Before I explain what paints you’ll want to start with, let me first say that what medium your paints use will massively influence your choice of brand and paint line. I use almost exclusively acrylics, and initially invested in a single large set, which effectively locked me into a specific brand. It’s turned out really well for me, but your experiences may vary and you’ll probably want to start small until you know what you like to use.

Acrylics are the most common paint type for game miniature projects, like Warhammer, and other model categories like railroads (though that generally doesn’t involve quite as much repainting as other hobbies due to the ubiquitous pre-built and pre-detailed models). There are a plethora of brands available here, though the ones you’ll hear about most often in the wild are Citadel, Army Painter, Vallejo, and Tamiya. There are also plenty of others out there with their own specializations, like Reaper, Badger, Scale 75, and Formula P3. There are also solvent-based paints like Testors’ enamels that are commonly used in military modeling. Which one you use will largely depend on two factors: what your hobby uses and what you like. Personally, almost all my paints come from the Vallejo Game Color line, which I could easily be mistaken for a paid shill for because of how much I go on about them, but alas no one is giving me any money to say how great that line is.

Obviously your preference is the ultimate deciding factor, but it may also help to know some of the biggest brands’ specialties.

• Vallejo, my personal favorite by far, is an all-rounder brand with a large number of specialized paint lines. I use mostly Game Color, which itself has a few subtypes (more about that below), but there’s also Game Air, Model Color, Model Air, Mecha Color, Metal Color, and a number of other specialty product lines. In my experience this brand is generally cheap for the quality you get and I have only found a couple of their products that haven’t fully satisfied my needs.
• Citadel is the in-house brand of Games Workshop. It is primarily intended to paint Warhammer, as that game has a broad and very specific set of color schemes for its figures, but it can of course be used for any applicable project. As a rule, with Citadel you’re buying the brand name and color matching rather than any particular quality of the paints – they’re quite simply more expensive than any other brand for otherwise equivalent products. Some of their products are genuinely better than competitors, for example their painting handle is excellent for working with Games Workshop minis and pretty good outside that context, but that’s in the minority. That’s not to say there are any major problems, just that the only standout is the name.
• Army Painter is an up-and-coming wargame paint brand that’s been eating up shelf space at hobby shops left and right. Their paints in my experience are – like Citadel – as a rule nothing terribly unusual that can’t be found elsewhere, but they do have some useful specialty products like their Quickshade varnishes that are fairly unique. And, as mentioned above, they have large rattlecan colored primers. While Vallejo has colored primers in their line, they don’t have rattlecans, which means properly using them requires an airbrush; Army Painter neatly gets around that problem with their pressurized spray cans.
• Testors’ flagship line of enamel paints are oil-based and will not play nicely with acrylics (water-based paints) if not handled carefully. This line is typically used for military models such as tanks and airplanes, though it certainly can find use in other areas. Some gunpla modelers also like using enamels, though I don’t at all care for them after using them disastrously on several projects growing up. They’re also quite expensive since they come in 1/4 oz. bottles that cost around the same as a pot of Citadel, though their differing qualities may make that worthwhile.
• Tamiya is a popular Japanese brand that is prominent in the gunpla hobby community. This is understandable since both brands are regional and while they’re now available fairly broadly this is a fairly recent development. My experience with Tamiya’s paints is limited so far, but their complementary products are very high-quality.
• Mr. Hobby‘s Mr. Color and Aqueous Hobby Color paints are a regional competitor to Tamiya that have gotten some traction lately in Europe and the US; like Tamiya I have limited experience with their paint line but the other product lines are solid so far. I’m particularly tickled by their weird naming convention of prefixing products with “Mr.” and choosing some zany names for some of them like Mr. Almighty Clip Stick, Mr. Spoon & Stick, Mr. Rasps, Mr. Metal Ball, and Mr. Sharpness Nippers.
• As a final point on paint brands, exactly what you’ll want to use depends on everything from availability to paint medium to project to preference, and there is no single right answer. If you don’t know what you need, start small and see what you like before committing.

