Oil Paint on Resin Figure Kits: Varnish First, Then Oils

Oils are the reason a figure stops looking like it was coloured in. They stay wet for hours, so shadows can be pushed around, softened and lifted back off long after acrylics would have set. On a resin figure kit that slow window is the whole point, and it is also the thing that makes oils unforgiving of the one step nobody wants to do.

That step is a coat of gloss varnish over your cured acrylics. Without it the thinner carries pigment straight into the basecoat and stains it, and no amount of careful brushwork afterwards will lift it out. This guide is built around that fact, because it is the difference between an oil wash that settles neatly into recesses and one that ruins a week of work.

Remerlinds makes made to order resin figure kits in the Netherlands and ships them unpainted. Oils come a long way into the process, so the honest place to start is where your particular kit actually joins the sequence.

What oils do that acrylics cannot

Acrylics dry in minutes. That is a feature when you are laying down base colours and a problem when you are trying to blend one tone into another across a curved surface. The paint sets while you are still deciding.

Oils stay workable for hours. You can lay a shadow in, walk away, come back and still soften its edge. You can wipe nearly all of it off with a dry brush and leave only what has settled into the recesses. That ability to remove paint after applying it is what makes oils forgiving in use, even though they are demanding in preparation.

There are three jobs they do better than anything else on a figure kit. Pin washes, where thinned paint is drawn into a panel line or a fold by capillary action alone. Glazes, where a very thin film of colour shifts a whole area a few degrees warmer or cooler. And wet blending, where two colours are worked into each other at the boundary while both are still open.

What oils are not is a basecoat. They are a layer that goes on top of finished acrylic work, and everything below has to be ready for them first. If you are still choosing that acrylic layer, our comparison of paint ranges for resin models covers what goes on before any of this.

Where oils sit in the order, and what that means for your kit

The full sequence from a bare kit to a sealed model is six steps: sand and fill, prime, acrylic basecoat, gloss varnish, oil work, final varnish. Oils are step five. That is worth stating plainly, because a guide that opens with mixing ratios implies you can start this afternoon, and for most kits you cannot.

Which step you start at depends on the preparation level you ordered. Every Remerlinds kit arrives washed, fully cured and quality checked, so nothing needs degreasing or scrubbing before you begin. What differs is how much surface work is left.

• Bronze, DIY Ready. Supports removed, washed and cured, quality checked. You start at step one and do all six. Usually ships in 2 to 5 business days.
• Silver, Detail Ready. Everything in Bronze, plus support marks sanded and visible holes filled. You start at priming. Usually ships in 4 to 8 business days.
• Gold, Paint Ready. Everything in Silver, plus all gaps filled and the figure primed in your colour. You start at the acrylic basecoat. Usually ships in 6 to 14 business days.

Only Gold arrives primed. If you have a Bronze kit and an afternoon free, the useful thing to do today is sanding, not shopping for oils. Our guide to assembling your first resin figure covers the earlier end of that sequence, and the finish levels explained in full sets out exactly what is done to a kit at each tier before it is packed.

Key takeaways

• Oils are step five of six, on top of cured acrylics and a gloss coat.
• Bronze does all six steps, Silver starts at priming, Gold starts at basecoating.
• Every kit arrives washed and cured, so no degreasing is needed at any level.

What you need on the bench, and how to work with solvents safely

Remerlinds sells the kit and nothing else. No oils, no solvents, no varnish, no brushes. The list below is written as principles rather than a shopping basket, and the safety part is not padding, because this is the one technique in figure painting that involves solvents strong enough to matter.

Paint. Artist grade oils rather than student grade, because the pigment load is higher and a wash made from weak paint just deposits medium. Oils sold specifically for models contain less linseed oil, which shortens curing and cuts the gloss they dry to. Four colours cover almost all shadow and weathering work on a figure: a warm brown, a cool brown, a neutral grey and a dark sepia.

Thinner. Odourless mineral spirits, or a solvent sold as a turpentine substitute for artists. Do not use hardware grade white spirit, paint thinner or anything sold for cleaning brushes in bulk. Those are variable in composition and can attack a resin surface over time, and the damage shows up weeks later rather than while you are working.

