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Top Beginner Miniature Painting Supplies: Updated 2024 Guide

We’re sharing our favorite beginner miniature painting supplies to help you get started painting!

We’ve been painting miniatures casually for about two years now. I still consider us beginners because we truly are just dabbling. We paint the bulk of our miniatures during the summer when our homeschool room becomes a summer art’s and crafts studio, then experience a short winter revival in December.

With each miniature painted, we’ve learned a little bit more and our skills and preferences for different materials has changed.

I still firmly believe that you don’t need to invest a lot of money into paints to deliver quality results. If you’re ready to get started painting miniatures here are the supplies we recommend today!

Brushes

Having a good set of brushes in various sizes is crucial to helping you get the look and detail you’re wanting. You don’t have to spend a large amount on them. We have a couple different sets and they’re all fairly priced.

This set will get you everything you need to get started!

It comes with many different size brushes, including some very tiny ones perfect for painting eyes, and has a couple dry brushes. The paint brushes have a nice grip section so you can hold it comfortably.

My son also got this set for his birthday. He’s our quiet artist and loves that it sits up so he can see and select his brushes easily.

Miniature Holder

My medicine bottle holders remain unmatched. I greatly prefer the official miniature holder we have.

I bought a set of empty medicine bottles so everyone can have one. To give it some weight, I add rice into the bottle and fill the top up with a bit of glue to keep it in place. This helps make sure it doesn’t topple over with the weight of our mini and feels really nice when held in hand.

You’ll also need some blue tack to keep your miniatures in place.

Beginner Miniature Painting Supplies

Spray Primer

This was a new addition last year and I have to say, a very welcome one. You can still scrub down your miniature with soap and water, but primer really is the way to go. Not only does it help keep your paint from flaking off, but it gets into all the tiniest crevices that your paintbrush simply could not go and provides a much better finished look.

We use two Army Painter primers: Matte Black and Matte White. If we’re paining something that will have darker colors and more shadows, we’ll use a black primer; if it’s a brighter miniature, we’ll go with white. I would have grabbed a Matte Gray primer, but my local game store has been out of it so we went with black and honestly, I quite like the more moody look it gives my minis. 10/10.

Paint Pallet

We’ve made a switch!

Instead of our round plastic pallets that I got for our acrylic painting, we now use our kids’ silicone pop-it toys!

Let me tell you, this has been the BEST. Last year some of you on Instagram sent us a video of a much more talented and professional miniature painter using one and I could not have run faster to grab them out of my kids’ room.

Now we don’t even worry about cleaning the pallet when we’re finished. Just let the small amount of paint that’s left dry and pop it out. It removes cleanly and your life is improved.

Paint

Clearly the most important element is what paint you use.

We now use actual paints made for miniature painting. (If you’d like to use standard craft paints, I explain how we make them work for miniatures in this post)

These are the current hobby paint sets we have.

Vallejo: Basic Paint Set, Fantasy Paint Set
Army Painter: Speed Paint 2.0, Washes Paint Set

We’ve been comparing the two sets against each other this year.

Both work really well but give an entirely different finished look.

For us, the speed paints tend to give a darker, more shaded look. These paints really make the miniature look like it was painted by someone with a much higher skill level than my own. (Perfect for impressing friends!)

That said, they’re also a little trickier to paint with — they require being mixed (shaken) really well and aren’t always as vibrant as I hope they would be. We only have a small paint set and I think more colors would be helpful. I can usually get by with a smaller set and just mix the colors together to create the colors I want, but the set we have just doesn’t provide the range we’re looking for all the time.

We got a Vallejo fantasy color set last year and loved using it — this year we added a set with a few more vibrant options for easier color mixing and it’s going really well.

These paints have a bright finish but are less dynamic compared to the Speed Paints. When we paint with these, we use the army painter washes to give it a better finished look. These paints have been much better for beginners though — there’s less of a learning curve compared to the Army Painter Speed Paints.

The paints you’ll like using best will likely depend on the style you’re hoping to achieve, to help you, here are a couple miniatures we painted with each paint type.