What Paint Colours Do You Actually Need for a First Miniature?

Open a beginner painting set and the first instinct is to worry you're missing a colour. You're usually not. A single figure, painted once, draws from a much shorter list than the pot count on the box suggests, and most of what's "extra" in a bigger set is there to make the packaging look generous, not because you'll reach for it.

The five colours that actually do the work

• White. Not just for white clothing. This is what lightens every other colour to get skin tones, pastels, and highlights, so you'll use more of it than any other pot.
• Black. For shadows, outlines, dark hair, and deepening any colour that's reading too bright. Goes a long way in tiny amounts, so a little pot lasts several figures.
• Red, yellow, and blue. The three you mix everything else from. Orange, green, purple, brown, and most in-between shades come from combining these two at a time, then adjusting with white or black.

That's it for the true essentials. Five pots, and a single figure with a shirt, skin, hair, and shoes is fully covered from just those, mixed on a plate as you go.

Worth adding, if you're painting people

Skin is the one area where mixing from scratch every time gets tedious, since it's a small, specific adjustment (a touch of red and yellow into white) that's easy to get slightly wrong under kitchen lighting. A pre-mixed flesh tone or two, light and medium, saves the guesswork and is the one addition worth paying for beyond the core five.

What most 24-colour sets waste money on

• Multiple near-identical blues or greens. A set often includes three shades of a colour that a single pot plus white or black would already cover.
• Metallics, for a first figure. Gold and silver look tempting on the shelf but rarely show up on a first project unless it's jewellery or an accessory. Buy one small pot only if you already know you need it.
• Neon or fluorescent shades. Almost never useful for a figure meant to look like a person or pet, and they tend to sit in the tray untouched.

None of this means a bigger set is a bad buy. It just means you shouldn't judge a starter kit by pot count alone, and you shouldn't feel behind if your own set only has eight or ten. For more on telling a genuinely useful kit from one padded out with filler, see what's actually inside a good miniature painting kit.

This is also where a kit built around one specific figure has an edge over a generic set. Ours ships with paint already mixed and numbered to your figure's actual colours, including the skin tone, so there's no guessing which of twenty-four pots you'll need and which you won't.