You will also need a flat size 2 brush and a size 4 flat brush for drybrushing, something that we will discuss later. It is my recommendation that these be natural bristled brushes of sable. The round brushes can be either natural or manmade bristles. The natural bristles tend to be softer and work well with blending, where the manmade ones keep a good point longer and tend to be stiffer, which is good for getting into hard to reach places. White nylon works well. Again, this is a matter of taste. Many will say use nothing but red sable, but I think that this is a matter of taste. I recommend getting a multipack of brushes at a craft store to start with. They will be much cheaper this way as opposed to buying them separately, although for your very fine brushes, you may want to hand pick these for the best points. It is not as important how few bristles that the brush has as it is how good of point that the brush has.

The colors of paint that I recommend are flesh, red, yellow, blue, brown, black, white, silver, and gold. I like the convenient squeeze tubes when you can get them as they are easy to get just the amount of paint that you want. Also, check out local craft stores. You can sometimes get paint as cheap as $.50 per squeeze bottle. It won't cost very much to have a good selection of paints at this price. Many companies sell packs of paint six or eight at a time aimed at miniatures painting. I don't think that these are a very good deal as such good paints are available at craft stores, often at better prices. The colors that you will want to buy from a miniatures company preferably are gold and silver. Many craft paints do a poor job with metallics, though they will have lots of colors that are often not available from miniatures companies. I have all kinds of paints in tubes, squeeze bottles, and pots. When you see what you like, don't worry so much about who makes it as how good of a value that you are getting. Better value means more colors to choose from naturally. Again, don't skimp on metallics. Cheaper metallics have coarser metallic particles and don't spread or dry evenly in many cases. You will eventually want to invest in the secondary colors: green, purple, and orange. You can get really great effects with pearlescent white added to other colors. If you will be doing blending, you will want to get some drying retardant, soemtimes known as extender. You will need to purchase and xacto knife for removing flash from figures. An old toothbrush can be helpful as well. You will need super glue as well.

You will need to buy a palette, which is a metal or plastic plate with concave areas for mixing paint. An old plate can be used for this if desired. Also you will need some container for water (or paint thinner) to wash your brushes in as you go. Also a couple of paper towels or napkins are necessary to keep close at hand. For multi-part figures and for those that require glueing bases on, either super glue or two part epoxy will work fine. Super glue tends to dry faster, almost instantly, whereas the epoxy takes along the lines of 10-20 minutes. The ribbon tape type epoxy can also be used if desired, though super glue is recommended.

You will need a box of common sand, fairly course, and some household glue (Elmers works fine). You will also need a can of matt spray fixant. This is to protect the paint when you are done from handling. Any drafting, craft, or hobby store should carry the stuff. I recommend getting some put out by a miniatures company. If you don't know what you are looking for, ask a hobby shop owner and he/she will know. If you intend to do wetbrushing blending (described below), you will need to purchase some drying retardant for acrylic paint. This can be aquired from most any craft or art supply store.

The last thing that is recommended is a good desk light. It is important that you have sufficient light to see what you are doing. A bulb light is superior to flourescent in my opinion. It is a harsher, crisper light, and makes for more defined shadows, which help one to see details of the figure and where shadows would occur. This is very important in both drybrushing and washing techniques, which will be discussed later.

Be sure to wear clothes that you don't mind getting paint on. No matter how careful that you may be, every now and again you will get some on your clothes, so take appropriate precautions. A kitchen apron will work fine as well. It is also a good idea to put down newspaper under the area that you will be working on to keep paint and ink off your tabletop. Again, just common sense things to consider.

