Your first month of miniature painting

Most first-time painters overthink paint brands and underthink actually finishing a model. Learn the three-step loop — base coat, wash, highlight — and your first month takes care of itself.

By The JustBeginning Editors · Published May 22, 2026

Miniature painting has a reputation for being the complicated hobby. The one where you need to know what NMM and OSL and zenithal priming are before you can start. That reputation is wrong, and it’s keeping people from a genuinely satisfying craft.

Here’s the truth: you can paint a complete, good-looking miniature in your first session with three techniques. Everything else is optional expansion, not prerequisite.

The three-step loop that covers 80% of everything

Experienced painters talk constantly about glazing, wet-blending, NMM (non-metallic metal), object source lighting. All real skills, all learnable. None of them matter in your first month.

What matters is the base-coat-wash-highlight loop:

Base coat. Cover the miniature’s surface with flat, solid colors. Skin is skin-tone. Cloth is whatever color the outfit is. Metal is silver or gold. No shading yet. Just flat coverage. This is harder than it sounds — getting full, even coverage without losing detail takes practice.

Wash. Apply a thin, dark liquid (Agrax Earthshade for warm tones, Nuln Oil for dark metal) over the entire model. It flows into the recesses and dries there, creating automatic depth and shadow. This is the beginner superpower. A model that looked flat and wrong will suddenly look like it has dimension. The transformation is genuinely startling the first time.

Highlight. Take your base color, mix in a little white or a lighter version of the same color, and paint along the raised edges and highest points of the model. You’re simulating where light would hit. Start broad, then go tighter with a brighter mix.

That’s it. That’s the whole loop. It produces results that look real, it teaches you to see form and light on a three-dimensional surface, and it scales — every advanced technique is an elaboration of this loop, not a replacement for it.

a person is working on a piece of art — Photo by Matias Luge on Unsplash

Week one: finish something

The number-one mistake first-time painters make is switching projects before finishing anything. You start a model, decide the base coat looks rough, and start a new one. Then you have fifteen half-finished primed models and have learned almost nothing.

Finish your first model. Even if the base coat is uneven. Even if the wash pooled wrong in one spot. Even if the highlight is too bright. Finished is the teacher; abandoned is the trap.

Here’s the concrete sequence:

Day 1: Open your Learn to Paint kit, watch a 20-minute beginner tutorial (Miniac’s “How to Start Painting Miniatures” is the one to start with), and prime your mini if it’s not Reaper Bones.
Day 2–3: Base coat every surface. Don’t rush. Two thin coats are better than one thick one. Thin the paint slightly with water — it should flow like skim milk.
Day 4: Apply Agrax Earthshade over the whole model. Let it dry fully (30 minutes). Then look at what happened.
Day 5: Highlight the raised edges. Start with a 50/50 mix of your base color and a lighter tone. Go around every edge you can see. Then go back with a 25/75 mix (more light) on just the highest points.
Day 6–7: Finish the details — eyes, metal bits, any small areas you skipped. Paint the base. Call it done.

Your first model will look rough. That’s fine. Finishing it means you now know what rough looks like, and you know specifically what to fix on the second one.

The things that actually make a difference

Thin your paints. This is the advice that appears in every tutorial for a reason. Thick paint obscures detail, dries with brush strokes, and looks wrong. One part paint to half a part water is a reasonable starting ratio. On a wet palette, the paper does some of this thinning automatically.

Clean your brushes constantly. Rinse every few strokes. The biggest killer of brushes — and of paint quality — is letting paint dry in the belly of the brush, where it works its way up toward the ferrule and destroys the point over time. Rinse, blot, reload. Rinse, blot, reload.

Work in thin layers. It takes two or three thin coats to get full coverage, and that’s normal. Beginners try to cover everything in one pass and get thick, globby results. Multiple thin coats give you control.

Let things dry. Washes especially — if you start highlighting over a wet wash, you’ll pull the wash out of the recesses and lose the shading. Wait 20–30 minutes. Go make a coffee.

What’s actually hard, and when it clicks

The genuinely hard parts of miniature painting aren’t the techniques — they’re the patience and observation skills. Learning to see shadow and highlight on a three-dimensional object, then recreate what you see with a brush, is the real skill. That takes time.

Most painters hit a clarity moment somewhere around their fifth or sixth model. Not a breakthrough exactly — more like the techniques stop being a foreign language and start feeling like tools. The base coat goes down cleaner. The wash settles where you wanted it. The highlights land in the right place.

That moment comes from completing models, not from reading more tutorials. Put in the reps.

a toy figurine of a man holding a shield — Photo by Kaptured by Kasia on Unsplash

Month one progression

If you start with the Reaper Learn to Paint Kit and work through it in order:

Week 1: First model (the skeleton is a good start — simple shapes, no complex textures). Finish it.
Week 2: Second model. Same techniques, different color scheme. Pay attention to what you want to fix from week one.
Week 3: Third model. Add one new technique you didn’t use before — edge highlighting, or trying a two-color highlight on something.
Week 4: Pick your next mini — either a Reaper Bones of your choice or a simple GW starter model if you’ve decided you want to go that direction.

By the end of month one, you’ll have four finished miniatures and a very specific list of what you want to get better at. That list is worth more than any tutorial.

What to do at month two

Join r/minipainting and post your work. The community is genuinely encouraging — beginners are celebrated, not criticized. You’ll get specific, useful feedback.
Try contrast or speed paints. Citadel Contrast paints and Army Painter Speed Paints are single-coat paints that do the base-coat and wash in one step. They’re not a substitute for learning the full loop, but they’re faster on bulk units and worth experimenting with.
Pick one technique to improve. Eyes, edge highlighting, smooth blending — one thing at a time. Trying to improve everything simultaneously improves nothing.

You’re not a beginner after month one. You’re an enthusiastic newcomer with rough habits — which is a much more interesting thing to be.

Ready to buy your first kit? See our miniature painting gear guide for which paints, brushes, and minis to start with — and which expensive upgrades to skip until month three.