Before I plucked up the courage to try painting miniatures, I basically thought it was just too hard. I have bad eyes, not terribly steady hands, and I'd never done anything with paint since watercolours in elementary school. Eventually, I gave it a go and while I don't claim to be good at it, the results are good enough for my low standards. When all you aim for is something that's not plain plastic, any paint job will do. However, I've come to learn that some miniatures are easier than others to paint. This is particularly important, as I've also discovered, in wargames, when you're often not just painting one miniature but 30 or 60. I've done a separate post about the easiest miniatures to paint, but this one's about miniatures you might want to reserve for late in your painting career.
My favourite faction in Warhammer lore is Adeptus Mechanicus, the cyborg tech priests of Mars. So when I started building a Warhammer army, that's the faction I chose. I don't regret it, because the faction has everything I love in sci fi, like cyborgs and mechs and Mars. However, I have to admit that because I chose to build and paint 1000 points of Adeptus Mechanicus, I ended up with something that doesn't exactly represent my best paint job. And I'd be lying if I said that my decision to just fill out the army with high point machines, like Kataphron Breachers and Armiger Helverins and Warglaives and Ironstrider Balistarii, wasn't influenced by a desire to stop the pain.
The reason Adeptus Mechanicus is so hard to paint is that they're mostly robotic, and a lot of the machinery is exposed. There's a lot of tiny little cables and wires and tubes and metal shafts and bolts and screws underneath flowing red robes, and it's just not easy to paint. Even the plates on the mechs are highly detailed, with gold trim and fleur-de-lis style decorations. There are countless distinct elements on almost every model in the army, which requires a lot of precision work, and makes them difficult to paint.
Miniatures are already small, obviously. But they get smaller. Even in the 28mm or 32mm size range, you sometimes encounter a hobbit or goblin from Middle-earth, a kinder from Krynn, kobolds, gnomes, and even sometimes dwarves. They're not just miniature. They're miniature compared to other miniatures.
It's not as impossible as you might think, but I it does require extra care. I'm pretty happy with the hobbits and goblins I got in Battle in Balin's Tomb, and the kinder I got for a Dragonlance game, but they each took a long time to get right. To date, I still haven't painted Rein and Raus from Blackstone Fortress.
Start with "normal" sized miniatures (28mm or 32mm), and save the really tiny stuff for later.
Surprisingly, I find that the opposite holds true, too. Miniatures that outsize your standard 28mm or 32mm miniature can be really difficult to paint. You might think that if a miniature is hard to paint, then making it big ought to make it easy to paint, but that's not what I've experienced. I think it's because the small miniatures hide your mistakes better than the big ones do.
On a tiny 32mm soldier, when I get a little of the red paint I'm using for the robes on the brown leather, it might look like a huge mistake under a magnifying glass. But once you look at the miniature from arm's length on the table, you forget all about it.
On a big miniature like a dragon or a beholder or a vehicle, your mistakes tend to be bigger because there's just more surface area for you to make mistakes on.
Not all sculpts are equal. I never used to notice this sort of thing before I started painting. One generic D&D miniature was the same as another. But once you start trying to colour in the lines of a miniature, the quality of the design matters. A lot.
When a miniature is molded, for instance, as 1 piece with no assembly required, parts of the figure that aren't meant to be 1 object get melded together. For instance, Meriadoc's sword in Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game is the same bit of physical plastic as his body. There's no gap between his sword blade and his shirt. They literally flow into one another. The girl with the katana in the original Zombicide has no space between her arms and her shirt, even though her arms are held up and away from her body to wield her sword.
Little shortcuts like these feel forgivable from an arm's length but they're hard to paint. Where does the sword end, and Merry's waistcoat begin? You suddenly have to make that decision, because you're doing the painting. No matter what you decide, you know it's wrong because really there should be empty space between the two objects.
I've bought a few zombies from various companies with so much gore or ragged clothing on that you just can't tell what's meant to be what. You can shrug it off and just slap a lot of gross-looking paint on it and call it a day, but for me that only makes it more confusing to look at later on. I've even tried repainting one to get it right, but it seems that no matter what colour I paint over the lack of detail, the more the lack of detail stands out.
I'm not saying you always have to spend a lot of money on amazing miniatures, but be aware that there are good miniatures and not-so-good miniatures. I'm often surprised by where the good ones appear. I never expected to be impressed by the assortment of miniatures in the Mansions of Madness box but every single one of them looks great. I certainly expected top quality from Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, but in some cases I was a little disappointed.
It's probably ideal to not purchase a miniature you haven't held in your hand first, but that's not always possible. Be aware of what you're up against when you accidentally buy a low-quality mini, and set your expectations for the end result. Sometimes less is more. I've seen some amazing duo-tone paint jobs that purposefully don't bother with detail, and instead go for an impression (like a gray zombie with just hints of sickly green, or a white knight with a glowing highlight of blue, and so on).
Miniature companies sometimes get clever and try to represent invisibility or energy out of clear plastic. Depending on the implementation, I like the idea.
The Armies of the Dead from Games Workshop were released as clear plastic in 2024, and Wizkids has a few models with clear plastic "magic" effects. I like these a lot, but clear plastic is tough to paint! I think the intention is that you dry brush highlight colours around the edges, to create a sort of glowing effect. That takes a surprising amount of skill, though.
You can also just paint the plastic directly as you would anything else, but then you're defeating the purpose of it being clear.
Wizkids also has a wizard miniature that's shooting a mana bolt (or whatever) from her hand, and the energy is cast in clear yellow plastic, requiring no paint. Of all the clear plastic I own, that's my favourite. In other words, clear plastic miniatures are easiest when they're already tinted and require no paint.
I've listed some types of miniatures I find hard to paint, but that doesn't mean they're impossible to paint. My Adeptus Mechanicus army won't win any awards (well, nothing I paint would win an award) but I like them. I don't know that I like the paint job so much as I like the army, but the paint makes them look game "real" to me. The same goes for the Star Spawns from Mansions of Madness. They're very cool but very big miniatures, and I'm just not qualified to paint them, but I did anyway and darn it they look better than plain grey plastic.
I guess the difficulty of the paint job doesn't take priority over the game, for me. If I want to play a specific miniature in a game, I'm going to buy it and paint it. I might not buy 1000 points of it when there are options for small skirmish teams instead, but I don't think I'd avoid a faction because it was too hard to paint. And anyway, hard to paint is probably good practice. You don't get better at painting by never challenging yourself. Mostly, it's just important, I think, to be aware that some miniatures are easier than others. It's neither here nor there, but it's a reality that you'll face when painting. Adjust your strategy, set expectations, and paint.
Photo by Seth Kenlon.