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News September 8, 2026

Paint Your First Anime Resin Figure in Five Steps with Remerlinds

Anime resin figure painting title card

Start with light sanding at 400 to 800 grit, then apply a thin spray primer, and build color with water-based acrylics in thin layers, saving cel-shading for the character’s shadow zones. That sequence, prep, prime, base coat, shade, seal, is the entire method behind anime resin painting. The minimum kit is a can of spray primer, a set of acrylics matched to your character’s palette, and two or three fine synthetic brushes, including a 000 for eyes. A Sasuke or Kakashi kit from Remerlinds gives you a clean, unpainted surface to practice all five steps on.

TL;DR:

  • Proper preparation involves sanding with 400-800 grit and cleaning dust to ensure paint adhesion and preserve detail.
  • Synthetic Taklon brushes in three sizes (2/4, 0/00, 000) are essential for controlled detail work and preserving sharp edges.
  • Thin, even primer coats and sparing use of filler putty prevent surface issues and maintain sculpt detail.
  • Achieving an anime look relies on flat colors, hard shadows, and gloss highlights, applied through specific layering techniques.
  • Beginners should start with simpler kits like Sasuke 1/8, focusing on mastering eyes, base coats, and cel-shading before progressing.
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Table of Contents

Anime Resin Schilderen: Tools and Materials You Actually Need

Anime resin schilderen (Dutch for “anime resin painting”) depends less on talent than on having the right handful of supplies. Most beginners overspend on paint and underspend on brushes, which is backwards. Cheap paint with a good brush beats expensive paint applied with a brush that splays after three uses.

Acrylics are the standard choice for resin miniatures and anime figures because they dry fast, carry dense pigment, and clean up with water instead of solvents, which matters when you’re working at a kitchen table. Water-based acrylic formulas built for 3D-print resin models hold detail on small-scale sculpts better than craft paints, which tend to go on chalky. If you want a side-by-side breakdown of specific acrylic ranges, Remerlinds has compared five paint ranges for resin models in more depth than fits here.

Brushes matter more than most beginners expect. Synthetic Taklon filaments hold a point through repeated washing and resist splaying, which makes them the practical choice for resin detail work. Buy three sizes minimum:

  • A size 2 or 4 for base coats and larger clothing panels
  • A size 0 or 00 for clean edges, accessories, and hair strands
  • A size 000 for eyes, eyebrows, and anything under a few millimeters

An airbrush is optional, not essential. It earns its cost once you’re painting multiple kits and want smooth gradient shading across a jacket or cape in minutes instead of layers. For a single figure, hand-brushing thin coats gets you there too, just slower.

Round out the kit with these consumables:

  • Spray primer (white, black, or gray, depending on your palette)
  • 400 to 800 grit sandpaper
  • A wet palette to keep acrylics workable instead of drying on the tray
  • Nitrile gloves and a basic respirator or well-ventilated space for aerosol work
  • Painter’s tape or liquid mask for sharp color separation

Scale matters here. Kits come in a small scale suitable for detailed brushwork, with chibi figures also available, which is small enough that a 000 brush and steady light are doing most of the real work on a face. This is not 28mm wargaming, so you won’t need a full paint army or bulk consumables, just a focused, small kit built around detail control.

How Do You Prepare and Prime a Resin Figure Kit?

Preparation decides whether your paint sticks or peels six weeks later. Skip it and even good paint looks patchy over the smooth surface resin comes with straight out of the box.

Follow this sequence before any primer touches the kit:

  1. Inspect for seam lines and flash. Kits arrive with supports already removed and the surface washed and UV cured, so you’re starting from a clean part, but faint seam lines can still show under primer. Scrape these gently with a hobby knife.
  2. Sand key areas at 400 to 800 grit. This removes surface shine and creates a mechanical tooth that helps primer grip the resin instead of sliding off. Sand in straight lines rather than circles, since circular motion tends to blur crisp sculpted edges like hairlines and fabric folds.
  3. Clear the dust. A soft brush or a few bursts of canned air gets sanding residue out of recessed detail before primer traps it there permanently.
  4. Choose primer color by palette. White suits light color schemes since fewer topcoat layers are needed to reach full opacity. Black suits dark palettes for the same reason. Gray splits the difference for mixed-tone characters, and this color logic saves real time once you’re four coats into a jacket.
  5. Spray in thin, even passes. Hold the can roughly 8 to 10 inches away, sweep in one direction, and let each light coat flash dry before the next. Two or three thin coats beat one heavy coat every time, since heavy application pools in seams and eats fine detail like eyelashes or fabric stitching.

