Painting Resin Miniatures for Beginners: A Step-by-Step UK Guide

The first miniature you paint is never the one you frame on the shelf, and that is exactly the point. Painting resin miniatures for beginners is far less daunting than the contest-winning photos online suggest. A bare grey resin print, a handful of paints and an hour at the kitchen table will get you a tabletop-ready model, and the gap between "playable" and "lovely" closes faster than most people expect. Here is the approach we recommend to customers picking up a brush for the first time.

Start with a clean, primed model

Good paint needs a good surface. Our prints arrive as detailed resin, so a quick prep makes everything that follows easier: wash off any residue, snip away supports and stubs, and give the model a thin coat of primer before colour goes near it. Primer is the layer that lets paint grip the resin instead of beading off it, and a grey or white spray gives you a neutral base to work over. We walk through the whole process in our guide to prepping and priming 3D-printed resin miniatures, so if your model is still on the sprue, start there and come back.

The kit you actually need to begin

You can spend a fortune on hobby supplies, but you do not need to. A starter brush, a pot of water, a cheap palette and roughly a dozen acrylic paints will cover almost any fantasy or sci-fi model. We stock a full range of miniature paints and ready-made paint sets from The Army Painter, which save you the guesswork of buying colours one at a time. A boxed set gives you a sensible spread of basics, a wash or two and usually a brush, so your first order is genuinely everything-in-one.

Three things matter more than the brand on the pot: thin your paints with a little water so detail does not vanish under thick coats, keep a wash in your kit for instant shading, and buy one decent brush rather than five bad ones. A single good size 1 brush does the vast majority of the work on a 28mm or 32mm figure.

Painting resin miniatures: a simple five-step method

Once the model is primed, a reliable routine takes it from grey to finished. Base coat first: block in the main areas (skin, cloth, metal, leather) with flat colour, leaving the primer to show in the recesses if you are quick about it. Next, wash the whole model with a dark shade and let it flow into the cracks; this single step does most of the shading for you and is the moment a model suddenly reads as three-dimensional. Then drybrush or layer a lighter tone over the raised details to bring back the highlights the wash darkened.

Finish with a few spots of bright accent colour (a gem, an eye, a glowing rune) and a coat of varnish to protect all that work during play. Run that order on every model (base coat, wash, highlight, detail, seal) and your results climb steadily without it ever feeling complicated.

The fast lane: speed paints for instant results

If the five-step method sounds like a lot for a whole warband, there is a shortcut. Speed paints (also called contrast paints) combine base coat and shade in one heavily pigmented coat: brush them over a light primer and they pool in the recesses and thin over the raised areas on their own. A unit that would take an evening with traditional layering can be table-ready in a single sitting. The Speedpaint 2.0 Starter Set (£35.99) is a tidy way in: it pairs the paints with a brush and practice models, and it is the set we point most newcomers towards when they want a painted army rather than a single showpiece. The wider Army Painter range builds out from there as your confidence grows.

Choosing a good first miniature to practise on

Pick something forgiving. A single character with clear, separated areas teaches you more than a cluttered centrepiece covered in tiny gems and chainmail. Our Printed Obsession range is full of characterful one-piece NPCs and monsters that paint up quickly and hide a wobbly first attempt well, while the monthly Galaad Miniatures sets give you adventurers and townsfolk in clean 32mm sculpts that are a pleasure to learn on. Print a couple of cheap singles, treat them as practice, and do not be precious about them. Mistakes wipe off with a little isopropyl alcohol, and every model you finish teaches your hands something the last one did not.

So pick a forgiving first model from one of our designers, browse our paint sets to put a starter kit together, and get a brush in your hand this weekend. The shelf-worthy minis come later. The fun starts on the very first one.