Optionally you can purchase inks for washing. As you will probably want to keep the expenses down to begin with, this is not necessary and can be gotten around. Drawing inks work well, which can be purchased at a drafting or art supply store. Brand name is a personal thing, but I think that Pellican (tm) makes a good, inexpensive ink that works well for washes that does not have surface tension problems which others might have. I would recommend a good red, blue, purple, black, and green as inks to buy. Yellow would be very optional, but you might find it useful when washing white areas. Again a warning as to your clothes. Inks are very unforgiving when it comes to stains. You can expect to pay about $2.50 each for stains. This is pretty good since you will pay $15 or more for a set of 6 prepackaged inks from the companies that manufacture miniatures. You get a slight savings when buying brand name drawing inks, but the real savings is that the drawing inks come in bottles that are twice the volume at the same price or less. Also you can mix and match a lot more. Pellican puts out about 10 colors of ink that I am aware of from yellow to black.

Another thing that you may want to eventually pick up is something called a pin vise. It is a type of vise that sits on your table and will hold the miniature in any position while you are working on it. It will help to keep you from rubbing off painted areas of your figure or those that are still wet when you are working with it. It will also help you to keep a steady hand while painting. One can be purchased at Radio Shack or similar store for about $8-$10 if you shop around. You may find it very useful. Another thing that you might want eventually are jeweler's files. They can be purchased at most any hobby shop.

Eventually you may want to buy a good set of metallic colors. You can mix them yourself, and there is nothing that can't be mixed in the way of metallics that you can't whip up yourself. It is nice, however, to be able to recreate just the color that you painted something with some time ago, especially if you have to touch it up, which you often end up having to do if you handle your pieces a lot. The best metallic set that I have found is put out by Armory. The main thing to look for in a good metallic paint is the size of the particles. Pick up the bottle and hold it close to your eye. If you can see individual flakes of the metallic powder that is used to make the paint with, hesitate to buy it. Especially craft paints with metallic lines are suspect. They usually deal with crafts where larger areas are covered. For the needs of a miniature painter, these often do not cover as well as you would like and are not sufficiently opaque for our needs. This leads to having to paint more than one coat, which will cause you to lose the details of the piece. Other than metallics, you may want to purchase your flesh color and your white from a miniatures manufacturer. A good flesh tone is hard to find. Most of them are too light to the point of leaving your piece looking like an albino. Make sure that the white that you purchase is sufficiently bright as well. Many whites are a bit yellow, which makes it hard to get the brilliant effects that you are often after. Titanium white that comes in a tube from art companies is very good as well as others.

A complete checklist of necessary materials is included at the end of this article as Appendix A along with what you are likely to pay for each.

Once the miniature is glued to the base, the molding lines, or flash, must be removed. The best technique for this is to take a very sharp xacto knife and scrape along the flash line. The flash, the lead that seeps out of the mold when the miniature is cast, will peel off with not too much trouble if the knife is sharp. Be careful that you are not drawing the knife toward your thumb or hand as these knives are very sharp and can give a nasty cut. In the light of envirnonmental concerns about lead, especially with small children around, either do your flash removal outside where the filings go where they cannot do any harm, or if you are inside, place newspapers under your work and when done, carefully roll them up and throw them away, not allowing any of the lead filings to fall out onto the floor. Learning disabilities have been linked to children having exposure to lead at a young age.

If you are working with plastic or resin miniatures, the process is the same, but more care must be taken to assure that the knife is sharp and that one uses light pressure when removing flash. For metal figures, a small file can be used to get into small areas, but such should not be done with plastic miniatures. If, after removing the flash, one finds pits in the miniature, these can be filled in with Testors filler or with modelling putty. The figure can also be sanded to take off any bumps that result from the molding process.

Once the figure is thus prepared, it is time to prime the figure. I use spray enamel paint, the cheap kind found at hardware stores. Depending on the effect that you want, you can use any color to prime the miniature with, but as a general rule, white is by far the best, or perhaps a light grey. It has been my experience that when a darker color is used, it is very difficult to get colors bright which are painted over it. On the other hand, when using a light or white undercoat, it is often difficult to achieve dark shadows in the depressions on the figure that are to be shadowed. An alternate methood is to paint white and then brush black into the cracks before the base coat is applied. This will allow highlights to be bright and shadows to be darker, higher contrast. If you are doing something metallic, some have suggested spraying the undercoat with chrome or silver. Once it is painted over, one can take a piece of tape that has been made less sticky by sticking it to a piece of cloth or one's pants and then ripped off, which can be stuck to the paint over it once done, which will lift off small specks of the exterior paint, leaving silver specs, as if the paint were peeling. This is good for vehicles or robots. Otherwise, I would advise sticking to white.