But where to start? Even once you decide on a brand to try out, there is a dizzying array of individual colors. Do you start with Caliban Green or Death World Forest or Waaagh! Flesh? Do you buy Bloody Red or Scarlet Red? What about the difference between Dark Blue and Dark Prussian Blue? Well, to be honest for your first couple of paints it doesn’t matter all that much. You’ll typically want to have a few bold primary colors and a way to lighten and darken them; you can mix just about anything you need given a few basics, willingness to experiment, and a margin of error for color matching.

You’ll want to start with the following at minimum:

• A thinning medium. At the very most basic, for acrylic paints this is water. But even then you’ll want to use distilled water since tap water, no matter how well filtered, is still going to have some amount of sediment that can transfer to your miniatures – or even worse, get stuck inside of your brush. However, I prefer to use a glaze medium made of the below ingredients. This may seem expensive, which as an upfront cost it can be, but I mixed my batch nearly three years ago and have only used about 3/5 of it, and I’m not shy about using a bunch of it at a time. You’ll typically want between 2:1 and 1:1 paint to thinner, depending on the paint. I stole this recipe from an old article in The Escapist; I use it a little differently than the original author, though.
  • 5 parts distilled water (you can buy this from just about any grocery store for $1-2)
  • 4 parts drying retarder (Liquitex Slow-Dri)
  • 1 part flow improver (Liquitex Flow Aid)
  • A mason jar or other sealable container to keep your mix in
  • A way to control how much thinner you add to your paint, such as a dropper bottle. I use droppers with needle tips, which allow fine control over exactly how much comes out of the bottle.
• A Learn-To-Paint kit like the ones from Reaper, which will include a set of paints, brushes, instructions, and a few miniatures to practice on.
• OR you can pick up the following colors in your preferred brand. With that you’ll be able to mix most of the colors you want, though do keep in mind that any “white” paint will not be a true perfect white color but will have some kind of color cast to it, and likewise with blacks and grays. So for example mixing a blue-white with yellow to make a pale yellow may give it a very slight green cast compared to the color you might expect. Additionally, if there’s a specific color you need for your project – especially if you’ll be using a lot of it – you may want to invest in one bottle or pot of that color so that you know exactly what you’re going to get without mixing it yourself.
  • Black
  • White
  • Red
  • Blue
  • Yellow
  • Skin tone (recommended but not needed)
  • Purple (recommended but not needed)
  • Green (recommended but not needed)

Now, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, you do not need what I have in order to paint your miniatures or do other craft and hobby projects. I’ve spent a downright silly amount of time and money building this paint collection (in no small part because starting with most of it set off my collecting impulse) and while having it has made life much easier I could get by without a significant chunk of it. It’s worth it to me, but it may not be worth it to you. That said, here’s an overview of my paint set:

