Welcome to the Painting Guide of Inner Circle 

This Guide won't make you win the next Golden Daemon award. But it will , hopefully, give your army a more unified look with less effort. 
The whole purpose of this Painting Guide is to paint miniatures as fast as possible with the best result. More time to game with a better looking army. 

Maybe you already know all what's inside of this guide. Maybe you totally disagree with the content, sorry. At least take the time to mail me with suggestions. 

Scroll down to see the different parts of this guide, click on one of the links to jump to that part.(Use the little triangles to jump back to the beginning of this guide.)

For constructive comments and remarks E-mail to Avorian

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BEGIN

 Some miniatures are far more easy to paint than others. And it cannot be said that the more elaborate mini's are always the most beautiful. Look at most Eldar, not really difficult to paint, but gorgeous to look at. 
Plan ahead. Even the nicest mini's get boring when you have to paint up a whole army of them. Try to play with an army before starting the process of buying and painting. Buy a few mini's to see if that army is as easy and fun to paint as you thought. See if you like armies with relative expensive (in points) troops. E.g. Chaos, Space Marines, Eldar, Any Elven Army. Saves money and painting time. 
If you favor for instance Elven army for Fantasy Battle, and you don't care which one. Go for the easiest to paint!! (Dark Elves). Same applies for Space Marines and Eldar, don't go for the more difficult Chapters/Crafworlds. 

When you decided which army to play, make an army list before going to the shop. Otherwise you will end up with useless mini's who have no value on the battlefield whatsoever. 
Thinking ahead saves money and frustration. Personally I have mini's of almost every army. And I was really serious about starting to play with each particular army, "This time is different, this will be THE army" 

 Sure.... 

ASSEMBLY

 Most of the time it's just a matter of glueing on some arms and basing the mini. The best glue is the super glue that comes as a gel. It doesn't run all over your mini and fingers, just apply a drop somewhere and it just sits there, waiting for you to show up with that little shoulderpad. Nice.

TOOLS

For the painting bit you need brushes and paint. Citadel Miniature paint is the best. As for the brushes, more expensive is better..=] Try NOT to use brushes with a very small tip, like 000. The brush doesn't hold paint well and it's quite hard to paint with. Buying a slightly larger, like 00, brush with a good tip is much better. 

Also buy a good lamp, preferable with a daylight bulb in it. The bulbs are blue and give out light that comes close to ordinary daylight. The lamp should be mounted on a swivelthingie, so you can adjust it to your painting position.

UNERCOATING

Use black whenever you can for rank and file troops. Faster and easier to paint over black than over white. Al the shading is more or less in place when you've undercoated it. No need to paint right up his armpit, it's more than natural it's abit dark under someone's arm. With a white undercoat it would look silly, a white dot under an arm. Mini's painted over a black undercoat don't have to look murky, just adjust your technique. But for beginners white is easier because over a black undercoat colors can come up quite differently from what you would expect. 
White is only used when black isn't possible, High Elves or Blood Angels. Miniatures like that. 
Characters are worth investing some time in, so I use white for them.

BASIC TECHNIQUE

The Basic technique is just to give a miniature a nice looking color. No thrills and difficult techniques. 
Do remember to use as little different colors as possible, not only does it save time, it also looks far better. Take two or three main colors for your mini and try to avoid many more. This is especially important when painting up a squad or unit, try to go for consistency. No squad or unit will look good with 5856756 colors. The bretonian men-at-arms GW has painted are excellent examples of  a well painted unit. 
When painting a large amount of miniatures try to use the biggest brush that gives a decent result. It's silly to approach every miniatures as if it was a character model. Most of the time there just there to fill up the ranks. Save your time for the characters and big single models. 
When painting a mini for the first time or maybe to get a army on the table as fast as possible, try the following. Just color in the mini using colors that are really not transparent. (reds and yellows are too transparent to cover a surface well in one go). Blue, white and green are good choices. 
After you've done that the mini should be painted in all the base colors. From a distance it should look just fine. Battle ready =] 
When you have the time or you just want to give your miniatures a better look try a technique called Highlighting. 
Highlighting is nothing more than to "lift" out the edges of certain parts of the model. E.g. when a model is wearing a blue cloak, you will just paint over the raised part of his cloak with a slightly lighter tone of blue. This gives more depth to that miniature. 
The easiest way to highlight is a technique called Dry brushing. Just take an old and big brush. Put a little paint you want to use on it and wipe it all of again by brushing wildly across something (I always use my fingers). When you think 90% of the paint is gone do the same, slightly less wild perhaps, brushing on the part of the mini you want to highlight. Presto, the paint left on the brush will gently cover the raised parts of the cloak or whatever you're highlighting. 
 

For the non-believers. Take a plastic Chaos knight. Undercoat it black, make sure the undercoat is truly dry. Then take a fairly big brush and brybrush the Knight using Boltgun metal. In just 5 min the armor will look very decent indeed.

ADVANCED TECH.

BASING

RANK AND FILE

LEADERS