Tips for Starting Warhammer 40k: Painting Basics 1

Painting Basics

When you're first starting playing Warhammer 40,000 you need to paint your miniatures (that's a given). Most tournaments have rules about painted miniatures (i.e. you need at least a basecoat, or up to 5 colors, etc). Either way, it is always better, in my opinion, to have an army that is fully painted instead of one that is just grey (or primed black).

In this post, I'm going over some basic painting tools and tips. I am breaking this up into several posts so it can be more easily digested.

Paint Brushes

When you start out, you only need a few brushes. if you keep them well maintained. I use only round brushes (the ones of the left column of the picture). The one's that you really need are the following ---

-A large/basecoat brush (Size 3 or 4)
- A standard size brush (Size 1 or 2)
- A detail brush (Size 0 or 2/0)
- Any brush size 0-2, for glue/drybrushing/liquid green stuff (one you don't mind ruining)

Not every company uses this size system. Army Painter and Games Workshop use names, like "Detail" and "Standard/Character". As your painting needs get more complex, you might need some more brushes (like a 3/0 or 4/0 brush for fine detail, or a larger brush for tanks and such).

Brush Maintainence

When you are first starting out, you don't need to worry about any fancy brush cleaners or anything like that. Just follow a few simple rules and you should be fine:

1. Never store your brushes tip-down. Ever. You can store them on their sides, or tips up in a cup or mug.

2. Always clean the paint off your brush. As soon as you are done painting, clean off your brush thoroughly and never let paint dry on it. Also, letting paint get down towards the base of the brush (where all the bristles converge) is bad, so try to only load up paint on the tip of the brush.

3. Try to keep a good tip on all your brushes. A brush is basically useless once it can no longer keep a good tip. If the bristles no longer come to a point at the end, but instead fray in all different directions, the brush should no longer be used for painting, only things like glue and maybe mixing paint.

If you are careful with your brushes, they should last you a long time.

Priming

Every model should be primed (spray painted) before being painted. This allows the paint to stick to the model better, and results in a better overall paint job. Usually, this is done with either black or white, but can be done in other colors (maybe a metal color for Necrons, or a blue for Ultramarines. This can be done with a spray gun, which I will go over much later). Additional coats of paint go on top of this. 

The choice of a white or black priming depends on the color scheme of your model. It's pretty simple: If you have mostly light colors, prime using white. If you use mostly dark colors, use a black primer. It's hard to make light colors cover a dark primer (painting white or yellow over black is very difficult). 

I will go over priming technique, as well as some things to look out for while priming, in a later post.

This has been a very brief introduction to painting, more to follow! Be sure to comment if you found this helpful or have any questions!