Painting — Bench & Table

What to actually buy

Roughly $70–90 gets you painting properly. The single most common beginner mistake is spending that on forty paints and one bad brush instead. Buy few things, buy them decent.

Primer, one can Black hides mistakes and makes colours richer. Grey or bone makes colours brighter and is more forgiving for a first model. Pick one.
~$18
Three brushes A size 1 round for most work, a size 0 for detail, and a cheap stiff brush for drybrushing. Buy synthetic now. Sable is better but punishes bad habits and costs five times as much.
~$20
Six to eight paints Your main armour colour, a metal, a flesh or bone, a black, a white, and one wash. Add colours when a model demands one, not before.
~$30
Two water pots Old jars are fine — they just have to be two. Why it matters is under water and rinsing.
$0
A palette A white ceramic tile from a hardware store beats the plastic tray in the starter set. A wet palette is a later upgrade, not a requirement.
~$3
Clippers and a hobby knife For getting parts off the sprue and cleaning up. A cheap file or the back of the knife blade handles mould lines.
~$18
Plastic cement Not superglue. Plastic cement melts the two surfaces together and makes a far stronger joint on GW plastic kits.
~$6

Before you touch a model

The part nobody explains because everyone around you already knows it. If you're teaching someone in person, this is what you'd show them with your hands before either of you says a word about technique.

Dry palette

A tile, or the plastic tray from a starter set. Paint sits on the surface and starts drying in a few minutes, so mix small amounts and refresh often. This is what you use for basecoats and drybrushing, and it's completely fine to stay here for a long time.

Wet palette

A damp sponge under a sheet of parchment paper, sealed with a lid. Keeps the same mix workable for an hour or more. Worth setting up once you're layering or blending and keep returning to one colour.

Building a wet palette

A shallow, sealable container, a sponge, and a sheet of palette paper. Fifteen minutes to build, reusable indefinitely.

Get a container with a lidA takeaway tub or a dedicated wet palette box. Shallow and flat beats deep — you're loading a brush from it, not storing soup.
Cut a sponge to fitA kitchen sponge or the foam insert some wet palettes ship with. It should sit flat in the base with no gaps at the edges.
Soak it and wring it outFully saturate the sponge under a tap, then squeeze until it stops dripping but is still damp through. Too wet and paint thins itself on the palette; too dry and it stops working within the hour.
Lay palette paper on topPurpose-made wet palette paper, or baking parchment as a cheaper substitute. It needs to be porous enough to pull water up from the sponge — regular printer paper does not work.
Mist the paper lightlyA spray bottle, a few pumps. Damp, not pooling. This gets the paper wicking straight away instead of slowly drawing water up from the sponge underneath.
Load paint and seal between sessionsPut paint on as normal. Snap the lid on whenever you step away, even for a few minutes — that's most of what keeps it workable for so long.

Top up the sponge with a little water every session or two as it dries out, and replace the paper once it starts to discolour or tear. Mould can grow in a sealed palette left unused for a long stretch — rinse the sponge or start a fresh one if it's been sitting for weeks.

Loading a brush

The same four moves, every time, before the brush ever reaches the model. Get this wrong and every later step fights it — flooded detail, streaky coverage, a ruined tip.

Wet the tipDip it in the water pot, then wipe once on the rim — damp, not dripping.
Pick up paintA small blob on the palette. You can always add more.
Work it inDrag the brush through the blob in one direction until the bristle holds an even coat, not a lump at the tip.
Test itOne stroke on a clean part of the palette. Smooth and opaque, it's ready. Beading up or feeling gluey, add more water and mix again.

Reload before you think you need to. As soon as a stroke starts dragging or the colour goes patchy, the brush is already too dry — loading little and often beats stretching one blob across a whole model.

When loading goes wrong

Symptom	Fix
Paint floods off the tip the moment it touches the model	Overloaded. Wipe more on the palette first — you should barely see paint leave the tip on first contact.
The tip splays into a fan instead of holding a point	Too much paint pushed up near the ferrule, usually from pressing the belly into the palette. Wipe it back and reshape the tip before continuing.
Colour thins out and starts dragging mid-stroke	Under-loaded — reload rather than pushing on with a dry brush.

Once this feels automatic, the technique reference covers finer control over how loaded a brush should be for a given job.

Water and rinsing

Bad habits here are the quiet cause of a lot of muddy, streaky paint.

Two pots: one to rinse the brush, one clean for thinning paint. One pot doing both is why colours go muddy.
Swirl the brush gently against the side of the pot. Jabbing bristles into the bottom splays and wrecks the tip.
Change the rinse water once it goes cloudy or feels gritty.
Wipe the brush on a towel before loading new paint — a wet brush thins whatever it picks up next, whether you meant it to or not.

Your first model, end to end

Pick a single infantry model you do not care much about. Not the character, not the tank. The first one is practice and you should expect to be mildly disappointed by it.

Clip the parts off the sprueCut leaving a small nub rather than flush against the model — clipping tight can tear the plastic. Trim the nub away afterwards with the knife.
Scrape the mould linesThin raised seams run down arms and legs. Drag the knife edge sideways along them. Paint magnifies a mould line, it never hides one.
Glue it togetherPlastic cement, a small amount, hold for thirty seconds. Leave it a few hours before painting.
Prime itOutdoors or in a garage. Hold the can about a foot away and use several light passes from different angles. Do not try to cover it in one go — that is how you fill detail. Skip it entirely if it is humid or below about 60 °F (15 °C), or you get a chalky finish.
Basecoat the big areasThinned paint, two coats. Armour, cloth, skin. Do not worry about neatness at the boundaries yet; you will tidy them later.
Wash itA dark wash over the whole model, or just into the recesses if you want more control. This one step does more for a first model than anything else you can do.
Bring the raised areas back upEither drybrush the original colour over the top, or repaint the raised surfaces leaving the wash in the crevices. Both work.
DetailsEyes, weapons, pouches, purity seals. Last, because they are most likely to need a second attempt.
Base and rimTexture or sand, then paint the rim of the base a solid dark colour. A clean rim reads as "finished" more than almost anything else on the model.
VarnishA matt spray protects it from handling. Worth doing on anything you intend to actually play with.

Beginner traps

The mistakes that cost people the most time, in the order they usually happen.

Painting straight from the pot. Unthinned paint fills detail and dries glossy and streaky. Thin everything.
Buying a huge paint set. You will use six of them and the rest will dry out over two years.
Priming too close or too heavy, and burying the detail before you start.
Spending eight hours on model one, hating it, and stopping. Give the first three models two hours each and move on — you improve faster across five models than within one.
Not shaking the paint. Two minutes, properly. Pigment settles hard.
Comparing your work to Instagram. Those are display pieces shot under studio light at 10x magnification. Yours will be seen at arm's length on a table.