Collection of mini figures on a wooden table with various paintbrushes, paints and other supplies.

How to Base Coat Miniatures for Wargaming and Model Making

Base coating is the first layer of colour you apply to your wargaming miniature, laying the foundations for the colour scheme and tone of your character. This technique is one of the most vital steps in painting a model, and creating a smooth, even basecoat helps ensure that any techniques, such as dry brushing, highlights, or weathering, 
can work to their full potential. 

Learning how to apply the smooth, thin and full coverage base coat will help you to ensure that you don’t obscure any detailing on your models, but also provide you with a solid base for any detailing. This blog is going to talk you through the steps of how to create the perfect basecoat, while also guiding you through the best brushes to use and any tips and tricks you can use to improve your technique. 

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Painting a basecoat onto a mini figure with an ABC Brushes Easy Grip brush.

What is Base Coating for Models?

Your base coat will always be the first layer of colour you apply to your miniature and immediately follows priming, entirely covering it up. The even paint not only sets up the foundations for the rest of your painting and detailing, but also helps you to block out areas of colour on your model, acting as a guide for the colour palette of your character and setting up areas of tone. Bad base coats can result in the rest of the painting steps on your model also being unsuccessful, so nailing this is essential to creating better models and wargaming miniatures. 

The key difference between priming and base coating is how they are used to set up a mini for painting. Priming is used to help with the adhesion of paint to the plastic or metal material of a model, ensuring that the paint doesn’t peel off after you have spent time painting and designing your character. Base coating is more of a tool to block in and plan colours, helping you to start to fill in tonal values and form a basis for the overall look of your character. 

Collection of miniature figurines on a wooden surface in various stages of painting.

Why Does Base Coating Matter?

Base coating is the first wargaming painting technique that starts bringing your characters to life and away from the boring, flat primer coat. You can begin to fill in the main colour schemes of the miniatures and make them more vibrant and recognisable. You can then also use base coating as a tool to keep your colours consistent across your characters, setting the tone for the entire set and helping to produce clean and readable models for the tabletop. 

You can always adjust the level of detailing on your models’ base coats, in accordance with the size of the character, to help with the speed of your painting. For example, when you are painting large amounts of infantry characters for armies, you might want to ensure your base coat is limited to only one colour on all of the soldiers, so that you don’t become too focused on the detailing for all of these minis. You can then make time for base coating larger, more complex characters. 

Set of red ABC Sable Spearhead paint brushes on a paint covered cutting mat, with minis next to them.

What Makes a Good Base Coating Brush?

The most common paint brush types, wargaming and model painters use for base coating include sable or synthetic pointed round and regular round brushes, usually slightly bigger than any detailing brushes you normally use. Remember to adjust the size of the brush you are using according to the size of the mini that you are base coating. The brushes you should use will have an excellent paint-holding capacity, a tip that allows for controlled coverage and good durability, all characteristics that will improve your base coating skills.

If you want to find out more about the different array of model painting brushes and what techniques they are best for, have a look at our blog: Choosing the best brushes for model painting.

Sable brushes

Sable and Kolinsky sable paint brushes are the highest quality, natural hair brushes available to you, whose characteristics can never be fully replicated by a synthetic hair brush. The soft, fine hairs are lifted by water as you submerge them, collecting paint and water between them and ensuring they have excellent paint retention. Each hair is also thicker towards the centre and thinner towards the base and the tip, ensuring that paint can gather in the belly of the brush and be released slowly. 

Set of ABC Brushes Tri-Grip Wave Synthetic brushes on a ABC drybrush board with yellow paint covering part of it.

A sable miniature painting brush has incredible, smooth paint flow, aided by its unique, fine scales, found along the follicles of each hair. This enables them to control the pick up and application of paint extremely efficiently, always ensuring that paint flows off the brush evenly and helping to create smooth, even coverage for your base coat layers. Sable brushes also have an excellent snap, maintaining a consistently sharp point that aids in applying a base coat to any smaller or more detailed areas of a model. 

However, sable brushes also come with a hefty price tag, due to the labour-intensive processes and sourcing that go into making them. They are also more delicate than synthetic paint brushes, which means that many miniature painters keep their sables for detailing aspects within their base coats and never use them for any rougher painting techniques. Since they are an investment and can be so delicate, they are ideal for more experienced painters, and if well-maintained, can remain reliable for years. 