When the piece has dried, we are ready to do the base coat. Before starting to paint, it is a good idea to envision what the piece will look like when done. It is best not to charge into a figure without considering the whole color scheme that will be used. Colors should be chosen that will go well together. If something is meant to stand out, one should pick colors that highly contrast them, which are on the opposite side of the color wheel, which is reproduced below. A short discussion of color theroy will follow.

				Red
                                 |
	                         |	
		      Orange	 |      Purple
                                / \
                               /   \	
                              /     \                 The Color Wheel
                             /       \
                            /         \
	               Yellow         Blue	
		   
			       Green

What are called the 'primary colors' are red, yellow, and blue. They are thus called because all other colors can be made by mixing different combinations of them along with white added to lighten a color or black to darken it. The colors in between these are those that result from mixing the two colors in even proportions. Red and blue make purple, blue and yellow make green, and yellow and red make orange. Purple, green, and orange are called the secondary colors. These can be mixed with their neighboring colors to come up with even more colors. It is often beneficial to actually make a color wheel for your own use as a guide. When purchasing paints, it is important to make sure that you have one of each primary color as well as black and white. I suggest buying brown, metallic silver, and metallic gold as well. This will give you the basis of what you need to get started. As said above, if you have little experience with painting and/or color theory, it would be good to take a piece of white construction paper and make a color wheel of your own so that you will know what colors that you can get out of your basic paints, also called pigments. Start by making a circle of red, yellow, and blue in a triangle. Then mix one part of red with one part of blue to make the purple, which we will make a filled circle of between the blue and red. Do this as well for blue mixed with yellow, and yellow mixed with red. The wheel can be furthur expanded out by mixing 1:1 the red and purple, the purple and blue, and so on around the color wheel. These colors are called the tertiary colors. In all we have made a pallete, or color selection, of 12 colors from our original 3. As said before, white can be added to any of these to get a lighter, softer color. As it gets lighter, it is said to become more pastel. When black is added, the color becomes darker. Brown can be added to make a color more earthy or subdued. Silver and gold are interesting colors of themselves, but they can be added to mixed colors to give them luster or even to make them shiny. If a small amount is added, the color will get a satin finish to it. If one wishes to paint a red silk hat on a figure, mix up a color of red that is just darker than the color that you want the hat to be. When you add silver, it will lighten the color slightly. Mix in a very small amount of silver and mix thoroughly until no streaks of either of the original color remain, leaving a well blended satiny red. Experiment to see what you get by adding more and more silver to the mixture. You might want to add a blob of metallic and satin red next to the red circle on the color wheel to remind you later or colors that you can mix with red and silver. You could also do this with red and gold to see what you get. The key point here is experimentation and to be able to see at a glance what colors that you have available to you when you sit down to plan the coloring of features for a figure. It makes it easier to visualize what the piece will look like when you are done. Continue by mixing silver and gold to each of the other colors on the color wheel if you desire.

Having a basic understanding of paints and how colors mix to get other colors, we can hold up a miniature and plan our painting. It is best not to rush into a piece and start painting. Once a miniature is painted, it is a shame to have to remove paint that took much time to put on in the first place. On the other hand, miniatures are often not cheap, so you want to get the best possible effect. If you happen to paint an area and later change your mind, all is not lost. If the paint is still wet, you can get a paintbrush saturated with water and brush over the area, letting the water in the brush mix with the paint to make a thin wash, which will drip away the color. Care must be taken not to ruin other painted areas. Even after acrylic paint is dried it can get an undesireable bumpy surface if it gets wet before it is spray sealed. More on this later.

