In this post, I’ll cover several key aspects of selecting a color scheme for your miniatures.
- Matching Colors to the Character of the Miniature
- Basics of Color Theory
- Choosing Focal Points
- Common Mistakes in Color Selection
- Your Personal Preferences
I’ll go through all these points to give you a solid foundation for choosing your own color scheme, allowing you to express whatever comes to mind.
Colors and the Character of the Model
The first thing to consider when choosing colors is the character of your miniature or the entire army.
Take, for example, the miniatures from Cthulhu: Death May Die.
There are miniatures representing cultists, monsters from the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as Cthulhu itself and other Great Old Ones, along with investigators who aim to thwart the cultists’ plans.
So let’s think about the nature of this world and the characters within it.
The Lovecraftian world is bleak, gray, and terrifying. In the darkness lurk beings beyond the comprehension of ordinary people, beings with their own plans that are likely not favorable to humanity.
With that in mind, would you paint the cultists or Mythos creatures in bright, highly saturated colors? I doubt it.
The first decision we need to make is the saturation of the colors. What level of saturation suits our miniature and emphasizes its character, as well as the character of the world it inhabits? The world of the Cthulhu Mythos, as I described earlier, is grim and dangerous, so we’ll likely choose more muted colors that complement this eerie and chaotic world.
But there are also the investigators in this board game. Should they be as desaturated as the monsters?
In my opinion, absolutely not! And why? Because contrast is always the most important factor when painting miniatures.
The investigators are our main characters, the ones we embody, so they should stand out, contrasting with the Mythos miniatures. But this doesn’t mean they should be extremely saturated—after all, they exist in the same world I described earlier.
We can use slightly more saturated colors, making them beacons of hope in this world, while still reflecting the nature of their surroundings.
This kind of contrast perfectly highlights the difference between the investigators and the monsters and cultists. We can use a similar approach in other games.
Basics of Color Theory
Hearing about color theory might feel a bit overwhelming because something as simple as colors suddenly has a “theory” behind it. You might also be tempted to ignore it, thinking colors are straightforward.
The most important tool we’ll need here is the color wheel. The color wheel helps us understand and then appropriately choose colors for our miniatures.
Temperature Contrast
Let’s start with something simple—warm and cool colors. We’ve all heard about it in elementary school, but did you know that cool colors have their warm and cool tones? Or that red can actually be somewhat cool? Exactly.
Let’s look at two shades of red. Red is a warm color, yet the one on the left is warmer than the one on the right. That’s because on the color wheel, the right red is closer to blue. Adding a bit of blue to red will make it cooler in temperature.
Fine, so why is this important? Contrast.
Always remember contrast.
In this case, our contrast is the difference in temperature between the tones used. For example, when painting red skin, you can use a cooler red with a hint of blue in the shadows and a warmer red for the highlights on the most exposed areas… Or the other way around! It’s entirely your decision on how you want to paint your miniature.
Just remember to consider the environment. At night or in a snowy setting, the light will be much cooler, so the highlights should lean towards cooler tones, whereas by a campfire or in a desert, you should lean towards warmer light.
Color Contrast
Another option for achieving great contrast is contrasting the colors themselves.
To find out which colors contrast most strongly with each other, again, simply look at the color wheel—colors directly opposite each other will contrast the most, these are complementary colors. Meanwhile, those adjacent to each other are harmonious colors.
This type of contrast is most useful for selecting colors for specific elements of the miniature. For example, you can make the armor red and the decorative elements green.
But you can also use this for shadows. For instance, when painting a Warcraft orc, I added purple and red to the shadows of the green skin to make the green appear even more intense.
A very important thing is not to use these colors in equal proportions on the miniature. Don’t make the miniature half and half, as from a distance it will just look muddy.
One color should complement the other. Let’s look at the basic painting of Space Marines.
Dark Angels have green armor, and the complementary color is red, which is used on their weapons. Additionally, the neutral color of the cloaks and the ivory of the Aquilae, the cooler red of the decorative elements, and the harmonious golden metal accents.
Everything here is well thought out and fits together perfectly, almost textbook.
From color theory, this is the absolute minimum we need to grasp to make informed decisions about color selection, and next is…
Choosing Focal Points
The next important thing is to decide what we consider the most important element of a given miniature and what we want the viewer to focus on.
Most often, these elements are the head and weapons, but if you decide you want the viewer to focus on something else, choose what you think is best.
Focus can be achieved in various ways, but they all boil down to one thing—contrast. Because it’s contrast that draws the eye.
You can choose one of the contrast methods mentioned earlier; you can make more dramatic highlights on that element, use contrasting colors, or simply put more effort into that element than in other parts of the miniature, creating contrast through the difference in painting quality.
Look at this Chaplain, what stands out about him? His crozius (staff), which is essentially the most important element. His helmet is hidden under the hood, and apart from that, he has a regular bolter, so I made the staff with an intense red color contrasting with the less saturated colors of the rest of the miniature as the main focal point.
The second element I considered important is the head, but instead of perfecting the skull mask itself, I focused less on the surrounding elements—the armor, the hood—and highlighted them slightly brighter.
The second miniature is the Emperor’s Champion. Here, I did the same, focusing on two elements. The first thing that catches the eye is the sword, so I paid more attention to it, giving it better TMM (True Metallic Metal) than the other elements. The second element is also the head, so I highlighted the chest under it more intensely than the other parts of the brown armor and painted the laurels above the head in a relatively intense green color along with the red eyes.
Common Mistakes in Color Selection
There are a few mistakes that people make that detract from the aesthetics of their miniatures, but they can easily be avoided.
1. Ignoring Contrast
Because what else could be the first and most important mistake?
Not using proper contrast significantly diminishes your miniature’s appearance, making details less readable and harder to distinguish (especially from a distance). Contrast also generates interest.
2. Too Many Colors
Another issue is using too many different colors, and I’m not talking about using orange and purple when your primary colors are red and green.
At the start, try to choose colors in this way:
- Two complementary colors—one for the main elements of the miniature, the other for accenting decorations.
- If there are additional decorative elements, try to choose neutral colors, like gray, white, black, or brown. If not neutral, then harmonious with one of our main complementary colors.
- If the miniature has a third large element that you want to paint in a different color, I suggest using a neutral color here as well.
Always gather all the paints you need before starting to paint, look at them and think if they match well together.
3. Too Few Colors
On the other hand, too little color variety can negatively impact the perception of your miniature.
Even if you want to keep your miniature in a monochromatic scheme, I recommend adding another suitable color to the focal points, which will significantly enhance the importance of those elements.
Your Preferences
Ultimately, it’s your miniature, and it will be painted according to your vision.
You don’t have to incorporate all the elements I mentioned. You can focus on light contrast (which is still the most important) and not ignore colors in shading; you can take what you need from this material and gradually implement it.
Do what’s most comfortable for you and don’t listen to others when they tell you that you did this or that wrong, because most people don’t know much about it and can only repeat buzzwords. Sitting on Reddit, you might think that the solution to all problems is overly thick paint.
To develop in any aspect, you must analyze what you’ve done, how you want to do something, and also how someone better than you did it, because no matter how good you are, there will always be someone who is better at something than you. But don’t compare yourself to others either, as it can lead to complexes.
That’s it for now. In the next posts, I’ll cover some topics mentioned here, such as neutral colors and color mixing.
