Guides · Getting started
Some armies are far kinder to a new painter than others. The trick isn't talent — it's picking a force whose scheme works with one-coat paints and whose look forgives an unsteady hand. Start with one of these and your practice models will look good fast, which is the thing that keeps you painting.
The classic beginner army. Prime with a metal spray, wash the whole model with Agrax Earthshade, and pick out the weapon glow — you have a tabletop-ready robot in three steps. There are no fiddly cloth or skin blends to get wrong, just metal, a wash and a spot of colour.
Necrons schemes & recipes →Rot is forgiving. The heavily textured, grimy aesthetic thrives on Contrast paints that pool into the recesses, and — crucially — a rough, dirty finish hides the wobbles a beginner's brush leaves behind. Mistakes read as battle damage.
The most forgiving green in the game. Ork skin is a basecoat, a wash and a drybrush; the scrap-metal wargear is supposed to look chipped and mismatched, so nothing has to be neat. All character, no pressure.
Orks schemes & recipes →A whole swarm can be built on one repeatable recipe: a Contrast coat over the body and another over the carapace, and the model shades itself. Batch-paint a dozen at once and the army comes together faster than almost anything else in 40k.
Tyranids schemes & recipes →Effectively a one-paint army. Prime Grey Seer, then a single ghostly Contrast colour — Hexwraith Flame or Nighthaunt Gloom — gives you the whole ethereal fade in one coat. The most striking result for the least work anywhere in the hobby.
Nighthaunt schemes & recipes →Big, simple armour panels are kind to a beginner. Three or four colours plus a wash of Agrax Earthshade or Nuln Oil gets a Stormcast looking sharp, and the large gold plates are a gentle introduction to metallics.
Stormcast Eternals schemes & recipes →Age of Sigmar's answer to Orks. A green basecoat, a wash, an optional drybrush and the model is nearly done — and, like their 40k cousins, the swampy, grimy look means neatness isn't the point.
Once you've picked a force, our guide to buying your first army covers what to buy first and what it really costs, and how to start painting walks through the kit and the first model. Prefer to skip to the finish line? Commission it.
For most beginners, Necrons in 40k or Nighthaunt in Age of Sigmar. Both reach a genuinely good tabletop standard in two or three steps — Necrons on metallic-and-wash, Nighthaunt on a single Contrast coat — with no skin or cloth blending to master first.
They're fine, but not the easiest. Large flat power-armour panels are unforgiving of thick or streaky paint, and the iconic chapters — Ultramarine blue, Imperial Fist yellow — are among the harder colours to get smooth. A more textured or grimy army hides beginner mistakes better.
No. Necrons, Nighthaunt and Death Guard all place highly at painting competitions — they're easy to do well, not doomed to look cheap. The forgiving ones simply have a lower floor, so your early models look good sooner.
Three things: schemes that suit one-coat Contrast or Speedpaint; textures and dirt that disguise imperfect brushwork; and few small areas of skin, cloth or freehand that demand blending. The armies above hit all three.