Pro Tip: Do a test spray on cardboard first. Primer that comes out sputtery or too wet on a test surface will do the same on your figure, and you’ll want to know that before it’s on Kakashi’s face.

Gaps at parting lines occasionally need filler putty. Apply it sparingly with a small tool, let it cure, then sand flush with the surrounding surface using a fine needle file and light strokes. Support the part on something rigid while you work so pressure doesn’t flex or crack a thin section, and stop as soon as the gap is filled. Overfilling buries the sculpt’s original detail, and that’s detail you paid for.

What Painting Techniques Give Resin Figures an Anime Look?

Anime characters read as anime because of flat color fields, hard shadow edges, and glossy eye highlights, not because of realistic shading gradients. Getting that look on a 3D resin figure comes down to five techniques used in a specific order.

Base coating comes first. Load your brush lightly, thin the paint slightly, and build opacity across two or three passes rather than one thick one. A wet palette keeps your acrylics from skinning over between passes, which matters since anime base coats often need to stay workable for twenty minutes at a time. Thinning paint to roughly a skim-milk consistency gives you predictable coverage without drowning the sculpt’s fine lines, an approach worth studying further through general acrylic painting technique guides if you’re new to layering paint at all.

Washes and glazing come next, and this is where that skim-milk ratio matters most. A wash is heavily thinned paint pulled into recessed detail (creases, buckles, the underside of hair strands) using capillary action, and it should look almost like tinted water on your palette before it touches the model.

Cel-shading is the technique that actually makes a figure look like it stepped out of an anime frame. Work it in three passes:

  • Block in the shadow shape first, using a mid-tone one or two steps darker than the base color, following where the character’s official shading would fall
  • Clean up the edge of that shadow shape with a small brush so the line stays crisp, not blended, since anime shading uses hard edges by design
  • Add midtones between shadow and highlight, then place a small highlight where light would hit hardest, like a cheekbone or the top of a shoulder

Drybrushing handles texture. Load a brush lightly, wipe almost all the paint off on a paper towel, then sweep it across raised detail like hair strands or armor edges. It catches only the highest points, which pulls out texture that flat painting misses entirely.

Airbrushing can replace hand-brushed base coats and gradients if you own one, and it produces smoother transitions across large flat areas like a cape or jacket. But hand-brushing thin layers works fine for most anime kits at 1/8 and 1/12 scale, where the surface area per color zone is small enough that brush control beats airbrush speed anyway.

Pro Tip: Paint in this order: skin, then clothing, then accessories, then eyes last. Painting eyes early means you’ll spend the rest of the project trying not to smudge them with your palm.

How Do You Paint Anime Eyes and Small Details on Resin Figures?

Eyes make or break an anime figure. A crooked pupil or a flat, lifeless iris undoes clean base coats and sharp cel-shading in a way nothing else on the figure can. This is the section where patience matters more than any tool.

Nyx, who writes Remerlinds’ painting tutorials, walks through this exact process in the step-by-step guide to anime eyes on resin kits, and the sequence below follows that same logic.

  1. Thin your paint to skim-milk viscosity. Anything thicker drags across the eye’s tiny curved surface and leaves brush marks you’ll see from across the room.
  2. Use a 000 brush, nothing larger. Fine-point brushes at this size are what let you lay down an iris without spilling onto the surrounding sclera.
  3. Base the iris in your main color first, then layer a darker tone around the top edge to suggest depth and shadow from the eyelid.
  4. Add the highlight last, a tiny dot or crescent of near-white paint placed slightly off-center. Staging the highlight after everything else avoids smudging it while you finish the surrounding detail.

Steady your hand by resting your wrist on the table or a rolled towel, and work under strong, direct light or a magnifier if your eyesight needs the help at 1/8 scale. If you lift too much paint or lay a wobbly line, don’t panic. Let it dry, then repaint that small patch rather than trying to wipe it clean while wet, which usually smears further into the base coat. Practicing on a spare test surface before touching the real figure builds the muscle memory faster than any amount of reading about it.

