Base Coating

Where to begin when painting a miniature? You'll likely get as many different answers as there are painters in the world. But I can tell you where I begin, and that is with a "base coat."

To explain the purpose of a base coat, we'll need to skip ahead just a bit and discuss what it is that we are trying to accomplish. Obviously our goal is for our miniatures to "look good." We want them to look like those miniatures that we see online, which are sharp and crisp and realistic looking. But, so often, when we try to put paint on miniatures, they end up looking more like a six year old's coloring book. What gives?!

Well, there are a lot of factors, but the techniques which are going to make the biggest difference in how your minis look are shading and highlighting. Seriously. Learn these two things, and you can speed paint every game you'll ever own with very presentable results.

Shading and highlighting means getting darker colors in the recesses, lighter colors on the raised surfaces, and a smooth gradient in-between. 

A majority of painting techniques are just clever ways of creating this gradient. Sometimes people “work up” which is giving the figure a dark coat of paint and then strategically painting lighter colors over the top until they get very light colors on the raised surfaces. Other times, people reverse this by painting the mini a light color and “working down” by getting darker colors of paint in the recesses.

Either way, that first coat of paint is your base coat. A base coat can be one color over the entire mini, or it could be different colors on various parts of the figure. It all depends on the needs for the miniature.

Generally speaking, speed painting starts in the middle with a mid tone base coat and then we work both up and down. I’ll explain why we do this a bit later. For now, just trust me so we can get a move on.

Take a look at this Reaper Bones Warg (77202).

Ultimately, we want the raised surfaces of all that great fur to be a lighter color. And we want all of those recesses to be a darker color, with as smooth of a gradient as possible in between.

But the very first step is just to get a base coat over the whole Warg. In this case, I gave him a base coat of Vallejo Beige Brown.

Vallejo Beige Brown is a bit lighter of a color than I want the final product to be. You'll see why we chose a lighter base coat color as we start to apply the shading and highlighting in future articles.

But, that's the base coat. And the base coat is where we are going to begin on just about every miniature we do on Color Spray.




This post was adapted from an article originally published on the Mad Adventurer's Society.