Free US shipping on orders over $35 · Advent calendars ship next business day
Nothing commands a tabletop quite like a full-scale pirate ship. Then you sit down to paint one and realize you’re staring at a massive wall of flat, textured wooden planks, and it gets daunting fast.
Edge highlight every board with a detail brush and you’ll be painting until your crew mutinies. Slap a brown wash over the whole thing and, honestly, that’s fine. It beats bare plastic, we can all agree on that. But it tends to come out muddy and flat, and you end up wishing you’d put in a little more effort.
This post is the middle road. It’s how I painted the wood on a 28mm galleon commission using three techniques in sequence: overbrushing, sponging and drybrushing. No tedious edge highlighting, no heavy washes, and no committing a couple of weekends to one model. Everything below is the actual ship from the video, start to finish.
Prefer to watch? The full video above walks through every step on the real model, with animations that show exactly where the paint lands on each pass. The written version below has the details, photos and the answers to the questions I get most.
People use these three names like they mean the same thing. They’re related, but they do completely different jobs, and the difference comes down to two things: how much paint is on the tool, and how far down into the surface it reaches.
| Technique | Paint on the tool | Where it lands | Its job on the ship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overbrushing | A lot, still worked mostly dry | Every raised surface, stops at the recesses | Base color, instant black lining |
| Sponging | A little, tapped off | Random islands on the raised surfaces | Weathering, breaks up the uniform look |
| Drybrushing | Almost none | Only the highest ridges and edges | Highlight, makes the planks pop |
This whole method depends on a dark primer. The ship went down black with a red brown zenithal spray over it, so the shadows were already sitting in every plank line before any color went on. From here on, every step only adds light. Nothing is going back into the cracks, which is exactly why you don’t need a wash at the end.
Think of overbrushing as drybrushing’s older brother. It’s heavier on the paint, and yes, that makes it wetter than drybrushing. That sounds weird, but more paint means more moisture. That’s just how it is.
If you dip the brush and paint normally, you’ll flood every crevice and cover the whole thing. Nothing wrong with that if it’s what you want, but that’s just a base coat over the primer, not overbrushing. The trick is the angle:
Notice how fast the coverage builds up on the raised areas. Because there’s still moisture in the paint, you don’t get the chalky texture heavy drybrushing sometimes leaves. Within a couple of minutes per section, the raised wood grain has a solid base coat and every seam between the boards is still crisp and shadowed. That’s the instant black lining: the dark primer stays in the crevices, and you never had to paint a single line.
Then do the whole ship. It takes a bit of time, but it’s not bad, and I find it very zen.
The biggest giveaway on a miniature ship is that everything is a little too perfect. Real deck timber gets blasted by salt spray, boots, storms and cannon fire, and none of that weathers in neat patterns or straight lines. Sponging fakes that randomness in a few minutes.
The random pores of a torn foam sponge break up the flat, overbrushed planks with tiny irregular islands of color. They read as blotchy water stains, worn varnish and the organic grime a ship picks up at sea. Here’s how:
Weather where the crew actually walks. Go heavier on the high traffic areas, like around the main mast, the helm and the cannon emplacements, then lighter toward the edges. Watch the ship come to life with this step. It kills the plastic look and puts real variation across the boards, without painting a single knot or stain by hand.
The sponge color was a craft store acrylic, a couple of bucks a bottle instead of six or seven for hobby paint. On a hull this size that matters, because a ship drinks more paint than twenty minis will. What you pay for in hobby paint is a finer pigment grind and better flow, which is worth every penny on a face or a cloak. Up here it buys you nothing. Craft paint sits a little coarser and dries a little chalky, and on weathered wood that’s the look. Save the hobby paint for the trim and anything a player looks at up close.
Overbrushing gave us the base color and sponging gave us the surface texture. Drybrushing is all about catching the sharpest edges and the raised wood grain. With almost all the moisture out of the bristles, the pigment only catches on the highest micro ridges of the sculpt and snaps the grain and plank edges into focus. At arm’s length, the individual planks really pop.
