As you might guess from the absence of certain items from the other sections of this tool guide, there are still a few points left to cover. My paint kit includes a lot of not-strictly-paint items intended to make things easier, cleaner, and less frustrating; these are those things, arranged very loosely by how important I find them. Certain items will jump up or down this list pretty dramatically depending on exactly what kind of tools and products you’re working with, for instance if you airbrush a lot you’ll really want a set of gloves but if not you may never end up using them at all, or if you use Citadel paints you’ll desperately need a tool to move them from the pot to your palette while Army Painter and Vallejo dropper bottles render that unnecessary. Use your judgement, and think through your process ahead of time so that you have everything you need.

• First off, any paint project requires a workspace. This doesn’t have to be a dedicated area, but it helps if it is. My workspace is at the best of times cluttered and messy, which is compounded by the fact that it’s just my regular computer desk that also gets used for my computer, on occasion my streaming setup, and a bunch of trinkets that I like to keep around. Because of the limited desk space available to me, I also sometimes need to spill my projects out onto a neighboring table, which my spouse is generally very gracious about letting me use. Be courteous towards others who share your space when deciding where, when, and how to work on your paint projects! And be sure to keep your project space as clean and nice as possible, because even if you don’t share that space with anyone else keeping it nice now lets you have nice things later.
• Always, always keep paper towels and/or other cleaning tools on hand! Sooner or later, you will spill something, and I promise you will want a way to clear the mess up in a hurry. Some people prefer to keep a cutting mat in their workspace to mitigate this kind of problem, but I generally just use the bare desktop and rely on a roll of paper towels to keep things clean. I suppose it’s not strictly the most efficient approach, but I find it useful to be able to both keep my area clean and wipe off any excess paint from my tools. Additionally, you’ll always want at least one disposable and absorbent object (again typically a paper towel) around to wick off excess paint and water in your brush while actively painting, and to dry it out when cleaning up. Up until now I’ve used regular store-brand paper towels (Kirkland Signature, I think), but I’ve recently picked up a roll of moderately more expensive but much more durable Shop Towels, which I think I like.
• For brush painting, a rinse cup of some kind is another necessity. Keep some water on hand to rinse your brush out between colors, keep some more water around to rinse out metallic paints so that the shiny particles don’t get spread around everywhere, and keep more water still around to clean up after you’re all done painting. I like these simple palette cups from Craft Smart that I talked about in the paintbrush section since they hold enough water without being super deep, and you can set your brush across the top where the studs keep it from rolling away on you, but really anything will work.
• You’ll want some kind of palette to hold your paints between the pot or bottle and the brush. Basically anything that water won’t pass through is fine for this; a simple piece of blister packaging from a tool or toy will do just fine on the cheap, but I prefer to use this rectangular palette from Reeves. Before that, I used a Craft Smart round palette with a lid, which also worked just fine.
• Some kind of grip is very helpful when dealing with miniatures. A lot of people swear by the Citadel Painting Handle, which has some weight to it and a clamp-style grip to hold the mini base, but honestly I’ve been largely happy with some old medicine bottles and blu-tack. There are also some third-party handles I’ve seen that have pretty snazzy features, like a pin-based grip that can be set up in any orientation on the head, but they were as I recall quite expensive when the medicine bottles meet my needs.
• If you’re thinning or mixing your paints (which you should always, always be at least prepared to do depending on your specific needs!), you’ll need something to mix them with. I used to use regular wooden toothpicks until I got a pair of metal stir spoons – mine are a third-party brand that I haven’t seen elsewhere, but they’re basically the same as these ones from Tamiya – which so far are significantly better. An added benefit of the metal spoons is that for paints like Citadel or Tamiya that come in pots, you can use this to transfer the paint to your palette in a relatively precise way.
• Lighting is important. Not vital depending on what you’re doing, but important nonetheless. If you can’t see your colors, you can’t see what your mini will look like, and in that condition every brushstroke is a gamble. I like to use a combination of blue floodlights on clamp lamp fixtures and yellow diffused light from a shaded table lamp in my work area, since that gives a fairly “real” impression of what the colors will look like in various environments. Because switching this setup on turns the room from 1:00 AM to high noon in a split second, I prefer to keep all of the lighting gear on a power strip of its own so that I can turn that on and off separately from anything else in the room.
• Because of the scale of miniature projects, beyond a certain point it gets awfully hard to see what you’re doing. Using a magnifier gets around that limitation and also helpfully reduces the eye strain involved in detail work. I use a Fancii LED-lit 3X magnifier and it’s served me well for the most part, even if it is a bit limited. A caveat to that particular model is that its battery life is absolutely awful, so I usually keep it plugged in to an outlet or my PC whenever I use it, which leads to a bunch of daisy-chained USB extenders laying across my desk and getting in the way in order to let it reach.
