Est. 2024 · Miniature Painting

Paint Smaller.
See Bigger.

Where the magnification goes up and the world outside goes quiet.

Scroll

I — Primer

This started with a single face.

I'd been painting Space Marines for three years before I noticed I'd never really looked at one. Not properly. Then I spent six hours on a single Primaris lieutenant's face — wet-blending the shadows up from a deep violet-brown, layering warm flesh tones in hair-thin glazes — and something shifted.

Atelier exists for that shift. For the painter who's put down the speedpaint and picked up the size 1 Kolinsky. For whoever finds themselves at 2 a.m. with a loupe, a half-finished eyebrow, and no desire to be anywhere else.

"The miniature doesn't care about your deadline. It only asks for attention."
— Atelier founding note, January 2024

Close-up workbench with miniature paints, brushes, and a half-painted Space Marine under a daylight lamp

The workbench, 02:14

Wet palette with pools of acrylic paint in earth tones and deep shadows, still moist under studio light

Collection of fine detail brushes — sizes 0 through 3 — resting on a ceramic dish beside a magnifying glass

4 hrs

Avg. session length

340+

Community members

Technique guides

II — Technique

The mark the brush
actually leaves.

Every method below is documented at macro scale — close enough to see individual bristle marks. No theory without practice; no practice without evidence.

Extreme macro photograph of a miniature face showing wet-blended skin tones, individual hair-thin brush strokes visible under studio lighting

Macro · ×8

Method 01Blending

Wet-Blending a Cloak

Extreme macro of a painted miniature cloak showing wet-blend gradient from deep shadow to warm midtone, individual bristle marks visible

Two wet colours pushed into each other on the model itself — no drying between.

Load your wet palette with the shadow colour (I use Rhinox Hide + Abaddon Black 2:1) and the midtone. Apply both to the cloak while still wet, then use a clean damp brush to feather the boundary. The key is working in sections no larger than a thumbnail — the paint must stay workable. A retarder medium extends your window by 60–90 seconds. Three passes over four hours produces the oil-paint depth you see in Golden Demon entries.

Method 02Glazing

Glazing Armour in Layers

Macro photography of a Space Marine pauldron showing layered glaze technique with visible depth in the metallic surface

Thin, transparent colour builds chromatic depth that opaque paint never achieves.

A glaze is paint thinned 6:1 with medium — it should barely tint the surface. On a Space Marine pauldron, start with a purple-brown glaze in the recesses (Druchii Violet over Leadbelcher), then a blue glaze (Guilliman Flesh thinned blue) across the flat faces. Seven to ten layers, each fully dry. The final highlight is pure Runefang Steel applied only to the topmost edges. The result reads as metallic but contains an entire value range invisible at arm's length.

Method 03Freehand

Freehand Heraldry

Close-up of a painted Stormcast Eternals shield with freehand heraldic design, clean geometric lines in gold over white ground

Geometry before detail — the grid you sketch in thinned paint saves every design.

Sketch your design first in highly thinned base colour — thin enough that a single pass is nearly invisible. This ghost layer lets you correct proportions before committing. For a Stormcast shield quartered diagonally: mark the centre point, pull two lines corner to corner, then build each quarter independently. A size 0 brush with a fine point and medium-length bristles gives more control than a triple-zero. Steady your hand against the model itself, not the desk.

III — Showcase