If you are buying in the EU, the label word you want is on the front of the bottle: odourless in English, geruchlos in German, inodore in French, geurloos in Dutch.

Brushes. One fine tipped synthetic for pin washes, one wider soft brush for glazing, and a cheap flat one you do not care about for lifting paint back off. Keep them separate from your acrylic brushes. If your bench is not set up yet, the seven tools every resin figure painter needs and our painting set up essentials both cover the base kit that this sits on top of.

Cleanup. Lint free cotton swabs and a soft cloth. Both will end the session soaked in solvent.

Working safely. Open a window and work in moving air, not a sealed room. Wear nitrile gloves, since solvents pass through latex. Keep the thinner in a closed jar between uses rather than an open dish, because most of what you breathe comes off the surface of standing solvent. Put used swabs and cloth into a sealed metal or glass container rather than a bin, and take them to a household chemical waste point. Solvent soaked cloth left in a heap is a genuine fire risk, not a theoretical one.

The varnish barrier is the whole trick

After your acrylics have cured, apply one or two thin coats of gloss or satin varnish and let them dry completely. Everything else in this guide is technique. This part is the mechanism.

A gloss surface is smooth and non porous. Thinned oil paint sitting on it does not soak in, so it runs to the lowest point available, which is exactly the recess you wanted it in. Excess sitting on the raised areas stays on the surface and lifts off cleanly with a swab.

A matte surface is microscopically rough. That texture grabs pigment across the whole area, the wash goes everywhere rather than into the recesses, and cleanup drags colour around instead of removing it. The stain is in the basecoat at that point, not on top of it.

Test the varnish on an underside or a hidden area before you commit the whole model, and let it dry fully rather than nearly. Oil applied over varnish that is still curing will haze.

Mixing and applying a wash

A useful starting point is roughly one part paint to four parts thinner, but do not premix it into a uniform puddle. Put a small amount of paint at one side of the palette and thinner at the other, and load the brush by touching first one and then the other. That way the pigment load is set on each individual stroke rather than fixed for the whole session.

1. Load lightly. Touch the loaded brush to a recess or a fold and let capillary action pull the wash along it. You are placing the paint, not pushing it.
2. Choose your coverage. For a pin wash, work only into specific recesses. For an all over wash, cover the area and then take most of it back off.
3. Remove excess in one direction. Use a clean swab or a brush barely dampened with thinner, and pull consistently downward. Consistent direction reads as natural streaking. Random dabbing reads as blotches.
4. Glaze in thin films. Thin further than for a wash and lay colour across broad surfaces to shift the tone rather than to shade a line.
5. Blend while both are open. Work two colours next to each other and feather the boundary with a dry brush before either sets.

Resist the urge to fix things immediately. Oils stay workable long enough that a correction made ten minutes later is easier than one made in the moment.

Two techniques on this site depend on exactly this kind of controlled shading and are worth reading next to each other. Non metallic metal is built on placing hard highlights and deep shadows in the right places, and an oil glaze is a very forgiving way to unify them afterwards. Painting anime eyes is the one area to keep oils away from, because the shapes are small, crisp and easily flooded.

Key takeaways

• Roughly one part paint to four parts thinner, loaded stroke by stroke rather than premixed.
• Let capillary action carry the wash instead of brushing it into place.
• Clean up in one consistent direction, never with random dabs.

When it is safe to seal

Initial cleanup happens while the paint is still open, within about an hour of application. After that, leave the model alone. Oils do not dry by evaporation, they cure by oxidising, and that takes far longer than a touch test suggests.

Wait at least a full day before final varnish, and longer if any of the following apply. Bright pigments and whites cure more slowly than earth tones. A thicker application cures more slowly than a thin one. A cool or humid room slows everything down, which in a Dutch winter is most rooms. Plenty of painters leave a model a week before sealing, and nothing is lost by doing so.

To check, press a hidden area lightly with a fingertip. Any tackiness, any transfer, any fingerprint left behind means it is not ready. Sealing over oil that is still curing traps it, and the surface stays soft under the varnish indefinitely.