Synthetic brushes

Synthetic brushes are much more cost-effective than sable brushes because they are man-made, eliminating any need for sourcing and labour intensity costs. Obtaining the bristles to make a synthetic brush is a lot easier and means that the bristles can be made to a more exact uniformity, as opposed to any natural hairs that can, naturally, contain a lot more irregularities. They also possess a higher durability, being able to withstand harsher techniques, cleaners and paints. 

Dry brushes, red demon miniature figures, and a paint palette on a wooden surface.

This makes them perfect for heavier and high-use, therefore better for batch painting base coats on armies and larger wargaming models with bigger surfaces, than sable hair paint brushes. Synthetic brushes are the usual go-to for the majority of your base coating, and many model painters like to keep them solely for this work, while their sable brushes remain for detail-orientated areas only. They are a perfect brush for anyone who has just started model painting, removing the pressures of using and potentially damaging a costly sable hair brush.  

Discover more about the differences between synthetic and sable brushes in our blog: Sable or Synthetic? Choosing the Right Brush for Wargaming Miniatures and Scale Modelling

Rounded dry brushes

Rounded dry brushes should never be your first choice for painting a base coat, as they lack the detailing characteristics of the round synthetic and sable brushes, especially when painting smaller characters. However, if you need fast coverage for terrain or larger, textured surfaces, the dry brush can be a better choice than any small round synthetic or sable brushes. The coarser bristles and blunt shape will always be able to handle rougher, textured surfaces better than any brushes with finer, softer hair. 

Three bottles of War Paints Fanatics model paint on a table with a person working on a model in the background.

Choosing the Right Paint for Base Coating

Now that you have chosen a brush, what paints should you use to base coat with? The short answer is: it’s up to you! However, we will go through the key differences between the different characteristics of acrylic and enamel paint and how they can benefit your base coats. It is important to build up your base coat in thin, smooth layers, building up the opacity rather than applying thick, opaque paint all at once, so always thin your paints before applying them anywhere on the model. This may take longer, but it will preserve the finer features of your characters better and form a consistent foundation for the rest of your painting.

  • Acrylic paints - Acrylic paints are a water based pigment, allowing for quicker drying time and easier clean up, with just soap and water. A quicker drying time allows you to build up layers of base coat faster, making them perfect if you want to create a large number of minis in one go. 

    You can use water to thin acrylic paints very easily, and achieving a consistency similar to milk is usually best for base coating. Using a wet palette can help to preserve the thinness of your paints for longer, so that you don’t have to readjust their consistency, as the paint dries out over long painting sessions.

    Some popular, high-quality acrylic paint ranges include: Vallejo, The Army Painter and Coat d'Arms.

Painting a basecoat onto a mini figure with an ABC Brushes Prolon brush.
  • Enamel paints - Enamel paints are oil-based pigments that take a lot longer to dry and require mineral spirits for thinning and cleanup. While enamel paints are not recommended if you want to paint a project quickly, they can create a smoother, more durable finish and allow you to blend and make corrections for longer than acrylic paints. 

    Similar to acrylic paints, your enamel paint will need to be the same consistency as milk, but because they are an oil based paint, you will need to use thinners such as turpentine or enamel thinners to thin them. Remember to always use these spirits in a well-ventilated room, as they can cause headaches, and if you want to be even more careful, you can use odourless mineral spirits. They are a touch more expensive but are less likely to cause headaches. 

    Some popular, high-quality enamel paints include: Humbrol Enamels.

Using a paint brush to [ick up paint from a wet palette.

How to Base Coat Miniatures

Step 1 - Prepare your models by sanding off any mould lines and uneven aspects of the plastic, ensuring that any irregularities are removed before you apply paint, so that they don’t affect the application of a smooth base coat. You can then prime the mini, using airbrushing, spray-on or brush-on primer, creating an undercoat that will help the base coat to adhere to the model. Always let this dry completely before painting on your base coat.

Want to know more about priming? Have a look at our blog: Priming Miniatures Explained: The Best Methods for Wargamers. 

