The Essentials set are our go-to paints that we use in nearly every project from world shattering titans to humble goblins. It solves that problem and is the set we'd recommend to every hobbyist whether you're a grizzled painting veteran or someone ready to dive into your first project.

Miniature Review

I chose to paint the dwarf last as it didn't have the amount of OSL or NMM on it that I really wanted to try out.

The sculpt itself is fairly simple, but as with the others has a good range of textures and details to test out the paints in the set out. The face is really well sculpted, being the focal point on the miniature, and the log is nicely done too.

The Paints

We didn't tell you everything about these paint sets - and its haunting us!

Here are some ways that the paints in the range are best used:

Core

These two paints are used for mixing most of the other colors needed for the miniature.

Skin

Start by mixing Burnt Red 50:50 with Sunny Skin Tone to create a base shadow color for the skin. Then slowly add more and more Sunny Skin Tone to the mix to create midtones and highlights. Finally add a small amount of Light Flesh to the mix, or Ice Yellow for a warmer highlight.

Alternatively for a paler flesh, substitute Sunny Skin Tone for Skin Tone, great for vampires and the like.

For darker skin start with Dark Rust, then use Dark Fleshtone as the midtone, then either Sunny Skin Tone or Skin Tone for the highlights. For something more desaturated, start with Dark Rust and mix in Sunny Skin Tone to highlight all the way up.

Copper

The most beautiful NMM copper you've ever seen

Highlighting

These colors are used to highlight more of less everything, blue, red, orange, green etc. For example:

• Highlighting a tree - Sunny Skin Tone
• Highlighting steel or orc skin - Ice Yellow
• Highlighting cold blue or red - Light Flesh

Then for the remaining colors the following are used:

Browns

These browns are all great for materials like leather, trees and horns.

Japanese Uniform WWII is also great for shading yellow, or mixing with Ice Yellow to create sandy bases.

Mixing Dark Rust and Japanese Uniform WWII is also great with horns and ropes, which can then be highlighted up with Sunny Skin Tone.

Deck Tan

It can be used as a midtone for none metallic steel. It can even be mixed with another color such as green or blue to create a colored non-metallic effect.

It's also great for horns, leather, stones and highlighting bones. Another use is as a midtone when painting white, and when zenithal highlighting with an airbrush.

Inks

These paints don't have any medium and are super vicious, so are best used though an airbrush.

Skin Ink is great for tinting skin, spraying from below to add some warmth to the skin tones. It's also great for shading wood and leather.

Magenta Ink can also be used to add some vibrancy to skin such as cheeks, as well as shading blues from below.

Painting Techniques

Rather than list all the paints I used for each part of the miniature I'll point to the tutorials I followed. All paints were from the Squidmar sets, mostly from those listed above included in the box set.

Dwarf

Paint your miniature box art like a PRO - Squidmar dwarf

Non Metallic Gold

The easiest way to paint perfect Gold on Warhammer

Roundup

I think the skin came out really well, and the red glaze at the end added a lot of character to the piece. The log came out pretty well too, although I'm not sure about the freehand vines on it. The tutorials didn't say how to paint the base so I just went with a similar look to the previous two and I think it really helped with the woodland feel.

Overall I'm glad I bought the paint sets and got to practice a few new techniques with some different paints. I really need to paint this way more often, not worrying about keeping miniatures consistent and just trying out techniques to learn and improve. Hopefully I can do this with some of my odd projects like HeroQuest and other boxed games.