You’ll hear both. On this ship I mostly flicked the brush perpendicular to the wood grain. Pulling across the planks, the bristles hit every raised plank edge and grain ridge head on, and with that little paint they never get down into the surface. You can go with the grain too, and it depends on the look you want, but across is what made these edges pop.
A stiff brush holds up best to this. Drybrushing chews through soft bristles, so use a goat hair drybrush or an old flat, and keep your good ones out of it.
Right before your eyes, all three layers lock together. The drybrush catches the sculpt’s wood grain and unifies the random sponging underneath it. Look closely at the planks now and you’ll see:
Skip one and you can see it. No sponge and the ship looks painted. No drybrush and it looks flat. All three together are fast, approachable, and honestly pretty beginner friendly, which makes a big ship a great place to practice them.
This post is about the wood, but of course there’s the rest of the ship to paint too. On this commission the red brown trim, the bone rigging and spars, and the blue in the stern gallery all went on last, in hobby paint. Small areas, clean edges, and they’re the parts that sell the ship at arm’s length.
This galleon is playable terrain, not a shelf piece, so the paint job had to hold up all the way down. The masts pull straight out of their steps, the forecastle and quarterdeck lift away, and then the main deck comes off in one piece.
Under it is the gun deck, with the ports open all the way through so the cannons run out for real. Below that is the hold, bare planking ready for cargo, prisoners, or whatever your table needs. Every one of those surfaces got the same three passes, which is the other argument for this method: it’s fast enough to paint the parts nobody sees until somebody’s rogue ends up down there.
How much paint is on the brush. Overbrushing carries enough paint to cover every raised surface, so it works as a base coat that leaves the recesses dark. Drybrushing carries almost none, so it only catches the very highest edges as a highlight.
Not with this method. The dark primer already put the shadows in the seams, and every pass after only adds light. On big flat decks a heavy wash tends to pool into coffee stain puddles anyway.
It depends on the look you want. Across the grain hits every raised edge head on and makes the planks pop, which is what I mostly did on this ship. With the grain gives a softer, streakier finish.
Blister pack foam or a new kitchen dish sponge. Tear it and use the ragged edge so you don’t print straight lines.
A large flat brush. It covers more area per stroke, and its flat edge is easier to hold at a low angle so the paint stays on the raised areas.
Yes. The same three passes work on anything with sculpted wood texture: ships, docks, crates, doors and buildings. A smaller hull is just a faster afternoon.
If you want a hull of your own to try this on, the Sailor's Galleon is the ship in this post, and the Rum Razer caravel is a smaller first project. Our ship comparison puts them side by side. A painted ship wants a painted crew, so grab the Scallywag Crew or some cursed skeletal raiders, and a two-brush set covers the base and detail work.
Rather skip the painting? I take ship commissions like this one. Request a painted commission and tell me what you’ve got in mind.
Weather the rest of the terrain range the same way, and when you need the next idea, Consult the Oracle.
Every Kirtrite miniature, terrain piece, and accessory is 3D printed in-house in Utah — built to be played with, not just displayed.
New releases, painting tips, and first dibs on seasonal drops.
Nothing commands a tabletop quite like a full-scale pirate ship. Then you sit down to paint one and realize you’re staring at a massive wall
Werewolves are a hard monster to run well. Roll initiative against one and it either shrugs off every sword in the party or dies like
Every October I get the same question: what do you actually get behind the twenty-four doors? An advent calendar is the one product people buy
Every campaign eventually hits open water. A kraken surfaces, the party commandeers a smuggler’s hull, or a chase turns into a broadside duel across the
The Dungeon Master is the hardest person at the table to shop for, and the easiest to delight. Hardest, because they already own more books,
There’s a particular joy in opening one little door a day on the way to December 25th. For tabletop players, that joy is even better