If the paint has dried already and you are not at all pleased with the outcome of the piece and want to start all over again, this is possible. You can get some oven cleaner and spray it onto the figures and then use a scrub brush to take the paint off and then start again. If the area that you want to correct is small, you can either paint over it or scrape the paint gently off with an xacto knife. Painting over mistakes will tend to make buildups which obscure fine detail of the figure. Scraping must be done with caution so as not to take off detail or make deep scratches or gouges.

Once you have decided on a color scheme, you can begin to paint the base coat. If you are going to do any washings later, you will want to pick a color that is slightly lighter than the color that you want to end up with. This is because the wash will tend to darken the base color before you are done. Start slightly light and you will be glad later.

I like to start with the deepest, hardest to get to areas first, working my way to the most easily accessible areas. This part of painting the miniature reminds me of the old paint by number paintings. You just fill in the colors. You are trying to get a nice, opaque covering of each area. If I am going to wash with inks, I go ahead and do all of the base colors before proceding. If you intend to wash with paint, it is best to do one section at a time by doing the base coat, washing, and then drybrushing, as you will be working with variations on your base color and won't want it to dry out before you get done.

Washing is a technique that involves highlighting shadows by allowing a thin mixture of color that is darker than our base color to flow into the cracks, creases, and crevices of the figure. Ideally if brushed over the entire area, the color will flow off of the higher surfaces and stay in the cracks. If you are using acrylics, it is often necessary to add a very small amount of dishsoap to your paint mixture so that the paint will stay down in the valleys when it dries. Simply add a drop or two of dish soap into your brush washing container and use this to water down your paint when you get to this stage.

If using paint, you will mix some of the base color with a bit of black, making a much darker color than the original. Some use straight black for this, but a darker version of your base color will give a more natural look. Other than coal and a few other exceptions, black does not itself exist in nature. You will find that most things that you see in nature that are dark are just dark blues, browns, or what have you, albeit very dark sometimes. When you get a dark color that you are happy with, add some water to the paint by dipping your brush into your rinse container and mixing it with the color. The consistency that you are after is about like milk. It should flow well and be fairly watery. Washing is something that you get better at with time, so don't get discouraged if you don't get the effect that you want the first time.

You will want to drag your brush loaded with the watery paint ACROSS the grain of whatever you are washing. In other words, you do not want to drag the brush down, say the length of a fold in a cloak, but rather drag it across the folds. This will deposit the wash in the cracks. If you got uneven amounts of wash, you can put a bit more wash in these areas. It is important to consider how the figure is positioned when doing a wash. Gravity will tend to pull the wash to the lowest point, so you would not want to, for example, stand a figure upright and then wash his cloak unless you want much darker wash near the bottom where it will flow to. Let the figure set in this position until the wash is dry enough not to flow. You can then go on to another section of the figure. You cannot wash an entire figure at once due to the way that the wash will flow, but will have to do it in sections, even if all that you are washing is the same color.

Do this for each area, noting the highlights that will really make the details of the piece stand out. It is amazing how good of detail that you can get out of washing in a minimum of time. A special case is the face. I recommend using a mixture of red and brown to wash with for the face. Brown alone will make it dirty looking. Incidentally, use more red than brown, about 2:1 to 3:1. It doesn't take much dark color to really make things lose their intensity quickly.

As for inks, the same basic techniques are used in brushing on the wash. The difference comes in the fact that inks tend to be more intense than washes of watery acrylics, so you tend to get better contrast. Also you will only have to water down your ink about 1:1 with water to get the flow that you want. You can mix inks just like you mix paint. Inks can be tricky sometimes, but with some practice you will be much more pleased than with using paints for your washes. Again, for flesh tone use a mixture of red and brown, perhaps adding a half drop of black if you feel that you need more contrast. If you get too much ink (or paint for that matter) on an area when washing, simply dry your brush with a paper towel or napkin and then soak up the excess ink with the brush. It will draw the excess ink into it. Dry and repeat to get rid of more.