• As discussed above, my thinning mix is a vital part of my kit – I use it each and every time I brush paint. Airbrushing demands a different thinner, but a thinner is just as vital there even if it’s a different one.
• The Vallejo Game Color line, which consists of both Game Color proper and several subsets, is my workhorse for most applications. The main Game Color set (color chart here) consists of colors 72.001-72.068 and 72.095-72.106, and is Vallejo’s answer to the Citadel paint line. The colors are bright and plentiful, with special attention paid to getting every major hue covered. For example, there’s a pink-purple, a red-purple, a blue-purple, and a dark purple to cover all the main shades you might want to start from when mixing a custom color. That way you don’t have to, for example, fight with the base color of a blue purple when you want to turn it pink by adding white. There are a handful of colors that I’ve found too thin (Moon Yellow and Night Blue are the worst offenders), and a handful that are thicker and chalkier than I’d prefer (this is most noticeable with Dead White and White Primer, which is weirdly not actually a primer), but there are really only a few colors with any meaningful problems. In a paint line of around 200 paints in total, that’s not a bad record at all. The metallics in this line are also quite good, though as a caveat they demand to be handled differently than normal colors, with more thinner and a faster dry time.
  • Game Wash (72.200-72.207) is a set of pre-diluted washes. Most of them are blacks, grays, and browns – the usual expected tints you’d want to put on top of a given piece for shadows and light weathering – but there are also a couple of colored washes that give a strong cast to whatever you’re working on. This is most useful when washing a surface that’s already in that color range (green wash over goblin flesh, for example), but can be used in other ways with some creativity. Overall I’ve gotten a lot of use out of these washes and been very happy with them so far. The gray wash is the only place I’ve had any issues, and that’s because there are a lot of little particles of pigment that just don’t seem to want to mix all the way into the paint no matter how much I stir or shake. To fix that I may eventually run it through a filter to get rid of that stuff, but I’m not sure it’s worth it or even possible to fully clear out.
  • Game Ink (72.085-72.094) is comparable to the Citadel contrast paints, which are basically a way to paint a mini with basecoat, highlights, and shadows all in one coat. They’re ink paints, which means they have a lot of pigment and flow very smoothly without thinning, which in turn means that once they get onto the piece they’re basically not coming back off, so be cautious. They go on best when applied straight over white primer, which allows the color to show through brightly on the highlights and the shadows to keep their color.
  • Game Effect (72.130-72.136) paints are for specific texture and material effects like blood or rust rather than general application. I haven’t used them much so far, so I can’t speak to their quality, but what I’ve seen of other people’s projects that use them has looked great.
  • Game Color Extra Opaque (72.140-72.155) is a set of paints with a much higher pigment density than the normal line. They’re designed to cover in a single coat, and in my experience so far are extremely good at it. On my Master Grade RX-93-V2 Hi-Nu Gundam Ver. Ka project I’ve been using Heavy Charcoal on most of the body, and in my initial tests using some fairly heavy preshading it covered it straight over on the very first coat. I stopped bothering with preshading after that point, since it straight-out didn’t do anything to the Heavy Charcoal. The only downside to these paints (assuming they’re used as intended) is that the colors are generally desaturated, brownish/grayish versions of their normal colors and there isn’t really a brighter version.
• Vallejo’s effect and finish mediums (70.510, 70.520, 70.521, 70.522, 70.526, 70.528, and 73.214, which is not part of the Game Color set) are used to modify existing paints to have different properties. The chipping medium, for example, allows paint to be selectively flaked away in small chips after drying to show the color underneath, which is excellent for weathered metal effects. There is also a metallic medium, which makes any color look like metal, and a few varnishes that can go on over top of any given paint job to give it a shinier or duller look.
• I also have a couple of bottles of Vallejo’s Model Color paint, purchased for a historical modeling project; they’ve been quite functional, but aren’t particularly useful for my applications since I rarely bother with precise color matching. For people looking for specific historical uniforms or vehicle colors, this is a must.
• I’ve recently picked up the black and brown Tamiya enamel panel washes for a Gundam project; I haven’t tried them out yet but they certainly review well. I’ll update this when I know better how they behave.
• Lastly I also have a load of random craft acrylic paints (Apple Barrel, Delta Ceramcoat, Americana, Craft Smart, FolkArt, etc.). Most of these I picked up when I was first getting started, with the thinking that I’d learn using that and decide whether I wanted to be serious about miniature painting before buying real hobby paints. This turned out to not be the best idea ever, because these are terrible for miniatures. It doesn’t hurt to keep them around – they only cost about $1 for a decently-sized bottle, and I’ve certainly found uses for them where they make more sense to use than the hobby equivalent, but I’ve definitely learned my lesson about using the wrong tools for the job. If you’re interested in painting minis you can use these and be just fine provided you thin them properly, but they’re not going to give you the best experience or the best result. For clarity: thinning well makes a bigger difference than paint quality.

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