Our Prusa Academy team has been on fire, bringing you a sixth course already this year: this time about miniature painting. It’s absolutely massive, covering everything from little decorative busts to tabletop gaming minis.

We work with both SLA and FDM-printed models, but all the techniques apply to regular, store-bought plastic figures as well. The course features six thorough sample projects with free downloadable print files, which we further describe below.

We painted all the projects using the recent, beginner-friendly Prusa Starter Paint Set, using just a little mixing and a few extra tools here and there (all mentioned in the checklists with each project). All the Army Painter paints included in the set have the newer “Fanatic” formula and are among the best hobby paints on the market. Together with the Academy course, they are the entry ticket to the world of D&D sessions, Warhammer 40.000 battles, and more. If you ever thought about painting your own Demogorgon, Mimic, or Owlbear, this Xmas is the perfect time to give it a try.

TL:DR: Quick, cancel all your holiday plans and visits – you’ll be painting minis!🤩

Get the Miniature Painting for Beginners course

Naturally, we offer the paint set and the course in a bundle, which saves you about 30% of the combined price!

Get the Prusa Starter Paint Set bundle

If you bought the paint set earlier already, you automatically get the course for the same discounted price: simply log in to your account, and the course price will automatically drop to the bundle rate.

Course format and content

Actually, for a miniature course, this one is surprisingly big (ha, ha🤡), similar to our longest courses so far, e.g., 3D Modeling in Fusion or 3D Print Postprocessing. The course is text-based, but features a vast amount of pictures and short videos: about 550 in sample projects and an additional 250 in theory lessons!

Compared to watching YouTube videos, the combination with text offers much better clarity; you can easily look up the individual steps, read summaries of the important things, and so on. The short looping videos (about 10-30 seconds) show you the exact work and techniques with different brushes – no need to skip and rewind a long video just to see a single moment.

As with all our courses, we aim at complete beginners, but we include many tips and tricks that should appeal to more advanced users as well.

As always, there are a few quizzes that you can pass and earn a certificate of completion, but this is obviously a very hands-on course, so to consider yourself a real graduate, you should finish at least some of the sample projects – and ideally, share the results online!

Theory lessons

The course starts with a couple of lessons about brushes and paints, and an introduction to the painting techniques such as drybrushing, washing, or glazing.

The theory lessons are based on the 3D print postprocessing course, and we have expanded it with more photos. Plus, there’s an entirely new, long chapter on detailing miniature bases and adding non-3D printed elements.

Sample projects

The core of the course consists of six sample projects from three different painters, all in a very detailed, step-by-step format, guiding you from the fresh print to a completely painted model. We prepared a mix of different sizes, complexities, and visual styles.

All of the 3D models are available for free. Some of them are from Vae Victis Miniatures (saving you about 20 USD on the free downloads), some were sculpted by our in-house designer, Vlado Turek:

Church ruins by Vae Victis Miniatures: a simple piece of FDM-printed wargaming terrain.

Plague doctor by Vae Victis Miniatures: a one-piece SLA-printed miniature of a standard tabletop size (25mm base).

Orc bust by Vlado Turek: a bit larger FDM-printed bust (about 12cm height). It is featured on the Starter Paint Set box, by the way. In the course, you will find a link for downloading the 3D model of his goblin companion, too.

Ratfolk warband by Vae Victis Miniatures: batch painting of a small group of multi-part, SLA-printed miniatures, standard tabletop size (25mm bases).

Dryad bust by Vlado Turek: another FDM-printed bust (about 10cm height), with a larger and more realistic face. Originally sculpted as a promo model of the Prusament Woodfill materials.

And finally, the mighty Eyeballer, a multi-part, SLA-printed, “monster size” (60mm base) miniature, fully customizable with two different bases and about 20 different eyestalks that fit into eleven sockets in the creature’s torso.

The model itself is available on Printables.com for free as per the Creative Commons 4.0 license; however, in the course, you will get neatly organized print files with custom supports.

Share your results online!

As we already mentioned above, we’d like to encourage you to share your results online (for example, in the Prusa subreddit), to get some constructive criticism, but also well-deserved praise.🎉 Also, if you let us know, we will upload your photos to a user gallery at the end of each sample project. Every result is a good result!🧡

So you don’t suffer from stage fright, we already included some models painted by our colleagues when proofreading the course.😉

Happy Painting!🎨