If you build and paint Warhammer 40k or Warhammer Age of Sigmar minis, or any scale model, there’s a good chance that you don’t feel like you’re keeping up with your painting backlog. It can be quite a bummer to realize just how much of your collection is sitting unpainted. But there’s no better time for a new start than the new year, and in this guide, I’ve set out my top tips for how to paint more miniatures in 2025 than ever before!
If you want advice on painting miniatures in general, we have a separate guide that goes into all the techniques you need to know for any tabletop game (and particularly Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar). And if the prospect of painting miniatures at all leaves you hollow or fills you with dread, we have a separate guide on how to beat hobby burnout by professional psychiatrist Dr. Joe Stammeijer.
This article is inspired by personal experience. I’ve recently moved into a new house, and for the first time in years, I have a dedicated hobby painting space that isn’t in a chilly garage. I used the move as an opportunity to really think about what I needed. I’ve bought new hobby tools, got rid of many more, and set up my painting environment so that it works. And, edifyingly, I’m painting much more frequently, consistently, and to completion than I was before.
What do I think has made the difference? Well, painting is just easier than it was before. Obviously, not everyone has the space for a dedicated hobby area. But whatever your home situation, you can make changes that will make it much easier for you to pick up a brush.
These are the five big changes you can make to your hobby habits to paint more miniatures in 2025:
1. Make space
Not everyone can make room for a dedicated hobby area. But determining where in your house you are able to paint, and ensuring that space is ready for you to paint whenever you get an opportunity, will make it far easier for you to use it. Keep it tidy, and make sure it’s pleasant to be in.
A ‘project box’ is a really useful way to speed up getting started. This should contain your current model building or painting project and the tools that you need for it. While you might have a deeper store of unbuilt kits and tools, you want to be able to grab everything you need and set it out in one quick motion.
If you do have a dedicated hobby space, is it one you can use when you want to paint? Do you have a comfortable chair? Is the desk covered in half-finished projects? Is the space cluttered and cramped by other boxes? My painting space is also my work office, so I have no choice but to keep it tidy, or else my day job would become a nightmare (and I would get very embarrassed by my background on video calls).
2. Get the right tools
What part of painting models do you find most stressful? Whatever it is, do you have the right tools for the job?
If you’re frustrated by the amount of control you have with your miniature paintbrush, check if it’s still in good condition. A brush that has started to fishtail or fork is going to make painting much harder, and needs replacing. If it takes you ages to base coat, are you using a brush that’s too small? A size four with a good tip will work great for basecoating. If drybrushing is irksome, why not get some drybrush paints?
Lots of people stumble on waterslide decals: putting chapter icons onto curvy Space Marine pauldrons is an absolute nightmare. Micro Sol and Micro Set are two great tools that first soften decals, and then help them to adhere.
I really rate a brush rinser as a tool to make applying decals more convenient. It’s a very over-the-top brush-cleaning system, but it does mean I always have access to a shallow dish of clean water. I can swap between painting and applying decals without leaving the paint desk to get a saucer of water – so I can slap on a decal without really thinking about it.
Basing miniatures can be really easy these days too. Vallejo diorama FX paste is a great way to apply earth, sand, or snow textures to model bases, which you can then spruce up with some grass tufts. Geek Gaming Scenics basing mixes and basing glue are a one-stop solution. I store mine in tall pots so I can easily dip a model into the basing mix without getting my desk messy.
If you find the prospect of painting when you’re tired off-putting, what’s your lighting situation like? Many domestic reading lights are not bright enough to paint comfortably by – unlike reading a book, you’ll often be looking at the shadowy underside of a model. A daylight bulb lamp will save your eyes, as well as giving you a more accurate view of how the models look – the photo above shows the difference between a painting lamp and the regular light bulb in my room.
3. Make your tools visible
If it’s hard to find a tool, it’s hard to use it. I had most of the tools listed in the last section, but they were stuffed away in storage boxes, or (in the case of the paintbrushes) hidden in a collection of lots and lots of duff brushes. Now that I’ve made everything accessible, I’m using it. Funny that.
Storage solutions are important. If you have a dedicated painting area, paint racks will both make it much easier to find paints, and also much easier to put them away. If you don’t have a full-time painting area, you can institute a ‘hard drive and RAM’ system – keep most of your paints in long-term storage, and then maintain a small supply that you are using for your current project, in your project box or in easy-access-storage near to where you paint area.
