Maxime Penaud - Using painting techniques to tell a character story

Course overview

How can painting become a powerful storytelling tool? This course explores the artistic choices and techniques that help reinforce a miniature’s identity and tell its character’s story.

Through painting faces, leather and metals, we will explore how different textures and finishes can create a lifelike, organic presence. We will also work on visual hierarchy, contrast and the interplay of colour and subtle variations in tone to guide the viewer’s eye.

The aim is to learn how to choose and use technical effects coherently: what does a worn surface reveal? What does a face tell us? Which details deserve attention? Every painting decision becomes a way to give the piece character.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Define an artistic intention based on the sculpt and the character’s identity.

• Organise the visual reading of a miniature by distinguishing its main elements from secondary ones.

• Use value contrast, saturation and the level of detail to establish a visual hierarchy.

• Develop a coherent palette and colour scheme.

• Distinguish skin, leather and metal through their textures, their responses to light and their finishes.

• Choose texture and weathering effects that reveal something about the character.

• Bring these choices together to create an expressive, readable and coherent miniature.

• Use different paint textures to distinguish the materials on a subject.

  
  

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for intermediate to advanced miniature painters who want to deepen their artistic approach and connect their technical choices more closely to an artistic intention.

It is particularly suited to painters who want to refine the finishes on their pieces and create a sense of realism that supports their miniature’s story.

Prerequisites

• Be comfortable with the fundamentals of painting: basecoating, paint dilution and brush control.

• Know how to paint shadows, highlights and gradients.

Materials

• A miniature for the workshop (provided).

• Acrylic paints.

• Brightly coloured translucent inks or paints (FW, Contrast or Golden High Flow).

• A selection of precision brushes with a good point, including a fine brush for details and size 1, 2 or 3 brushes for surfaces and textures.

Meet your teacher

Maxime is a miniature painter, sculptor and art teacher. As co-founder of a drawing and painting school in Paris, he and his team help thousands of students develop their artistic practice. Trained in drawing and sculpture, he draws on the fundamentals of classical art to inform his approach to miniature painting.

His work explores realism, material textures and the ways painting choices bring a character to life. In his workshops, he shares both his techniques and the artistic thinking behind them.

He has won three Slayer Swords at Golden Demon (France in 2010, the United Kingdom in 2019 and Germany in 2026), a Best of Show at Scale Model Challenge and the Best of Painting award at Monte San Savino in 2025.

See his work

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