Picking up your first Warhammer miniature and staring at a pot of paint is a strange feeling. There's excitement, a bit of intimidation, and usually some very real questions: where do I start? What paints do I actually need? Will it look terrible?
The honest answer is that your first miniature probably won't be your best — but it doesn't need to be. Painting Warhammer models is a skill you build gradually, and most people are genuinely surprised by how quickly results improve with a few basic techniques under your belt. This guide covers everything a beginner needs to get started.
What You'll Need Before You Start
Before touching paint, you need a few essentials. You don't need to spend a fortune — the basics will carry you through dozens of miniatures.
Paints: Citadel (Games Workshop's own range) is the obvious choice because it's designed specifically for miniatures, with base paints, layer paints, shades, and drybrushing formulas all clearly labelled. Vallejo and AK Interactive are excellent alternatives and slightly better value per pot. A starter set covering black, white, a couple of colours relevant to your army, a brown or black shade, and a metallic is enough to get going.
Brushes: You need three: a size 1 or 2 for base coating, a small detail brush (size 0 or 00) for fine work, and a larger brush or sponge for drybrushing. Don't buy cheap brushes — they shed bristles at the worst moments. Synthetic brushes from Army Painter or Citadel are good starting points.
Primer: This is non-negotiable. Paint won't stick properly to bare plastic or resin without primer. Spray cans are the fastest method. Black primer is the standard choice — it fills recesses and makes colours pop. White or grey primer suits brighter colour schemes.
A palette: A wet palette keeps model paints workable for longer and lets you thin them properly. A dedicated wet palette is worth buying once you're past your first few models, but a ceramic tile or even a piece of baking paper on a damp sponge works just as well initially.
Browse our full range of acrylic paints for miniatures to stock up on everything you need for your first session.
Step 1: Prepare Your Miniature
Before priming, clean the model. Plastic miniatures come with mould lines — thin ridges left by the manufacturing process — running across surfaces. Scrape these away gently with a hobby knife or the back of a nail file. It takes a few extra minutes but makes a noticeable difference to the finished result.
Remove your model from any sprue it came on, clean up the attachment points, and assemble as much as makes sense before painting. For complex models, it sometimes helps to paint certain parts — heads, arms, interior areas — before final assembly so you can reach everything.
Step 2: Prime
Shake the primer can for a full two minutes, hold it 20–25cm from the model, and apply thin, even coats. Work in passes rather than staying in one spot. Two light coats are better than one heavy one — thick primer obscures surface detail.
Let it dry completely. Rushing this step and painting into tacky primer ruins the texture. Give it at least 30 minutes; an hour is safer.
Step 3: Base Coat
The base coat is your foundation colour — the main colours that define what each part of the miniature looks like. Use a medium-sized brush and work section by section: armour first, then skin, cloth, leather, metal.
Thin your paints slightly. Acrylic paints straight from the pot are often too thick for miniatures. Add a small amount of water (or dedicated acrylic medium) to get a consistency a little thinner than single cream — it should flow smoothly without pooling. Two thin coats of base colour cover better than one thick one, and they don't obscure the fine details the sculptor worked hard to include.
Don't worry about being perfect here. You'll go back and tidy edges later.
Step 4: Apply a Shade (Wash)
This is the step that makes the biggest instant difference to a beginner's model. Shade paints — Citadel's Nuln Oil (for dark areas) and Agrax Earthshade (for warm brown tones) are the two workhorses — are thin, ink-like washes that flow into recesses and create natural shadows without any artistic skill required.
Apply shade generously over the base coat, letting it flow into all the gaps and crevices. Stand the model on paper and let it dry without touching it. When it dries, your model will have depth and definition that would otherwise take years of skill to achieve manually.
Avoid brushing shade onto flat surfaces you want to stay clean — it'll pool and create tide marks. If this happens, wipe it back quickly while it's still wet.
Step 5: Layer (Highlight)
Once the shade is fully dry, you'll notice the model looks slightly darker and more unified. Now you bring back the mid-tones and highlights by re-applying your base coat colour carefully to the raised surfaces only — the tops of shoulder pads, the peaks of muscles, the crest of a helmet.
Use a small brush and try to leave the recesses shaded. This is where patience pays off. You don't need to be perfect, but the cleaner you keep these layers, the more professional the result looks.
A second, lighter layer on the very highest points (using a lighter version of your colour, or adding white to your mix) adds even more definition — this is called edge highlighting and is a technique worth learning once the basics feel comfortable.
Step 6: Drybrush Metals and Textures
Drybrushing is perfect for metallic areas, fur, hair, and rough textures. Load a stiff brush with metallic paint, wipe almost all of it off on a paper towel, then skim the nearly-dry brush quickly over the surface. The tiny amount of paint left catches on every raised edge and texture, instantly adding a worn, battle-weathered look to armour and weapons.
It's fast, forgiving, and looks great. Start with Leadbelcher (or any steel metallic) for weapons and armour details, then a lighter silver on the very sharpest edges.
Step 7: Tidy and Base
Go back over the model with your base colours and fix any areas where shading or highlighting went outside the lines. Take your time on anything that catches the eye — faces, eyes if you're feeling ambitious, squad markings.
The model's base matters more than beginners expect. A textured paste (Citadel Texture paints work well), drybrushed with a bone or light brown colour and finished with a few tufts of static grass, turns a bare black oval into a convincing piece of ground. It frames the miniature properly and makes even a basic paint job look intentional.
Upgrading to an Airbrush
Once you've painted a few squads and want to work faster, an airbrush transforms how you paint. It handles priming, base coating, and blending colours in a fraction of the time brush painting takes. You'll need a compressor too, but entry-level setups are more affordable than most people expect.
Browse our full airbrushing range, including airbrushes and starter sets, for everything you need to take your painting to the next level.
Building Your Paint Collection
You don't need every colour at once. Buy paints as you need them for specific projects. A core set of 10–15 carefully chosen colours covers most armies — you'll use your shade paints constantly, so always keep a couple in stock.
If you're building a Warhammer 40K or Age of Sigmar army, check our bestselling Warhammer products for kits and paints that work together, and our full acrylic paints range for individual pots from Citadel, Vallejo, Tamiya, and AK Interactive.
The Most Important Thing
Paint the models. That sounds obvious, but the hobby has a way of accumulating unpainted plastic on shelves while hobbyists research techniques, watch tutorials, and wait until they feel "ready." You'll learn more from finishing one imperfect miniature than from hours of preparation.
Your technique will improve with every model. By the time you've painted a ten-man squad, the last model will look noticeably better than the first — and that progress is genuinely satisfying. Start simple, get the basics right, and build from there.
Access Models stocks a full range of paints, brushes, primers, and Warhammer miniatures. We're based in Newark-on-Trent and ship across the UK. If you're not sure where to start, our team is happy to point you in the right direction — drop us a message or visit us in store.