learn something new, I experiment until it looks the way I want it to.

Although I can credit Bob Ross for getting me to use a knife in my painting if the situation warrants it.

I think as others mentioned, doing research through reading and watching videos is an incredible resource.

Asking local community/Warhammer shops to teach you is also very valuable from experience. There's certain value in having someone coach you and show you physically things you cant quite make out of videos, chief among being consistency. Recently had someone at Warhammer shop teach me about glazing which was friggin useful.


But, all in all, its using the knowledge you gain and just applying through trial and error is the only real way to improve.

I started some 21-22 odd years ago. My first painting demo was at a Games Workshop, where a staff member basically yelled at me to wet-blend on a demo Space Marine (it was awful).

From there, I just experimented a lot at home and on my own. My hobby community at the time had some pretty decent painters (at least they were better than me at that point in time), so I turned to them instead of staff and learnt the ropes of mostly army painting.

A lot of my painting journey had just been looking at works that other painters had done, and trying to mimic or brute-force break down a technique to figure it out.

Ya'll got it made now with the plethora of content out there on the internet.

I honestly don't think I have learned to paint. When I first started out as a young lad, I was terrible. I painted quite a lot and was very into Warhammer. Then I just dropped off the hobby completely for years.

I recently started again in 2019. I don't think I looked up much and just painted how I did in the past. I think the difference is just a better understanding of how paint works, what things should look like and what my personal preference is. I think because I'm much older and I don't have a lot of free time, the time I do spend on painting is very freeing.


More recently I tend to ask people what they did on a model. I see something online, particularly on instagram and I say hey that thing looks really cool, how did you do that effect? Then I experiment and try for myself.

I think at the end of the day, it is up to you to find a painting method that you enjoy. More importantly, one that you are satisfied with. There's a lot of bloody talented people out there who will make your own stuff look like a pile of crap

Getting an end result you are happiest with is what matters.

A lot of that is down to personal preference. There's a lot of styles of miniature painting that I really don't like, but it is artistic in it's own way.

Really enjoying this thread and very glad I started it. I'm still struck though by how many of you have learned from watching videos. The video content that's out there is fantastic. But what I'd really like is somebody to take me through the things they are doing properly so they can tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right to get the same effect that they are.

Jandgalf wrote:
Really enjoying this thread and very glad I started it. I'm still struck though by how many of you have learned from watching videos. The video content that's out there is fantastic. But what I'd really like is somebody to take me through the things they are doing properly so they can tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right to get the same effect that they are.

One thing about videos is that they are 100% available. They are there whenever you need them, you can pause and come back on your schedule. No need to set up time with someone else. And with what’s out there, you can drill down to the questions you need answered.

Sure, a one-on-one personal lesson is better, bur harder to arange.

The folks here in the P&M section tend to be very helpful. Ask questions, post WIP pictures of where you are at. We love to help.

Jandgalf wrote:
Really enjoying this thread and very glad I started it. I'm still struck though by how many of you have learned from watching videos. The video content that's out there is fantastic. But what I'd really like is somebody to take me through the things they are doing properly so they can tell me what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right to get the same effect that they are.

If you can arrange someone to guide you, it'll be much quicker than even YT videos. I'm not a good painter, but I've seen people have bad technique for years before I spent 5 minutes showing them how to do something a better way.

Personally I started on scale model aircraft when I was a wee lad, before I ever had internet to look up tutorials nor the money to buy guides on how to paint. I learned how to lay down smooth coats of the good old enamels mostly by myself but also with my Dad helping (he didn't really have much experience either, but he had more general life experience and a better eye for flaws than my 7 to 8 year old self).

When I swapped to painting miniatures I also swapped to acrylics and funnily enough my painting quality went down, lol. The first few models I painted with enamels and they weren't great but at least they were clean with smooth coats of paint, my first acrylic miniatures by comparison looked quite rough. My first army was 90% drybrushed, it looked mediocre but it was fast and got me playing. I could have easily dropped the hobby back then if I didn't pick such an easy scheme to paint (sure would have saved me a lot of time and money over the years).

It's been a slow painful slog learning since then, just gradual trial and error, pulling hints and tips from online tutorials here and there. I have taken breaks from the hobby for years at a time, so not really surprising that it's been slow learning.

These days there's a lot of video tutorials which are great, but I've always been critical that there's not a good introductory course teaching you both the how and the why, as well as a lot of the basic principles one might learn in a regular art course that are often lost on miniature painters that don't have an artistic background. I see a lot of painters that have incredible skill in blending, but couldn't paint a bowl of fruit to save themselves because they don't understand how light and reflections work.

One struggle is also that people have different aims, if you're trying to paint an army on a budget and quickly, there's little point in watching tutorials from high quality painters using airbrushes and techniques that will result in taking many hours for each model. Even simple stuff like "thin your paints and apply multiple thin coats" isn't actually a requirement if you are just aiming for a rough table top standard (the trick is not letting thick paint pool in the recesses, but 1 to 2 thick coats can look 95% as good as 2 to 4 thin coats and is much quicker to lay down assuming you use the right brushes and the right techniques).