If you find that you get a 'dirty' look to the piece that you are working on when you wash it, particularly with lighter colors, you might try the following. Wet your brush with straight water and brush this onto the area that you want to wash. This will tend to saturate the dried acrylic paint that you have already put down with water. When you apply the ink now, it does not saturate the paint with ink, which stains the original paint and makes it darker and 'dirty' looking. The ink will tend to run off without changing the underlying paint much. You will get more striking contrast and will not have to drybrush over the muddied area so much afterwards. Some staining occurs anyway, which is why when washing, you start with a slightly lighter color than you want to end up with.

Once the figure has dried and you are happy with the base coat and washing, you come to a technique known as drybrushing. In drybrushing the idea is to highlight the raised surfaces by applying a very small amount of paint to your flat brush and then dragging the brush across the grain of the texture. If you do not have much paint on your brush, this will only leave paint on the top of the texture.

Before going any furthur, you will want to protect the painting that you have done up to this point. Spray a light mist of matte protectant sealer on the figure. Don't get this too thick or it will give an unnatural shine to the piece. This is sometimes called the english look as many British gamers use a semigloss finish for their figures. Most do not like the effect. The sealer will protect the piece from handling, which tends to chip and rub off paint. Acrylic paint is not very durable until sealed. Once sealed it can handle regular use in gaming and the like.

Basing is putting a natural look on the base of the piece, the appearance of rocks or grass. The first thing to do is to paint the top surface only with household glue. Wash your brush out immediately afterwards to keep the glue from drying and ruining it. Then dip the bottom half of the figure in a box of coarse sand, or merely sprinkle it over the glued top surface. The sand will stick to the glue and remain in place. Let the glue dry before going on. When the glue is dry you have a decision to make. If you want the look of grass, mix up some dark green and paint the entire base, even the part with no sand on it (the sides). When this dries, drybrush with a lighter green, made from adding white to the previous color. Some enthusiasts use flock available at model train or hobby shops to get better appearance of grass.

If you want the look of natural rocks, you can either paint the base brown and drybrush tan or even do it very dark grey and drybrush with a light grey or white. It all depends on what you like. Try different things and see how it comes out best. The standard color is green to represent grass, but you only have to please yourself. Again, when you are done, spray sealer on the painted base to protect it from chipping and flaking.

Special effects can be attained through many techniques. Most of the best of them start as "What it I ..." and then trying them out. I have tried all sorts of things to make special effects. Adding metallic paint or opalescent paint to your colors will give them a luster or shine, for example. At one time someone had a "what if" question that they tried out. Use your imagination and get creative. I think that evidence of the evolution of miniatures painting is evidenced by looking through old White Dwarf or Dragon magazines with painted miniatures in them and comparing them to any recent White Dwarf that you might pick up. The hobby has come a long way. Perhaps the next thing that you try will end up as widely used as washing. You can get ideas from wandering through craft stores and seeing their many paints and the like, many of which were not intended for minatures, but they often work great all the same.

One technique that I use that started out this way was that I did not like the entirely flat look on skin, especially for monsters. I think that they look more realistic with just a hint of glow in their skin. For this some use brushed on satin or semi-gloss sealer. I did not like the surface shine that this technique gives, wanting a deeper glow. I added some pale white metallic, a opalescent color of antique white, to some flat skin color and drybrushed it over the muscles and lightly on the face of the Ogre that I was painting. I really liked the effect. It left shadow areas flat, gave the glow effect that I wanted, and looked almost like the creature was a bit sweaty. Nice effect.

Another technique that is a little tricky to do sometimes is blending. In blending, you can do it a couple of different ways. Both involve starting with a base color and mixing up colors that more and more approach the target color and then blending toward that color, bringing the color naturally toward the highlight color. Each color in the mixing progression should be applied in such a way that it is difficult to tell where one color ends and the next one starts. The first way to do this is a sort of drybrushing technique. You begin by painting the base color. This does not necessarily have to be the darker of the two colors. If you want a warm, bright look, it is best to use the brighter of the two colors as the base color, even if the brighter color is to cover less area than the darker color. In other words, the brighter color is usually thought of as the highlight color, or the one to be added to the darker or more subdued color. If the piece is to have a more subdued look, paint the darker color on as a base and work with the lighter colors painted on over it. These generalizations apply whether you are using the drybrush or wetbrush approach.

