So, welcome to part 1 of my getting started with painting D&D minis series. In this, I’m basically going to go over all the stuff you need to start painting, and give some recommendations and basic info about the hobby.

Oh right, introductions. If you’re new here, I’m Kaiden, and I’m the painting “expert” of the Gallant Goblin.

There’s four major things you need to get started painting miniatures: Minis, paint, brushes, and accessories like a palette, water pot, etc. In this post, we’re gonna handle the first and most important one: The miniatures.

There’s tons of unpainted minis brands you can use for D&D, but I’m just going to go over the three biggest (most popular/widely available) ones that you’ll likely encounter when starting out: Wizkids’ Nolzur’s Marvellous Miniatures, Reaper’s various lines of fantasy minis, and the cheap and easy to find minis from the D&D Board Games like Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, etc.

Nolzur’s Marvellous Unpainted Miniatures by Wizkids.

Oh boy, you can see the box of cards I’m using to prop my background up. RIP.

These are probably going to be the first option you encounter when venturing into the world of unpainted D&D miniatures. They come in blister packs, are availible in nearly every game store, have basically every D&D monster and hero you can imagine in the range, and they’re preprimed, so that saves you having to do that yourself. So, they’re very easy for beginners to just pick up and paint. Sadly, that’s where their pros end, and the cons begin.

I’ve got a whole rant on them in this blog, but to summarize: They’re massively overdetailed. Like, instead of a mini just having a belt, it will have like four and there’ll be six potion bottles, a dozen buckles, and half a dozen daggers on them just because. This would be bad enough on its own, as simpler, easy to paint models are a must for beginners, but there’s another problem: Wizkids’ molds aren’t good enough to keep up with this crazy overdetailing, so the end result is there’s often just some weird textured fuzz-lump would there should be details. Combine this with stupid poses that make it impossible to reach areas, a lot of scale inconsistency (some minis will be “heroic scale” sculpts which are the standard for the industry but most of them are super thin, spindly “realistic scale” sculpts with tiny details that are impossible to paint and are extremely fragile ), and the fact that the white primer used is the most unforgiving primer colour for beginners, and I can’t recommend them for beginners. Or anyone, in fact. I started with them, and they gave me a miserable time. There are a few models that are ok (they tend to be the simpler monsters, like ghouls), but mostly I recommend beginners avoiding these.

THAT BEING SAID: These criticisms only apply to their medium sized, humanoid and humanoid-adjacent (undead, etc) minis. Their large sized monster minis don’t suffer from any of these issues (except the bad primer), are generally pretty good, and I do recommend them.

Reaper Miniatures.

I don’t have a lot of these unpainted.

These minis have been the staple of unpainted D&D minis for decades now, and it’s easy to see why. Their sculpts are a perfect example of looking cool while still being simple and easy to paint. Designed by painters, for painters, with thousands of minis in their various Bones fantasy lines, they fully deserve their stellar reputation. Their minis are a joy to paint, and they have basically every D&D monster under the sun (renamed with generic fantasy names cause copyright) in their range. They’re widely available, particularly in North America. Basically, what’s not to love?

Well, they’re not perfect. Their earlier Bones lines, sculpted in white plastic, have a weird issue with spray primers not working, or drying very sticky, or not adhering. There’s no perfect way around this, and it even seems to vary from batch to batch. Don’t worry though: Lines such as Bones Black and Bones USA have mostly fixed this issue, and there’s still more then enough minis in those lines to build up a good collection. Basically, it’s only the old white Bones minis you have to worry about. And you can just use a brush on primer on those if you can’t find anything else.

Painted Reaper minis (by me).

All in all, these would be my number one recommendation for beginners… If the next option didn’t exist. But as that one doesn’t have the biggest range, I certainly recommend using these to fill out your collection. They’re perfect for beginners and one of my favourite ranges.

D&D Adventure System Board Games: Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, etc.

I have absolutely none of these unpainted, sorry.

These are my number one recommendation for beginners looking to get started with painting minis for D&D. Why? Well, first, they’re cheap. Each boxed game only costs about $50, and they have almost 50 minis, including player characters, tons of common bad guys like goblins, orcs, skeletons, kobolds, zombies, ghouls, cultists, wolves, spiders, and plenty more! And they all also have multiple Large and Huge sized monsters and bosses! There is no better way to quickly and easily build up a large core collection of D&D minis.

Here’s some of the big boys you’ll get in these sets.

Of course, what about the minis themselves? Well, they’re solid, far better then you’d expect for the price. Like every miniature line, each set has one or two dud sculpts, with either bad detailing or a goofy pose, but overall they’re quite good. They’re industry standard “heroic scale”, nice solid sized sculpts that aren’t super oversized or cartoony like many minis from the same era, and they don’t have any overdetailing so they’re simple and easy to paint (exactly like Reaper, so you can freely mix them and it’ll look great), perfect for beginners. Along with Reaper and Games Workshop (Warhammer) minis, they’re my favourite range of minis to paint. Overall, these are my top recommendation for beginner D&D painters, or hell, any D&D painters. They paint up quickly and easily, are readily available, have the best pricing out there, and look great on the table.

Of course, once you have your minis, you need some paint to paint them, brushes to paint it on with, and a bunch of acessories to help with all that. That’s what I’m gonna cover in part two of this series, which should be up fairly soon. If you’ve got any questions, leave a comment and I’ll try and get back to you. Thanks for reading!

Useful links:

This blog where I talk about why I love painting D&D minis (some good general advice in there): https://www.gallantgoblin.com/lpp/blog/hobby-blog-6-lets-talk-about-dd-minis-includes-ranger-paint-recipes/

Gallant Goblin Reaper miniatures reviews: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6uJaLfKteVcFJBbN2MIMPR8DG21iYbTm

Gallant Goblin Discord server (good place to get painting advice, feedback, etc): https://discord.gg/bFtH8uZ3ua

A good explanation of why you shouldn’t buy Wizkids Frameworks D&D minis as well as Nolzur’s (unless you’re rich): https://www.gallantgoblin.com/lpp/reviews/wizkids-frameworks-tiefling-warlock-review/