The Five Stages of My Painting Process

Sometimes it's good to push yourself and try new things, to take yourself out of your comfort zone and really push the learning experience, testing new techniques and processes to raise your game to the next level. However, sometimes you just want to sit down, turn the brain off a little bit, and crank out some models. Perhaps you want to decompress after a long day, or have a large swathe of models to crack through before a key game or session, but either way below is my 5 step process from getting a model from built to painted as simply as possible whilst still achieving what I think are really strong TableTop quality minis.

As a side note before we jump in - I don’t think this is the perfect painting process at all, it’s just the process that I tend to use when painting multiple models at once. Feel free to use it in its entirety, ignore it completely or maybe pick one or two steps that you want to adopt. I have picked one model, a Human Female Pirate, to show all the various steps throughout the process so hopefully you can see the impact of each step as we get towards the finished product.

1 - Assembly and Prime

Starting with an apology is never a good sign, but I forgot to get a picture of the model at this stage… so sorry! However, this is by far the easiest and most logical of steps which involves building the model and priming it. Building the model will vary depending on where you get the model from, the materials it’s made from and what you want the end result to be, but for me 95% of all the models I paint are 3D printed at home in SLA Resin by me so it involves all the post processing of washing, removing supports, cleaning, curing and glueing. 

Once the model has been assembled, typically separately from the base, I then spray it with black primer all over, followed by a Zenithal highlight to help pick out the details. For those that don’t know, a zenithal highlight is a highlight at the priming stage, typically from the top down and in white or a light grey, showing both the volumes and details a lot easier than if they were in just plain black, and also acts as a guide for painting, showing the areas that are most likely to catch the light. Depending on the way you paint, and the paints you use, this underlying highlight can slightly show through to give a little more variation in colour and shades.

2 - Base Coats

This is the first stage and one where you make most of the decisions. Here you make your way round the model and pick the main blocks / volumes and assign them a colour. This can be challenging mentally, but once you get a feel for it you can fairly quickly make some snap judgements about what colours you pick. In general, you are going to want to pick the 3 big areas and colours and focus on those first, thinking about how they will make the model pop. Everything else can be a bit more de-saturated and muted, ensuring that the focus of the eye from 6 feet away (remember these models we are painting with this process are mostly for playing with, not for display) reads towards the colours you want it to. 

So let's meet our model and talk through some of the decisions. This is from Titan Forge which I printed at home on an Elegoo Mars 3. Looking across the model the 3 large impact volumes I wanted to focus on were the Skin (normally always a focus, as humans we naturally look towards faces and hands as a focal point), the cloth wrappings (top half) and finally the trousers (or pants for our American friends) with the flicky material coming off the waist. As you can see our 3 main colours of focus here were the Brown, Yellow and Green respectively, combining to give us a muted palette with the cloth really popping out. I chose to paint in a mid tone here, because we are darkening it down in later stages, but once you have made the decision on the colours, it becomes a very relaxing process just painting “within the lines”, staying as neat as possible and getting a smooth base colour.

Depending on the details at this stage (which varies model to model), I may just paint straight over them knowing I can come back during a later stage to pick them out again, such as the handles on the daggers, or if I can be neat and tidy I may paint round them such as the necklace that is left grey in this picture, especially if the detail colour will be significantly whiter than the current base colour. Also note, whilst the cloth wrappings around her legs are the same cloth in theory, I painted those a slightly more muted brown so the focus is towards the top of the model where the light will be hitting. 

3 - Washing

Also known as “talent in a bottle”, washing is a very thin paint with high flow that can settle in all the folds, recesses and sunken areas to start to add some basic shadows into the model. There is one decision point here that can make an impact on the final model. You can either wash each element in a colour or tone specific to it, boosting the saturation of the colour and adding some more subtle shadows, or you can look to wash in a more general brown or black wash to tie the whole model together and desaturate as one. What you choose to do will depend entirely on the result you are after, and I recommend trying both out on different models; but both have their advantages and right place to use them. 

I chose to go with coloured washes, really trying to make the colours pop from a distance which can work well in a more fantasy setting rather than a grubby grim dark setting. You can see the shadows and definition really coming out across the yellow cloth and the brown skin (comparing the chest wrappings and this pirate's amazing abs!) but looking back I could have potentially applied a second layer of wash to the pantaloons to help the green shadows pop more. It's not too much of an issue, you’ll see in the next step we can highlight our way out of the issue, but it's something to keep in mind. 

4 - Volume Highlighting / Dry Brushing

This step is one of the most time consuming and not immediately obvious, but the difference in the before and after can be huge depending on the model, and as such I typically focus this step towards the 3 main volumes identified in step 2. There are 2 main ways I go about it, depending on the texture you are working on. For something like scales, fur, leaves i.e. anything with a lot of sculpted small ridges and bumps, dry brushing is an amazing easy way to get quick highlights and details. Dry Brushing is the process of getting some paint on your brush, wiping most of it off on a paper towel before dragging it across the model, allowing the brush to pick out the edges and raised areas. I'm not treating this as a tutorial, there are far better creators and teachers out there for that, but it's well worth looking into and giving it a go.

The other option for areas that are more flat, rounded or shaped is volume highlight through glazing. This is the process of taking the original colour (or mid-tone as referenced above) and laying down a layer of paint, then mixing in some lighter colour and painting another layer slightly smaller away from the shadows, repeating again and again to build additional highlights as you move towards more and more of the “highlight” colour.

Comparing our model to the original step (this was on a different day so please forgive the change in lighting) the volume highlighting is pushed towards the tops of the skin, the cloth and the trousers, and you can see especially around the chest and abs the lighter colour picking out the lighter areas. The Green pantaloons probably have the biggest change in colour between lightest highlight and darkest shadows, which was a result of attempting to pull the colour away from the shadows that could have been darker.

5 - Detailing

This is the final step in the process, and is all about picking out the final details around the model, such as the necklace, the handles on the daggers and the rings on the staff across her back. 

Depending on how the model looks, you can use this to either add some contrast through colours that pop and pull the eye, add some additional story to the model with additional elements and little bits of scatter or detail across the model, or you can look to keep the details low key and subdued if you don’t want to pull the eye from the volumes you have focused on. 

Eyes are always a challenge, and you have 3 options that you can decide on throughout the process that I think are easier than trying to truly paint the eyes with a full pupil and iris - I just don't have the time, energy or skill to do that consistently. 1 is don’t bother painting them at all, putting shadows deep into the eyes and letting the viewer of the model fill in the blanks. Scaling the model to life size, would you be able to see someone's eyes if they were 20-25ft away in real life? Option 2 is to paint the eyes white, and fill in the pupil with a very fine line black pen rather than a paint brush. This is my normal “Go To” at the moment. The last option is to paint the eyes a vastly different colour and make a feature of them, with a glow or a fade. This last option is normally great for more fantasy creatures or larger monsters, and can be really effective in making the eyes a point of interest.

The final step on the journey is to paint the edge of the base rim black (there is no other option, despite what the rest of the internet may think!) and, get it into the glamour shots, and then get it onto the table and start playing with it!

Concluding Thoughts

So that's my process. If I am really focusing on painting a model to the best of my ability, or learning a new technique or working on something like Terrain or large epic beast, some of the steps will vary, but the basics of Priming > Base Coats > Shadows > Highlights > Details is largely what I stick to. Does this line up with the kind of painting process that you currently work through, or are there elements that are new? Either way, the stages are there to try and remove some of the mental energy in the painting, allowing you to chill out, relax, trust the process and enjoy the painting rather than worrying about what comes next!