• Pipettes are highly useful for moving paint and other fluids from one container to another. Before I got the needle-tip dropper bottles I use for my thinner, I used a narrow-tipped pipette to get it onto my palette, and even now with my kit in otherwise good shape pipettes are vital for getting paint out of my airbrush’s cup if I don’t use all of it up at once. The ones I’m using now are fairly small and not graduated, which leaves them a bit limited, but they’re cheap and plentiful, so I don’t feel particularly bad about burning through them kind of fast.
• This is another one that seems obvious but gets overlooked sometimes – storage. Mostly I’m referring to storage for tools and paints, though this also applies to where you’re going to keep your finished pieces. For minis, there are plenty of companies out there that make customized foam block storage trays, or you can get pluck foam and make it yourself with relatively minimal effort, or in my case you can just put everything back in the game box it came out of. My spare brushes, markers, stirring sticks, etc. all have homes in a handful of cups on my desk, and for my paints and main brush set I use a pair of Vallejo Paint Stand Front Modules and one Paint Stand Corner Module, wedged helpfully into the corner of the room.
• Whether working from an existing color scheme for a project or coming up with your own, it’s useful to keep references on hand. Sometimes that’ll be a game card or character sheet, sometimes it’ll be a digital image on a tablet or phone, sometimes it’ll be a web color palette generator, and sometimes it’ll be an online painting guide; regardless if you’re planning a project out ahead of time you’ll want to have the references available while you’re working. Even if you go into a project knowing exactly what you want, you can protect yourself from silly mistakes by preparing ahead of time and referring back to those decisions as you go.
• This is less important with brush-painting, but anytime you’re spraying anything and some of the time when you’re working by hand you’ll want to have a set of disposable gloves around. For brush-only painters, eventually you’ll need to put primer and a topcoat on and while you can brush either one on depending on what kind you prefer, it’s faster and easier to just spray it on – and you’ll want gloves for that.
• Agitator balls are very helpful to mitigate clumping and settling in paint bottles. Over time the pigment and the medium tend to separate, and shaking helps with that, but ultimately it’s going to be pretty hard to get some of the gunk scraped off the bottom of the container. To fix that, tossing in some metal BBs (as in the gun kind) or purpose-made agitators doesn’t entirely remove the need to stir your paints but it sure makes it a lot easier. Note that Citadel-style paint pots are easier and less risky to agitate using a stir stick rather than shaking them around.
• Paint mixing dropper bottles are a must for airbrushing more than a tiny amount of paint at a time, and are helpful for keeping track of custom paint mixes that you want to use between paint sessions. I use some generic off-brand ones from a local shop, but if you’re looking for brand names Army Painter makes a set with preapplied labels to write on.
• For gunpla and similar projects, and for model railroading, hobby masking tape is very useful for keeping paint off of anything you want to show through. Sometimes this is good for keeping transparent parts transparent, or for keeping certain spots unweathered, or adding highlight colors to some but not all of your piece with a crisp edge. I’ve tried a few conventional masking tapes, like the usual Scotch brand and some blue painters tape, but they really don’t play terribly well with models and high-precision applications because of their rough edges and poor adhesives. Tamiya’s tapes are the industry standard, and I’m currently using a roll of 6mm tape and a roll of their 2mm curve tape. So far it’s a massive improvement over general store type products.
• For spraying, I find it helpful to have a box or block for things to dry on. I use the lid from an old cardboard filing box to spray in outside for anything that can sit flat, and a brick of styrofoam to jam my Mr. Almighty Clip Sticks – and homemade steel-wire equivalents that I made before I knew there were real ones available (a wire with a small alligator clip crimped around the end) – into for objects that can’t lay flat for whatever reason.
• Some people swear by wet palettes, some people swear at them. I’m closer to the latter category since in my experience they don’t play super well with my thinning techniques – things get runny and gross real quick – but that’s not to say they don’t have their uses. Mine is a simple piece of tupperware with wet paper towels and a piece of parchment inside, which is perfectly serviceable but not as good as using a cut-to-size piece of sponge and palette paper. I’d strongly recommend trying this tool out even if you don’t end up liking it, since it might end up being exactly what you need.
• Cotton swabs are very helpful for cleaning up airbrush parts, and you can also use them to clean up gunpla panel lines and other fine edges. Obviously for many applications regular grocery store Q-Tips are fine, but for the fancy tricks you’ll probably want something a little more specialized like Tamiya’s triangle-tipped swabs.
• A painting journal is an important tool for recording paint mixes, color schemes, layering orders, and anything else that comes up during a project. This is not low on the list because it isn’t important. It’s low on the list because I’m too lazy to use one. When I bother with this kind of thing, I typically just use a Google Drive document and toss in whatever seems important at the time. Learn from my mistakes, be rigorous, be diligent, be complete. It will save you trouble later on.
• Lastly, a camera and photo set. This is only necessary if you plan to share photos of your finished or in-progress pieces – but let’s be real here, that’s probably part of the plan. Showing off is fun, and you’ll need a way to do it. I use my phone camera and my normal workspace, but that’s because I’m a scrub and have no idea what I’m doing with miniature photography. The better the camera you can get, the better – but also putting together a set with a matte, varied-color background and diffused lighting will go a long way even without a high-end camera.

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