This simple tip will help you to improve your Warhammer mini painting without spending a fortune or wasting your precious miniatures.
Hands up who’s ruined a mini through painting errors or inexperience?
I certainly have and still do 😥
The problem is practice. Or rather figures to practice on and spoil.
The more figures you paint and the more painting techniques you perfect, the better your minis will look and the less mistakes you’ll make.
But how to practice without spending a fortune on 40k Space Marines, Death Guards, Tryanids or Eternals?
As promised there’s a cheap alternative and it takes me back to how I started.
The answer is those cheap green plastic solders man of us had as kids.
They’re still available, still as cheap and make ideal figures on which to practice.
They may lack the detail of Warhammer, ForgeWorld or Dark Sword figures but that doesn’t matter because they’re only going to be used for practicing paint techniques.
You can get packs of them with 10 to 100 soldiers for under a tenner. That’s a lot of brush work practice.
All the same techniques, such as spraying on primer, painting faces, can be tried, practiced and perfected before you get near an expensive GW figure.
Get some today, they’re available in toy shops, supermarkets or online from the likes of Element Games, practice a technique and come back and say how you got on in a comment below.
Andy is a lifelong modeler, writer, and founder of modelrailwayengineer.com. He has been building model railways, dioramas, and miniatures for over 20 years. His passion for model making and railways began when he was a child, building his first layout at the age of seven.
Andy’s particular passion is making scenery and structures in 4mm scale, which he sells commercially. He is particularly interested in modelling the railways of South West England during the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, although he also enjoys making sci-fi and fantasy figures and dioramas. His website has won several awards, and he is a member of MERG (Model Railway Electronics Group) and the 009 Society.
When not making models, Andy lives in Surrey with his wife and teenage son. Other interests include history, science fiction, photography, and programming. Read more about Andy.