4 reasons you shouldn't paint in sub-assembly

When I started painting miniatures, I painted the models that came included in board games. Those weren't exactly high quality miniatures, but they were fun and I was just excited to have painted playing pieces. Hungry for more, I bought the Games Workshop board game Blackstone Fortress, which included over 50 miniatures. Then I opened the box and discovered that these miniatures came on sprues and required assembly. I learned quickly that building miniatures was a heck of a lot of fun, and that it could be creative too. All the Citadel painting guides showed people painting miniatures fully assembled, so I followed suit, but I secretly wondered why nobody seemed to paint miniatures unassembled. So one day I tried painting an unassembled miniature, known in the hobby as a "sub-assembly", and I regretted it from the start. Here's 4 reasons you shouldn't paint sub-assemblies (and the 2 times you should).

1. There are no hard-to-reach places

You look at a built miniature and your brain tells you there are a bunch of places that are going to be hard to reach. How are you going to get paint behind that gun across the model's chest? That hand is tiny, and nearly hidden behind the robe, that'll be tough. And so on.

The problem is, once you start seeing one hard-to-reach place, your brain can't stop seeing hard-to-reach places. It's a sculpture that's just 28mm tall. Everything is hard to reach. You're going to get the wrong paint on parts of the model you didn't intend. And that's OK. There's an easy fix for that.

And the truth is, if it's impossible to reach with a paint brush, then it's also impossible to reach with your eyes. There are parts of a model that just don't have to be painted. This is why you choose your undercoat carefully.

If you think you need to paint a sub-assembly for fear of getting hard-to-reach areas, then you're likely over-thinking it.

2. It's hard to keep track of which pieces get which colour

It seems counter-intuitive that it would be easier to paint a complex miniature fully assembled, but actually the painting itself becomes more intuitive when you paint a whole object rather than just pieces of an object. The pieces of a miniature can be split up in truly bizarre ways, usually to ensure clean molding. And even for models that seem simple, it's really hard to paint the front and back of a model and then stick them together and expect the colours to match up seamlessly.

3. Painted parts might not fit together

I've lived in some pretty dismal apartment buildings. One thing lazy landlords love to do is paint, and unfortunately what they hate to do is to strip paint. So they just paint over the old paint every time a tenant moves out. After four or five fresh coats, doors start to stick and windows fail to open and close because they get jammed by thick layers of paint.

A similar thing happens when you paint a sub-assembly. If you undercoat the separate parts of a model, they no longer fit together as tightly as they do with no paint. If you undercoat and paint those pieces, it's even worse. Sure, we're talking fractions of a millimeter difference, but these miniatures are only a few millimeters around in the first place. Those fractions count.

4. Painting a sub-assemly means you paint places you never see

When you paint a sub-assembly, you're usually painting more than you need to paint. You paint the inside of a robe that ends up 80% covered by the model's body. You paint a side of a backpack or a weapn that gets stuck to the back of a model. Sure, it's just a drop or two of paint, but it's also time and effort.

(And then you try to second guess yourself and you STOP painting pairts of a piece but you miscalculate what's visible and what's not visible, and you end up with ugly gaps that you have to paint assembled anyway.)

Don't waste your skill on parts of a model that's never going to be seen.

Two times you should paint sub-assemblies

There are two times sub-assemblies seem to be useful.

• Heads: Painting tiny heads, which are often surrounded by high collars or wind-blown scarves, can be a useful trick. A head usually comes as one piece, so you get to treat it as a singular object while you're painting it, and then you just stick it onto the body once eveything is dry.
• Some parts of vehicles and walls: Sometimes painting tank treads, canons, corridor walls, or some big chunk of a vehicle model as a sub-assembly makes sense. Often, these parts have good tolerance for fitting together, and you're often using really big brushes to achieve full coverage, so it's easy to just paint big chunks of a model that's mostly flat surfaces, and then assemble it later.

Trust the process

It might seem like it's a good idea to paint a model before you assemble it, but there are reasons the experts don't advise it. I only had to try it once to understand why. It's much easier to paint an assembled model. Be agile, be ready to patch up mistakes, and have confidence in your painting skills regardless of how rudimentary you think they are.