Step 2 - You will have to then thin your paints properly, as base coating requires you to apply your paint in multiple, thin layers. This helps to preserve the details of the model underneath, especially in areas with high levels of detail, while also creating a smooth, even coverage of paint. Using one layer of very thick paint will obscure the finer elements of the model and create a lumpy, uneven coverage that will form a poor base for any further painting work. Thinning your paints will also ensure that you maintain a smooth flow of paint off your brush as you work. 

Painting a blue basecoat onto a mini figure of a monkey astronaut.

Step 3 - You can now start painting your base coat onto your mini! Always start with the hardest to reach or inner areas of your model, as this can help you avoid hitting the edges of the recess and ruining any places you have already painted around the edges. Apply the paint with steady, even strokes and never overload the brush with colour as this can cause paint to flood an area. Let each layer dry completely before you apply another one so that the paint remains consistently even, and always ensure everything dries before you add a different colour. 

Step 4 - Once you have painted your entire model with the desired colour scheme, leave the model to dry before proceeding with any other detailing or weathering effects. Depending on what paints you have used, the thickness of your layers and the humidity of your studio/ room, the time it takes for your minis base coat to dry can vary from minutes to hours. Remember to have patience, trying to apply over the top of and disturbing any wet paint will ruin your base coat layer and destroy any even coverage.

Picking up red paint from a plastic ABC palette, with an Easy Grip ABC paint brush.

Common Base Coating Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

  • Using paint straight from the pot - Always avoid using acrylic or enamel paint straight from the pot for painting any base coats. It will always be too thick, and the paint will never flow as smoothly off the brush, meaning that you won’t be able to build up layers as accurately and gradually. Too thick paint can obscure any fine detailing within the model and create uneven layers that any further painting and detailing can emphasise. It’s always better to do two layers of thin paint than one gloopy one. 

  • Overworking drying paint - You need to make sure that you let your paint dry before applying another layer of paint over the top in a new colour. You can run the risk of mixing the new paint layer in with the original one, rather than having a clean separation between the two. This will then spoil the original base coat, and you will have to redo the entire section of your wargaming model. 

  • Using the wrong brush size - Using the wrong size brush can really hinder your ability to create a smooth base coat. A too-large brush can flood the fine detail areas, removing the details of a face or any clothing patterns. Using a brush that is too small on a large area of a mini will result in a streaky, uneven base coat. 

  • Rushing coverage - Take your time as you are painting a base coat, rushing the process and skipping steps like thinning the paint properly or not letting each layer dry before you add another, can mean that you could ruin the quality of the rest of your painting. base coating is an essential part of model painting and can make all of the subsequent techniques much easier, so have patience and never rush the process! 
Painting a basecoat onto a mini figure with an ABC Brushes Vanguard brush.

Base Coating for Different Wargaming and Scale Model Projects

  • Infantry and characters - If you are painting many, smaller infantry characters, you might want to reduce the number of colours that you are using for your base coats. Using one colour for a base coat can really help to quicken the painting process when creating armies and help you not become lost in the details. 

  • Vehicles and armour panels - For larger models, like trucks and cars, some model painters prefer to use an airbrush instead of paintbrushes. They will thin down their paints in a similar way to how you would when you are brush base coating and then apply this in two coats, still ensuring that you have a smooth, even coverage of paint. This speeds up the process for larger vehicles and armour panels, but will not work as well for smaller models or characters with a large amount of detailing.  

  • Terrain and scenery - Painting terrain and scenery can be very harsh on your regular synthetic and sable brushes, damaging or bending the bristles as they paint over the textures. Using a dry brush, combined with help from a sponge, can help you to apply a base coat to your terrain bases, without destroying your brushes as quickly. It can also be more cost-effective to use regular acrylic paint, such as Daler-Rowney's System 3 acrylic, instead of your model painting acrylics for large terrain bases. 

Base coating is a core skill for all model and wargaming painters and is essential to the foundations of all of your miniatures. Learning how to use this technique ensures that your colour schemes remain consistent across your collections and elevates the quality of all of your models. However, discovering which brushes and paints to pair and use can benefit your painting even further, and we hope that this blog has provided you with the essential knowledge to perfect your base coating skills. 

Explore the full range of ABC’s brushes, essential in creating a smooth base coat, on our website. And while you are looking, why not also discover the best paints for base coating.

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