How to Paint: The Warrior — NINJON's Painting Masterclass

Hey again, friends. Over the years, I've made hundreds of YouTube videos breaking down individual painting techniques. And I love doing that. A ten-minute video on edge highlighting, another on NMM, another on basing. Each one teaches you one piece of the puzzle.

But here's the thing I kept hearing from people: "NINJON, I understand the individual techniques, but I don't know how to put them all together on one model from start to finish. I don't know what order to do things in. I don't know when to stop on one section and move to the next. I don't know how a display-level paint job actually comes together as a process."

That's a completely valid problem. And it's one that free YouTube content isn't great at solving. A technique video teaches you one tool. A masterclass teaches you how to build the whole house.

That's why I built How to Paint: The Warrior.

What the Masterclass Covers

59 lessons. One model. Start to finish.

We begin with preparation. Cleaning, assembling, priming. The stuff that's not glamorous but determines whether the rest of your paint job goes smoothly or fights you the entire way. Then we move into basecoating, building up the initial color scheme, establishing values, and creating a solid foundation for everything that comes after.

From there, we work through every major surface on the model. Armor, cloth, skin, leather, metallics, freehand details, basing. Each section follows the complete process: basecoat, shadow, highlight, refine, glaze, final touches. You're not watching me demonstrate a technique in isolation. You're watching me make the actual decisions and brush strokes that take a surface from primed plastic to display-level finish.

The techniques covered include:

• Wet blending for smooth basecoat transitions
• Stippling for controlled, opaque coverage
• Feathering for buttery-smooth highlights
• Glazing for color adjustment and shadow depth
• Non-metallic metal (gold and silver)
• Freehand detail and texture work
• Skin tone rendering (including temperature shifts)
• OSL (object source lighting) effects
• Display basing and final presentation

Who It's For

Let me be straight with you. This is not a beginner's course. If you've never painted a miniature before, start with the free content. The How to Paint Miniatures guide on this site will get you from zero to painting your first model. YouTube has thousands of hours of beginner-friendly content, including plenty of my own videos. There's no reason to pay for fundamentals that are freely available.

The Masterclass is for intermediate painters. You know how to basecoat. You can apply a wash. You've done some highlighting and maybe experimented with blending. Your models look good at tabletop distance. But you want to push further. You want to understand how display painters think about a model. How they plan their approach, manage their time, make decisions when something isn't working, and refine surfaces to a level that makes people stop and stare.

If you've hit a plateau and you can feel that your skills are ready for the next step but you're not sure what that step looks like in practice, that's exactly the gap this course is designed to close.

What Makes It Different from Free Content

Three things.

Structure. YouTube videos are individual lessons in no particular order. The Masterclass is a curriculum. Lesson 1 leads to lesson 2, which builds on lesson 3. Each technique is introduced at the moment you need it in the painting process. You're learning in context, not in a vacuum.

The complete process. On YouTube, I show you a technique on a section of a model, then the video ends. In the Masterclass, you see the entire model painted from bare plastic to finished display piece. Every decision, every mistake, every correction. Nothing is edited out because the "boring" parts matter too. The transitions between techniques, the moments where I step back and evaluate, the times where I decide something isn't working and change direction. That's where the real learning happens.

Advanced techniques in context. NMM gold on YouTube is "here's how NMM gold works." NMM gold in the Masterclass is "here's how NMM gold works on this specific model, next to this specific armor color, with this specific lighting in mind, after the surfaces around it are already painted." Context changes everything. A technique that makes sense in isolation can feel confusing when you're trying to apply it on a model where twelve other decisions are competing for your attention. The Masterclass shows you how to navigate that complexity.

Free Preview: Feathering

I don't want you to take my word for any of this without seeing what the lessons actually look like. So here's a taste.

Feathering is one of my favorite painting techniques, and it's one of the first advanced skills I teach in the Masterclass. The concept is simple: you put paint on the model, quickly clean your brush, and then use a swishing motion back and forth on the edge of the wet paint. You move into the paint while still swishing, then pull back, creating a smooth gradient blend.

It's similar to wet blending, but instead of pushing two colors into each other, you're softening the edge of a single color application. The result is a highlight or shadow that fades smoothly into the surface around it, with no hard line where the new color starts.

The key is paint consistency. Your paint needs to be thin enough to stay workable while you switch from applying to blending, but not so thin that it runs everywhere. And your brush needs to be almost dry when you start the feathering motion. Load the brush, place the paint, clean the brush, wick off the water so the bristles are just barely damp, then feather.

In the Masterclass, I walk through feathering on multiple surfaces across the entire model, so you can see how the same core technique adapts to different shapes and materials. That's the kind of depth that a single YouTube video can't provide.

What Other Painters Are Saying

Get the Masterclass

If you're an intermediate painter ready to push into display-level work, and you want a structured, start-to-finish guide that shows you how it all fits together, How to Paint: The Warrior is built for you.

59 lessons. Every technique in context. One model from prep to display case.

You already know the individual techniques. This teaches you how to conduct the orchestra.

Now get out there and slay the gray.

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