Easy Marble Effect Painting Tutorial

Here's one for you miniature painters out there. This article was planned to go along with the Wiz-War STL Kickstarter we ran in 2023, but other things came up and it just never happened. As the saying goes . . . better late than never.

This is one of those "easy-trick-anyone-can-do" tutorials. Well, anyone with an airbrush. It's certainly not my discovery, and I'd be happy to credit the pioneer of the technique, but I can't for the life of me remember the first time I saw it done. It's very likely the original use was for non-miniature related purposes.

I started by blasting a flat layer of a dark grayish-green on the base with the airbrush. Then, just to vary it up a bit, I sprayed on some bands of desaturated blue (AK Grey-Blue). (You can skip this second step and still get perfectly good results.)

Then I stretched some synthetic pillow stuffing across the base. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the optimal technique; you're going to want to give the stuffing a really good stretch to get all the little strands to line up the same way. Looking at the examples in the next pic should show you what I mean.

The first one is the only one I didn't redo. You can see how the marbled streaks run from upper left to lower right and appear more natural. The second is almost there, but the bottom left corner was a little too dark. The final two are just kind of a mess.

Obviously, some experimentation on paper beforehand will help reduce wasted time/paint. But it's so quick and easy to redo – you really could just jump right in. You might just nail it one!

And here's the whole Wiz roster on their nice marble bases. If you missed the campaign and have a 3d printer, you can grab the STLs on Warehouse 23.

-- Ben Williams