The drybrush approach involves mixing the next color in the progression and drybrushing it onto the top of the base color, leaving an outline of the base color and then moving on to the next color. Drybrushing in this way will often leave an almost hairy look to the piece if the drybrushing is not done with little enough paint on the brush. You work this way, each time leaving an outline of the previous color until you arrive at the highlight color. The effects can be very satisfying.

The wetbrush approach is best done with extender, a liquid that you mix with your paint to make it dry slower. One of the problems with acrylic paint can be the short drying time of it, which gives you little time to blend colors. Where acrylics tend to take ten minutes or less to dry, with extender added, it will lengthen to about a half hour, sufficient time to do your blending. Start by painting the figure with the base color, to which you have added extender about 1:1 or with slightly less extender. The extender will tend to make your paint a little more transparent, so don't use too much or you will not get good, even coverage. On your palette, mix the base color with a little of the highlight color. You then apply this to the area to be highlighted, leaving an outline of the base color, as with the drybrushing technique. You then blend the two colors together where they meet, essentially mixing the two colors where they meet to get an area of color that is an inbetween of the two colors. You can get very smooth blending by starting away from the border and working your way in, mixing as you go. If you get good enough, perhaps one could work with just the base color and the highlight color, blending as you go, essentially mixing your inbetween colors on the figure itself. I would recommend against this unless you have become very good at blending. It is easier to work with the inbetween colors mixed on the palette, to avoid streaking and uneven blending of colors. Wetbrush blending is something that will take time to get good at, but is very essential to painting large areas, especially for science fiction figures which tend to often have large areas with little detail. It will make the pieces much more interesting to look at, and more realistic in appearance.

Armor is a special case to paint if you want it to appear as medevial armor, which was often made of metal that tended to corrode. The best method that I have seen is to paint it with a black base coat of paint. To this you will drybrush silver onto it. This gives a nice look of armor that has corroded with some of the metal shining through. Drybrush more heavily on those areas where the light would reflect off the armor more to add highlights.

For newer, shinier armor, paint the armor solid in the color of the metal (bronze, iron, etc.) mixed with black. About 3 parts metallic paint to 1 part black should do nicely. Then wash with black to highlight the cracks. When this has dried, drybrush with the original color (no black added) of the metal. Finally, drbrush lightly with the pure metal color with white added. This last step should be done very lightly with care taken to ensure that most of the paint has been rubbed off onto a paper towel before beginning to drybrush. This is just a final highlight to depict light shining off the armor.

For chainmail, first mix up some black paint with 1 part water per three parts paint. This makes a thinned paint somewhere between full coverage and a wash. Paint this over all areas with chainmail on them. It should settle into the cracks like a wash, but it will dry with an intense black in the cracks of the chainmail. Mix up some gunmetal (black + silver 1:1) or a dark version of whatever metal that you are using (mithril: black + silver + blue). Drybrush this over the chainmail to make the high points of the mail B stand out. Then use the pure metallic color (no black added) to drybrush, doing so more lighly and applying less paint than before. Finally add the pure metallic and white about 1:1 and very lightly drybrush the armor in the areas that will be most exposed to the background light, namely the shoulders, some on the chest, etc. Mainly the light will be most intense the higher up on the figure that you go. Just picture rays of light coming from directly overhead to see where the light shines on it at the closest to perpendicular angles as it strikes the chainmail. Drybrushing for chainmail should be done with downward stokes, which will make the highlights emphasized on the bits of the mail that reflect the most light.

You can get the effect of different metals by drybrushing with other metallic colors. Gold mixed with brown will give a bronze or brass look. Black mixed with silver will give an iron or gunmetal look. Blue and silver mixed give a blued steel look, or the classic color of mithril in fantasy works. Red added to silver can give neat effects for metal as well. All of these combinations can be used as a base color as well, washing with ink over them for a good effect. For swords you will want to paint the sword with the base color that you want, one of the metallic combinations above perhaps, then wash with black and drybrush with gold or silver, depending on which was the base metallic color.