I, for one, don't really paint display models. I might paint 1 display model every 4 or 5 years on average, it's just not something that really interests me. I'd rather have 50 models painted "okay" than 1 model painted awesome that took me the same amount of time to paint

You need to figure out how you paint before trying to apply the techniques of others. No one can really tell you how to paint, unless you go to a tutorial, usually at a high cost. And I'd also say it's pointless at this basic stage. Learning the basics of applying paint is something you learn through doing. It's that simple, so pick up your models on an evening and paint them. Focus on getting smooth layers with single colours. Once youve got this down, then you can move onto other things. A good foundation is crucial..I spent years as a fairly decent but mediocre in terms of display painter until I decided to enter golden demon, but those few years of laying paint did wonders when I began to consciously apply higher standards and more advanced techniques.

20 years of trial and error. XD

I'm still not the greatest and skin tones and I can't do eyes to save my life, but I've come up with a style that I like even if it's far less flashy then most... perhaps because of that.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
You need to figure out how you paint before trying to apply the techniques of others. No one can really tell you how to paint, unless you go to a tutorial, usually at a high cost. And I'd also say it's pointless at this basic stage. Learning the basics of applying paint is something you learn through doing. It's that simple, so pick up your models on an evening and paint them. Focus on getting smooth layers with single colours. Once youve got this down, then you can move onto other things. A good foundation is crucial..I spent years as a fairly decent but mediocre in terms of display painter until I decided to enter golden demon, but those few years of laying paint did wonders when I began to consciously apply higher standards and more advanced techniques.

I don't really agree, you can learn it through doing, but you can also just have someone standing over your shoulder saying "that's too much paint on your brush", "try to use this motion instead of that motion", "you're getting too much in the crevices", "that's too thick", "that's too thin", "that's the wrong brush for what you're trying to do", "try using this other technique to achieve the result you're looking for", "heavily thinned acrylic paint changes tone when it dries".

If you go to, say, an intro to oil painting class, they don't just give you a brush, a canvas and a tube of paint and tell you "sweet, come back in 3 years once you've learned how to use it".

Practice is key and I agree you need the hands on feedback and you'll gradually improve, but good guidance can result in step changes in your painting at any stage.

As for expensive tutorials, maybe, but around these parts you could simply go to the local GW on a quiet day and get one of the shop staff to help you with that basic stuff for free, or if you know someone who is a good painter and is friendly you could just ask them to give you some tips. I am talking about basic brush and paint control though, nothing that will lead you to a golden daemon, lol.

That said, I've never entered a model in golden daemon and never will, painting for world class painting competitions isn't something that interests me. Even when I do paint a display model, I paint it with the intention of looking at it with my bare eyes on my shelf rarely closer than 12" away.

I learned how to paint in the very early 2000s using text based articles with a few blurry photos online, and literal books and pamphlets. My old stuff... wasn't great. I wasn't thinning paints, I was overly reliant on dry brushing, and I didn't understand color theory.

Thanks to youtube, a few seminars at conventions, and hanging out with better painters, I am now a perfectly competent painter. I will say that years of practice didn't necessarily make me a better painter, but it did make me a faster painter.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If you go to, say, an intro to oil painting class, they don't just give you a brush, a canvas and a tube of paint and tell you "sweet, come back in 3 years once you've learned how to use it".

Sure, but you also don't jump straight into doing advanced techniques on completed paintings. Your first paintings will be shaded black and white cubes/spheres and similar practice pieces, just to get the foundation of how to paint. And if you're in a class you'll have a teacher to provide guidance but you're still painting dozens of cubes on your own to refine your skills. Reading tutorials on how to paint is going to give you very little help with this process.

Incredibly painful trial and error. I had some rudimentary instruction in how to do washes, drybrushing, and highlighting from a veteran of the hobby when I started back in the 90's, but most of my technique (if you can call it that) has been learned through the school of hard knocks.

CadianSgtBob wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If you go to, say, an intro to oil painting class, they don't just give you a brush, a canvas and a tube of paint and tell you "sweet, come back in 3 years once you've learned how to use it".

Sure, but you also don't jump straight into doing advanced techniques on completed paintings. Your first paintings will be shaded black and white cubes/spheres and similar practice pieces, just to get the foundation of how to paint. And if you're in a class you'll have a teacher to provide guidance but you're still painting dozens of cubes on your own to refine your skills. Reading tutorials on how to paint is going to give you very little help with this process.

Yeah of course, but I would hope the teacher is giving you some basics of HOW to paint the cubes and not just letting you have at it (I mean, that is one teaching style, let you struggle for a bit and then show you a better way... but hopefully they don't let their students struggle for years ).

Things like painting cubes and spheres is a skill that I reckon many hobby painters lack. Some really skilled painters (in terms of brush control and blending) wouldn't know the difference between a diffuse reflection and a specular reflection, or if they do they don't know how to use it on a model (that's I think why so many NMM attempts look more like stone than they do a metal even though they might have the smoothest blending in the world).

In my professional life I've both taken and given a lot of structured teaching and a lot of self teaching and I reckon in almost all aspects of life all but a few naturally talented weirdos benefit massively from some bespoke guidance.