In this post, we are sharing our miniature painting basic checklist.

For the past few months, we started a miniature painting basics improvement journey. We watched a video from Squidmar Miniatures listing potential reasons why someone is not improving painting miniatures. One of the reasons was: “You are not mastering the basics”. That struck a cord and sent us on a quest to restart learning mini painting from zero.

We learned many important lessons… and we also learned to care for our brushes! We were mistreating them quite a bit. Going through a series of tutorials on YouTube, we assembled a playlist from great mini painters and made a list of all the key basics to master.

We also got a box of generic tabletop miniatures to practice painting. Each time we painted a new mini, we selected one point from the list to focus on. Instead of trying to practice everything at once and just fully mess up, we picked one and measured if we improved that specific skill.

Here is our list:

1. Priming
   ➡️ Zenithal Priming

2. Colour Theory
   ➡️ Colour Scheme
   ➡️ Contrast

3. Base Coat
   ➡️ Mid-Tones

4. Shading
   ➡️ All-Over Shading
   ➡️ Recess Shading

5. Layering
   ➡️ Layering
   ➡️ Glazing
   ➡️ Dry

6. Edges
   ➡️ Dry Brushing
   ➡️ Black Lining
   ➡️ Edge Highlighting

7. Basing

The ultimate goal of the first part of the series is to be able to paint a D&D Hill Giant. You can watch our improvement journey series so far on our YouTube channel.

We hope this checklist is helpful to you. Happy painting!