Ok, you bought Zombicide and decided you wanted to start painting miniatures. But where from? With which colors? And the brushes? And how do you make that effect? Read on and with this tutorial you’ll find out how to paint Zombicide miniature with good results, without spending a fortune.
How to paint Zombicide miniatures
Regardless of which board game or wargame you want to start painting, what you are about to see is a classic pattern for painting miniatures. It will help you as a scheme to paint your Zombicide miniatures at a good level of play, so as to give color to your games. However, before starting, two considerations:
- Don’t judge your results. This is a hobby that will lead you to improve yourself every time, the best miniature you will ever make is the one you still have to paint. Each miniature will take you one step further, to know new techniques, the experience will help you have a firmer hand and choose the right colors.
- Don’t spend a fortune immediately. Buy only the colors you need for the miniature you want to start painting. So avoid complete color kits, you don’t need the full range of colors and 12 different brushes. Focus on the essential to understand if this is a hobby for you. After the first miniature, you will have time and way to enlarge your work kit. Just start with a couple of brushes, two different size (i suggest you “small” and “very small”), and get a set of colors that only cover the miniatures you want to paint.
Step 1: Cleaning and preparation to paint Zombicide miniatures
The first thing you will need to do to paint Zombicide miniatures is clean the miniature from production smears and excess plastics. Do not take this phase lightly, because if you leave smudges, they will be even more visible when you apply the color.
Eliminate any burrs with lime and a modeling scalpel. With simple liquid dish soap and an old toothbrush, brush and wash the miniature. Then let it dry well because the water could be a problem in the next step.
Fix the miniature with patafix to a support such as a large cork stopper, or something that allows you to hold and handle the miniature, facilitating you during painting.
Step 2: apply the primer on the miniature
The primer is an essential color painting base that allows the colors to apply better. In fact, acrylics hardly adhere to the plastic of the miniatures. The primers can be applied with a spray reel or an airbrush, but for you who are starting out, the advice is to use the spray can for economic reasons.
Primers can be of various colors, but the most common are black and white. Depending on your project, you can use a different primer. My advice is to start using black. For example, I used black for Zombicide heroes and a “bone” color for zombies.
Step 3: basic colors
After giving the primer, you can start to lay out the basic colors for the various areas of the miniature. Then choose what color to make the various elements that make it up: hair, leather, clothing, armor, bags, cloaks and so on, and give one or two coats of color by diluting it with water (better if distilled to avoid contamination). Using fairly clear tones, we will see in the next step that these colors will then be reduced in brightness by shaders.
STEP 4: SHADER
The shader is an extremely liquid and transparent color. This will allow it to settle in all the inlets and recesses of the miniature, highlighting the more exposed areas and the more internal ones in the shade.
This will give a lot of depth to your miniature that suddenly seems much more “true”. As a beginner, you can use two colors of shader: brown and black. But my advice, over time, is to enlarge your color palette with at least one meat, one green and one blue. Then apply the tone-on-tone shader (basic flesh color with meat shader, basic green with green shader and so on).
Shaders take longer to dry, so be careful when applying more shaders to the same miniature. Always wait until the first one is dry to apply the second one. The risk is that they will be contaminated by dirtying the miniature, thus obtaining a result that you would not want.
Step 5: highlighting
At this point, with a very thin brush, you can very dilute the basic colors, giving more light to the most illuminated areas. This will create progressive layers of color that will give light to the parts of the miniature most exposed to light. For example, if you paint the face of your miniature, you will go and apply the color on the cheekbones, forehead, tip of the nose.
Step 6: details, finishes and effects
After illuminating the miniature, you can dedicate yourself to details such as eyes, buttons, seams, or scenic effects such as the coloring of the base or the application of a blood effect to create stains, cuts, drippings.
Conclusions: you have learned hot to paint a zombicide minuature!
After that, you will have painted your first Zombicide miniature! Are you happy with the result?