Finish eyes with a small dot of gloss varnish once the rest of the figure gets its matte or satin coat. That gloss layer is what gives anime eyes their glassy, lit-from-within look under normal room lighting.

Brush applying gloss varnish to anime eye

Finishing: Masking, Varnish, and Final Assembly

Sharp color boundaries, protective sealing, and careful assembly separate a finished figure from one that still looks like a work in progress.

Masking creates those clean lines. Painter’s tape works for straight edges, like the boundary between a sleeve and a glove. Liquid mask handles organic curves better, since tape wants to lift on anything that isn’t flat. Press tape edges down firmly before spraying or brushing across them, and pull mask away at a shallow angle once paint is dry to avoid tearing a fresh edge.

  • Matte varnish suits most skin and fabric surfaces and kills unwanted shine
  • Satin varnish gives a subtle in-between sheen, useful on armor or leather
  • Gloss varnish belongs on eyes, lips, and any wet-look surface, applied sparingly with a fine brush rather than sprayed across the whole figure

Apply varnish in the same thin, even passes you used for primer, and let each coat dry fully before handling the part. Assemble the figure last, using pins for any joint that needs strength and soft foam or a towel to cradle parts while glue or friction-fit joints set. Work from the base up so nothing wobbles or scuffs a finished surface while you’re still attaching arms or accessories. Small chips after assembly get touched up with the original mixed color, kept in a labeled container, rather than guessed at from memory.

Common Beginner Mistakes When Painting Resin Figures

Most painting problems trace back to paint that’s too thick, primer applied too heavy, or brushes that never get properly cleaned.

  • Overthick paint builds texture and hides detail. Thin it further and rebuild opacity across more passes instead of fewer, heavier ones.
  • Orange peel primer (a bumpy, textured finish) usually means the can was too cold or held too close. Sand it back lightly and reapply thinner coats from farther away.
  • Splayed brush tips come from paint drying in the ferrule. Rinse Taklon brushes immediately after each session and reshape the tip while damp.
  • Muddy color transitions happen when cel-shading edges aren’t cleaned up before moving to midtones. Fix the hard edge first, every time, before adding anything else.
  • Bleeding under masking tape means the edge wasn’t pressed down firmly enough before spraying. Test on a scrap piece first if you’re unsure your tape is sealing.

Test every new color on a spare surface before it touches the actual figure. It costs two minutes and saves an afternoon of rework.

Choosing a First Kit and Building Your Skills in Order

Choosing a First Kit and Building Your Skills in Order — overview diagram

Match the kit to where your skills actually are, not where you want them to be. A Kakashi or Sasuke figure in 1/8 scale offers cleaner separable parts and a manageable pose, which makes either a solid entry point before tackling something with more dynamic limb positioning. A Ranma garage kit rewards painters who’ve already got a few figures behind them, since its pose complexity asks more of your base-coating control.

Practice in this order regardless of which kit you start with: run a primer test on a spare part, work through eyes first since that’s where confidence gets built fastest, then base coats, then cel-shading, then varnish. Guides on edge highlighting and wet palette setup are worth working through individually before you try combining every technique on one figure at once.

— Nyx

Ready to Practice? Pick Your First Remerlinds Kit

Unpainted kits are sold specifically so you can build these techniques on a real figure instead of a test scrap forever. The Sasuke 1/8 kit is a strong first project with separable parts, a contained color palette, and enough clean surface area to practice base coating without fighting an overly complex pose. The Kakashi 1/8 kit steps up detail slightly, suitable for once eyes and cel-shading feel comfortable. The Ranma garage kit suits painters ready for more dynamic posing and finer edge work.

Sasuke | Naruto · 1/8 · myAnimate

Every kit arrives unpainted, starting from a clean base with no extra cleanup step standing between you and primer. Sculpts are fan-made interpretations built by independent sculptors, not officially licensed merchandise, and each one ships worldwide. Browse the full kit lineup to compare pose complexity and detail level before you commit to a first project, then order the one that matches the skill level you’re building toward.

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