To make larger rock formations, obtain some nonrusting window screen. Over this you will spread a mixture of Durham's Water Putty and water. Mix this up, adding the powdered putty until you get a substance about the consisting of cake icing. You spread it over the screen, which you form to the shape that you want, tacking it down to the base with thumbtacks. Make wrinkles in the screen to get variation. Once you spread the putty onto the screen, it will take about an hour to set up to where you can work with it. When it has a leathery texture, you can use your sculpting tools to form it. You can also mix up some fairly stiff putty and add it to areas that you want raised and the like. Work with this a bit. When dry the putty will be rock hard and very durable. To get some natural looking texture, you can use bits of coal spray coated with enamel paint (black is best) which you can press into the putty while it is still wet, preferrably before it becomes leathery. When it dries like you like it, paint the entire thing black or dark brown and drybrush on the color that you want, progressing lighter and lighter with coats of grey or brown until you get to white, each color being used more sparingly than the former until you get to the white, which will be drybrushed VERY lightly to the very tops of the surface detail. This will give a natural looking rock effect. When dry, the putty will add a bit of weight to the piece, so if that is a problem, it is better to work smaller and use more lightweight coal sprayed with enamel. I even did a piece with Durham's Water Putty that was a hollow rock formation with a cave inside, which was to be filled with treasure. A mother dragon sat atop the rock with a baby dragon at her side. You can do a lot with dioramas to make your figures look like something out of a fantasy novel. It just takes time and patience. Model railroad magazines can be a good source of information on how to do landscaping and realistic trees and undergrowth. If you have no intention of using the piece in game play, you can get as elaborate as you want with the size and weight of a piece.

You can make changes to the figure to make it more what you have in mind. This takes a steady hand and a lot of patience. If you are unhappy with the face of a figure, you can carve away at it with an xacto knife to make features more prominent or to make slight alterations. Some are so brave as to use a bit of plumber's epoxy putty applied to the face or other part of the figure and sculpt the desired changes. I have not tried this, but can only assume that it would work fine as the epoxy putty is meant to stick to lead pipe, so it should stick well to a figure.

Many miniatures enthusiasts enjoy collecting miniatures just for the sake of having them. Some do not even paint them. If one does not want to detract from the detail and form of the miniature itself, you can have them look much like the pewter collectibles with just a little work. First of all, scrub the figure with soapy water and a toothbrush to get all of the mold powder out of the cracks and crevices. When the figure has dried, wash the figure with black or a black and red combination. With the latter, you are looking for a very dark red as a result. When the wash has dried, you may want to highlight a little with silver, drybrushing to make the lead appear shinier than it really is. Then clearcoat the figure with matte or flat sealer and you are done. If done well, you will get a nice result which will bring attention to the form itself rather than the paintjob.

Different figure painters use different techniques for displaying their miniatures. This will depend a lot on whether you have to transport them or not. If you wargame with them and often do so elsewhere, you may not wish to unload your miniatures on a display case at all. One methood of transporting miniatures unharmed is to purchase a pistol case, one with the eggcrate foam. The indentations between each foam section will fit a figure nicely. They will not bounce around or bump into each other, thus protecting the paint on them.

Another way to keep the figures from bumping together is to purchase a multicelled box like the type that crafters use to organize embordry floss in. You can pad each cell or even better, you can glue washers to the bases of your miniatures and then purchase sheet magnets, which you can cut up into squares to fit the cell where the miniature is to sit. This will keep them rock solid if a good quality magnetic sheet is used and the washers used are iron/steel based.

An actual display cabinet is very nice for showing off figures, especially those that are not meant for gaming so much as to just display your favorite pieces. You can purchase what are known as shadow boxes from craft stores. These are wooden boxes separated into cells that hang on the wall as a formal display. Often craft stores will sell small shelves to show off miniatures and small knick-nacks. These work as well. You can always have one custom made to your specifications as well, though this is the most expensive option.