Basecoat

Basecoating is the stage where you lay down the main, flat color for each part of a miniature, skin, armor, cloth and so on, over the primer. The goal is even, opaque coverage with no primer showing through and no visible brush strokes, which usually takes two or three thin coats rather than one thick one.

This step matters because everything that follows, washes, layering, highlights, builds on top of the basecoat, so any patchiness or streaking here shows up in the finished model. Thinned paint, applied in light layers and left to dry between coats, covers more evenly than paint straight from the pot, which tends to be too thick and clumpy for small details.

When picking basecoat colors, choose paints with good opacity for the range you are painting, some pigments like yellows and reds are naturally more translucent and need more coats or a colored primer underneath. A common mistake is loading the brush too heavily and flooding recesses, which then need to be cleaned out before a wash can do its job properly.