There are a lot of ways to get paint onto a model (and in fact we’ll be talking about a couple of others elsewhere in this deep-dive!), but the most basic and best-known is your regular standard paintbrush. Now, for miniatures, the specific brushes you’ll need are going to be a little more specialized than a roller or heavy brush for painting the outside of your garage. In fact it’ll often be even more specialized than most artist brushes, depending on exactly what you need to do.

This will be a theme throughout this page, but to be clear – you do not need anything incredibly fancy, and it’s true that a bad artist blames his tools, but there is definitely also a quality threshold below which you will get worse results. When buying brushes for miniature painting as a beginner, shoot for at least hobby-quality brushes. You can of course pick up a pack of 25 assorted brushes for $5 at Michael’s or whatever else, but don’t do that and expect the same quality of brush as buying for example one good Reaper sable for $12.

To begin, what you will typically want to have is as follows:

• A container of brush soap – I recommend “The Master’s” Brush Cleaner and Preserver since it’s both effective and goes a long way – and something to rinse your brushes out in. This can be basically any water container, though I like to use a set of cheap palette cups from Michael’s since they stack neatly and have studs that will hold a brush in place when laid across the top. I would also strongly recommend having at least two water bowls ready when painting, three when using metallic paints. This is so that you can use one for getting the paint out of your brush and one for wetting the soap – this will get rid of more of the pigment before soaping the brush and get it cleaner overall, and keeping metallics separate will help limit the spread of the shiny pigment particles in that type of paint.
• At least one basecoating brush, often a #2 Round in your preferred brand and fiber type. This will typically be your nicest single brush, and will be your all-rounder for everything from basecoating and color blocking to shading to larger details. I recommend starting with a nylon/Teklon/toray brush since they’re a cheap way to get started, then when you’re comfortable with that upgrade to a similar sable. Personally I started with a bunch of cheap crap, and just lived with that for ages until I got my big paint set (discussed below) that happened to come with some nicer brushes.
• At least one detail brush, #0 Round or smaller. In my case I started with a set of Reaper detail brushes that gave me good flexibility for the price, then I almost immediately ruined them by not knowing how to care for them and had to buy more. They’re good brushes, but let my mistakes be a lesson to you: if you don’t care for your brushes you will not have good brushes anymore. I don’t use these as often these days since I have some larger rounds that hold their point so well I don’t need detail brushes, but more on that later.
• At least one flat brush for drybrushing. Exactly where you’ll want to start with this depends on your budget and the type and scale of pieces you’re going to be painting. Drybrushing is super hard on brushes, so you’ll never, ever want to use your nicer brushes for this unless they’re specifically purpose-made for drybrushing. Sometimes it makes sense to just use whatever old garbage you have laying around, like the cheap crap $0.25 brushes mentioned above. Depending on the technique you’re using you may want to keep a variety of old/cheap brushes around for this purpose, such as a brush with firmer bristles for modeling metal shear on vehicles, something a bit softer for highlights on large areas of skin or clothing, and maybe a fairly small one (#2 flat or so) for drybrushing smaller areas. The wonderful Teri Litorco also recommends keeping a set of cheap makeup brushes on hand for this, which is genuinely a great idea. They’re easy to use and easy to come by for not a lot of money, and they’re perfect for drybrushing both because of their soft fibers in large puffs and because of the sheer number of fibers in them that lets them resist the wear and tear of drybrushing.

Now that I’ve spent some time and money building my kit up, I’ve wound up with significantly nicer tools overall.

• I keep a few sable rounds on hand, both my older Reaper #2 sable (which served me well but I treated poorly – it now has a break in the fibers inside the ferrule from where I dried it improperly) and a very fancy set of Windsor & Newton Series 7 brushes that I’ve used almost exclusively since I got them as a gift. They hold their points better than anything else I’ve ever seen and . Let me take a moment to stress that while I feel they are worth the investment if you’re serious about miniature painting, you do not need these. If you’re driving an Audi TT, you’re not very well going to take your Volvo out for a cruise – but that doesn’t make the Volvo any less worthy to carry you to and from work.
• I also have several assorted synthetic rounds (the Vallejo set mentioned above, and both the Monster and Basecoating brushes from Army Painter) that I use for basecoating from time to time, depending on the specific piece I’m working on. Of those the Monster gets the most use since that’s decent for getting a lot of paint on a lot of surface area in a hurry. The actual brush bristles aren’t the greatest – it doesn’t hold a point at all – but I suppose it’s not supposed to. Because of that I don’t often use the Army Painter Basecoating brush, since it doesn’t offer much that my nicer brushes don’t already have.
• I use the same Reaper detail brushes I talked about earlier, as well as a Reaper #3/0 and the #0 and #000 brushes from a couple of other sets. Honestly other than the super-tiny ones I’ve just ended up with a bunch of these from unrelated other purchases that happen to come with the middle-small ones (#0 and smaller).
• For drybrushing I prefer the Reaper toray #2 flat and #4 flat for anything reasonably small, and for bigger/less detailed pieces I usually use a couple of generic makeup brushes – an example of a decent set is this pack from Walgreens. On rare occasion I find use for some of my older craft brushes, but I don’t typically find that I need them these days.
• Lastly, I don’t generally throw any brushes away even when they’re old and crappy or super cheap and poor quality out of the package. This is because I occasionally use craft paints (Apple Barrel, Delta Ceramcoat, etc.), which are thick and gross and bad for nice brushes, and because it helps to have something on hand to mix paints together without being hard on the nicer brush fibers. As far as specifics, it honestly doesn’t matter what you use for this – the whole point is that they’re effectively disposable.

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