Do not use a hair dryer, a heat gun or a radiator to speed this up. Heat warps resin, and a warped part cannot be unwarped.

Five things that go wrong

• The wash stained the basecoat. The gloss layer was missing, too thin, or not fully dry. There is no reliable repair. Recoat with gloss and carry on from where you are, and treat the varnish step as mandatory next time.
• The wash will not flow into the recesses. The surface is too matte. Add a gloss coat, let it dry, and try again.
• Harsh streaks across a flat panel. Rework the area with consistent directional strokes, then even out what remains with a very thin glaze in the same colour.
• The resin looks etched or frosted where solvent sat. Stop, set the part aside and test any new solvent on a hidden area before it touches a model again. This is almost always hardware grade thinner rather than an artist product.
• It is still tacky days later. Too much paint, too little thinner, or a cold damp room. Give it more time and more airflow. Sealing it now only locks the problem in.

Where this contradicts our own painting guide

Another post on this site, ten tips for painting 3D printed resin figures, says plainly that you should avoid thick or oil based paints because they can obscure detail or fail to adhere well. That is correct, and this guide does not overturn it. The two are answering different questions, and it is worth being clear about which is which rather than quietly leaving both up.

That advice is about paint going onto bare or primed resin as a colour layer. Straight from the tube, oil paint is thick, it is slow, it sits on top of fine sculpting rather than settling around it, and it never keys to the surface the way an acrylic primer and basecoat do. Using oils as your paint on a resin kit is a bad idea and it stays a bad idea.

Everything in this guide is oils used as a thin layer over cured acrylics and a gloss coat. At that point the paint is not adhering to resin at all, it is sitting on varnish, and it is thinned far enough that it deposits pigment into recesses instead of covering the detail around them. Same material, opposite job.

The short version is that oils are a poor choice for your paint and a very good one for your shadows.

Kits that suit oil work

Oils reward surface area and recesses. Deep folds, armour plating, rock and hair give a wash somewhere to settle, and larger scales give you room to blend rather than only to shade. A smooth chibi with few undercuts gives a wash almost nothing to hold on to, which is why the picks below are all at the taller end of the range. Four unpainted kits that suit the technique:

• Corrupted Nun, Original Art, 1/6, CA3D Studios. Roughly 35.6 cm, with deeply cut folds running the length of the habit and large feathered wings above them. Probably the single best oil surface in the catalogue, because a wash placed at the top of a fold does most of the work on its own.
• Geralt of Rivia, The Witcher, 1/6, CA3D Studios. Roughly 38.2 cm. Individually sculpted strands of silver hair, plated armour detail and a textured rocky base, which between them cover the three things an oil wash is best at.
• Sauron, Lord of the Rings, 1/10, Nomnom Figures. Roughly 25.5 cm of heavily spiked plate and a tattered cape falling in long folds. The smaller of these picks and the cheaper entry point into the technique.
• Guts, Berserk, 1/8, myAnimate. Layered armour and a heavy cloak over a rocky debris base, which is close to the ideal subject for pin washes.

If you are weighing one scale against another before you buy, scale versus proportion explains what those numbers actually mean on a shelf. The rest of the range is in the full Remerlinds catalogue.

Where to start

Do not learn this on a finished model. Take a spare part, a test print or an offcut from a base, prime it, put a flat mid tone acrylic on it and gloss it. That gives you a surface that behaves exactly like the real thing and costs nothing to ruin.

Then run the whole cycle once on that piece. Mix a wash, flood a recess, clean it back in one direction, and leave it alone overnight. In the morning you will know three things you cannot learn from reading: how thin your thinner ratio actually needs to be, how much comes off with a swab, and how long your room takes to cure a wash.

After that, the first real model is much less daunting, because the only genuinely irreversible mistake in this process is sealing too early. Everything else can be taken back off.

Recommended reading

• A step by step guide to assembling your first resin figure, which covers steps one and two of the six.
• Paint ranges for resin models compared, for the acrylic layer that has to go on before any oil touches the model.
• Finish levels explained, if you are not sure which tier to order.
• Non metallic metal, the technique an oil glaze pairs with best.