Your ability to find something depends on how buried it is among other bits and pieces. That, in turn, depends on how much stuff you have getting in the way. Which leads on to my next point:
4. Get rid of stuff
Just about every model maker has a pile of plastic potential, full of random purchases for sundry Warhammer 40k factions that caught our attention over the years. If you like kitbashing, or building Warhammer terrain from scratch, there’s a good chance you have a massive stockpile of bits and pieces as well.
These stockpiles may have cost a lot of money to build up, and there could be some emotions connected to them and all the cool ideas you had about what to do with them. But you only have so much space in your home and time on this earth. What’s more, stuff that you aren’t going to use gets in the way of the stuff you might actually use. Get rid of it.
You can sell it, though be warned that eBaying models or taking them to a bring-and-buy runs the risk of you picking up new kits. But if you’re part of a games club, have friends with kids, or if there is a school in your town that runs a games club, you can give stuff away. Not only will you free up space, giving gifts will make you feel good!
5. Cheat
Painting a whole army can be exhausting – so cheat and take shortcuts. An army of models painted to an average standard looks way better on the tabletop than a single miniature painted to competition standard surrounded by a sea of grey plastic.
Colored spray primer is a great way to both prime your model and apply the base coat for the dominant color. In the UK I recommend the Colour Forge range, as it’s cheaper than GW spray paint but the same quality – Army Painter is a good alternative in the US.
You can even do some cool technical effects with just sprays. I’m currently working on candy-red Mechanicum using Tamiya Gold and Tamiya Translucent Red spray paint. No airbrush needed.
Contrast Paint, and equivalents like Army Painter Speed Paint, is another great tool. Site editor Alex Evans has powered through several armies using Contrast. I use it to whip through a few specific parts of models: skeletons, parchment, red wax seals.
There’s the ‘slapchop’ method too. You first give a model a black base coat and then a white ‘zenithal’ spray from above, to define the shadows on the model. Then you color in the pre-shaded areas using Contrast Paints. This gives you much more impressive-looking shadows.
Drybrushing is a versatile technique. It’s a quick and dirty way to apply edge highlighting, or even to apply more substantial color shifts across large areas of a model. I built up this excellent scratched-metal pattern on these Solar Auxilia tanks using orange, cream, and then silver drybrush over a black basecoat. The humble makeup sponge can be used for a similar effect, rapidly highlighting large surfaces on vehicles and terrain, and you can buy them in cheap multi-packs.
If you prefer to paint one model at a time than to batch paint, you can speed up drying using a a hairdryer. Don’t get too close with the dryer as you may affect the plastic (or resin) of the mini, and bear in mind that Contrast paints and crackle paints (like Agrellan Earth) will have a different finish if you speed up their drying process – not necessarily worse, just different from what you were expecting.
Some scary-sounding techniques are also secretly cheats. Oil paints, for example, have a reputation as an advanced technique, because they don’t behave exactly like regular acrylics. But oil paint mixed with thinner is so good for quickly shading models it feels unreal. Just make sure that you allow any acrylic paints on the model to thoroughly dry and cure (and preferably seal them with matt varnish) before applying the oil wash, as the thinner can lift acrylic paint.
The advantage of oils is that, after the thinner has evaporated, the paint itself takes forever to cure; you can make the paint ‘live’ again by reapplying the thinner, letting you both add and remove the paint ’til you get the effect you want. This is a massive cheat for panel lining on vehicles: slap thinned oil paint all over the vehicle, then mop the paint off the raised surfaces using a sponge. It’s great for weathering, too!
Final thoughts
Sincerely, I hope those tips help. Painting models can be great fun, and if you’ve lost sight of that, it could be because the environment you’re trying to paint in and your expectations for what you should be achieving are a little out of whack. Use the New Year as an excuse to evaluate where you are, what you want to achieve in your hobby, and whether you’re set up for success.
I’ve received product samples of some of the items mentioned in this article from manufacturers: a Green Stuff World brush rinser, and Army Painter Speed Paints. Equivalent products from other brands are available, but those are the ones I’ve tested.
Here’s to a great new year in the hobby, and many more amazing miniatures to paint. Wargamer will be right there covering all the latest news for Warhammer 40k and other tabletop miniature games – follow Wargamer on Google News to make sure you don’t miss anything we put out!
And if you have some top tips to make painting easier and more fun, why not let us know on Facebook, BlueSky, or X.com?
Source: Wargamer
