Before I started painting miniatures, I literally thought it would be beyond my ability. I have bad eyesight, a relatively short attention span (except when I'm obsessed and have hyper-focused attention), an abundance of energy, and unsteady hands. I couldn't imagine these traits being compatible with painting tiny toy soldiers. But once I first tried applying acrylics to a small batch of board game miniatures, I discovered (much to my relief) that painting miniatures can be easier than painting, say, a portrait on canvas. It all depends on the miniature you're trying to paint, and your end goal.
Miniatures with lots of extra decorative bits means you have to pick out tiny regions and paint them with precision. On the other hand, miniatures that are poorly made and lack detail are hard to paint because you just don't know what's supposed to be what (is that hair or a hood? a hand or a hilt? boot or peg leg?) But some miniatures are highly detailed, but simple in design. Those are the best ones to paint.
The run-of-the-mill Space Marines from Warhammer 40,000 are superhuman warriors clad in ceramite plate armour. Medieval knights wear chain mail and metal plate armour. Both of those translate to lots of flat surfaces for you to paint exactly one colour, and just a few additional decorative bits for you to highlight. It's one of the easiest starting points possible, and I don't think it's coincidental that the largest wargame vendor in the world (Games Workshop) promotes the Space Marine more than any other figure. They're a great starting point. Pick a colour for your chapter, paint it onto a bunch of marines, go back around with some highlight colours, and start playing the game. Fast, and almost too easy to get wrong.
I say that men in armour is the easiest place to start, but to be honest my first miniatures were figures from my Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu board game. The game is set in the 1930s, so the miniatures are each dressed in "modern" (more modern than medieval or futuristic armour, anyway) casual clothing.
They're wearing sports jackets and waistcoats and simple dresses, with maybe an accessory here and there. Modern clothes are familiar, and it's easy to understand how they need to be painted in order to look right. You understand how a necktie works, and that its knot would be visible even though the rest of it is hidden under a collar. You understand how cardigans fall and where one would reasonably end. You know what a briefcase is supposed to look like. There's nothing high-tech or especially complicated, it's just fabrics and materials that you see everyday. I think the main reason this category of miniature is "easy" is because it feels so familiar that it can't feel intimidating.
Armies before the Dark Ages are often just called "ancient" in wargaming, including Greeks and Persians and Romans, Gauls, Eygptians, Vikings, and so on.
They're easy because ancient civilizations tended to be minimal in comparison to a more modern world. It was really hard to handcraft literally everything, there were no uniforms yet, there wasn't even all that much clothing and the clothing they did wear tended to just be draped over the body. For a painter, that means you get to paint a bunch of flesh tone, then some cloth, and then some wood and metal, and you're done. The quickest armies I've ever painted were my Romans and Egyptians. They look great, and I was playing with them, fully painted, just weeks after buying them.
The other miniatures in my first Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu board game, and in the next game I painted (Wrath of Ashardalon), were monsters. Monsters are, by definition, abominations of nature. They're ugly, a little chaotic, usually intended to be a little disgusting, and that's very often easy to paint. My first monsters were Shoggoths. As depicted in Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, a Shoggoth isn't even exactly a complete entity. It's sort of a mouth emerging from a lump of extra-planar flesh. I could do no wrong when painting them, and anything I did do wrong just ended up looking like an intentional aberration on an already aberrant entity.
For something with more structure but an equal amount of simplicity, Warhammer 40,000 has Tyranids. They're chitinous aliens with a sort of dinosaur armour over top and insect parts underneath, and they wield guns, just like you'd expect a horde of insectoid invaders. They're easy to paint. If you're painting a whole army of them, you get to keep painting the same thing over and over, so by the end of it you're really good at it and end up with some really nice "star" miniatures.
It's not necessarily easy at first, but painting lots of miniatures that are essentially the same has the benefit of enforcing repetition, which in turn becomes easier as you go. The first time I experienced this was with the traitor guardsmen from Blackstone Fortness board game, a set of 14 soldiers who are basically all the same, at least underneath. Each one has a different pose and a slightly different set of wargear, but they're just variations on a theme. You don't have to paint them all the same, but as your familiarity with the layout of the sculpts grows, the easier it becomes to neatly apply your paint. After three or four or seven or fourteen miniatures, it becomes second nature.
Miniature painting is fun, and it might surprise you at how different it feels to play a game with painted miniatures instead of the plain plastic tokens your game shipped with. It's easier than you might expect, especially if you choose your first few miniatures with care. Start simple, build up your skills, and remember that they only have to look better than nothing.
Photo by Seth Kenlon.