OK, so let’s say you’ve decided that minis are for you. Next step is to actually procure some. Ebay is a great option for bulk quantities of basic minis, but at some point you might want to have the exact sort of mini to fit your game. This is especially important with Savage Worlds because of the huge variety of settings out there. Perhaps you backed the Pinnacle Flash Gordon Kickstarter and you’re getting some awesome Ming, Flash, Dale and Barin miniatures. In these situations, you might want to learn to paint. I’ve been engaged with learning to paint minis for some time now, and I started out with the Reaper MiniaturesLearn to Paint kit. You get a small assortment of paints, some less-than-great-but-good-for-starting-out brushes, three minis, and most important, a detailed set of instructions for how to paint them. The Learn to Paint Kit walks you through priming, basecoating, washing and drybrushing in simple enough terms for a middle-aged guy who hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in 20 years to figure out. The minis themselves are pretty basic, but also useful for most fantasy-style campaigns – an orc, a knight, and a skeleton. One thing I did when I bought the kit was buy an extra of each mini, which Reaper has available as singles. That takes some of the pressure off – if you completely botch your first mini, you have a backup.
If you progress in the hobby, you’ll probably want to upgrade your paints, start picking up custom washes, get better and more brushes, and maybe even dip into airbrushing (not me, yet, anyway, on that last one). But the Learn to Paint Kit is a great way to figure out if this whole painting miniatures thing is interesting at all without breaking the bank in the process.
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