Why Bother Painting Any More? The Full-Colour Printer Has Landed

There is a particular silence that falls over a painting desk when someone shows you a photograph of a miniature that came out of a machine already finished. I had that silence last week. A friend sent me a link, no message attached, just the URL, which is how hobbyists deliver bad news to each other.

The machine is the HeyGears G1X. It landed on Kickstarter in July, and it prints in full colour. Not primed. Not base coated. Colour, all the way through the model, straight off the plate. The marketing copy says the words out loud: paint-free.

We wrote about this possibility back in 2024, in Will Full-Color 3D Printers Ruin the Miniature Painting Hobby?, when the technology cost as much as a car and the honest answer was "ask us when it gets cheap". It got cheap. So here is the answer, written by people who print miniatures for a living and still keep a wet palette on the desk.

What the machine actually does

Credit where it is due, because the G1X is a genuinely clever piece of engineering and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this article worthless.

It uses an Epson i3200 printhead with 3,200 nozzles and eight ink channels, jetting droplets of pigmented photopolymer and curing them with UV as it goes. It builds geometry and colour at the same time, layer by layer, at a quoted 10 to 30 microns per layer, and it claims more than ten million colours. Supports dissolve in water rather than needing a bath in something that makes your garage smell like a nail salon. Kickstarter pricing opened around $1,999, with the fuller G1X packages sitting nearer $3,299 and a future retail price around $5,499.

That is a real machine at a real price, and the first hands-on reviews are broadly positive. FauxHammer got one in front of a camera and came away impressed, with one important caveat that we will come back to: "The full-colour results are impressive, but they do not match the finest detail from top-end resin printers."

So the panic is not unfounded. Something changed. Let us be honest about who benefits before we get to who is worried.

The people this makes very happy, and they deserve it

There is a version of this article that treats every person excited about a colour printer as a philistine. That article is smug and wrong, so here is the other one.

Think about the games master who needs thirty NPCs by Friday and has a job and two children. Think about the board game with ninety identical grey plastic cultists that nobody was ever going to paint, in any timeline, ever. Think about the person who has bounced off painting three separate times, who owns a shelf of grey resin that makes them feel guilty every time they walk past it, and who just wants their character to look like the character in their head.

And think, seriously, about the hobbyists whose hands shake. Arthritis, essential tremor, low vision, limited fine motor control, chronic pain that makes forty minutes at a desk under a lamp genuinely expensive. The miniature hobby quietly asks for a very specific set of physical capabilities and then acts surprised when people drop out. A machine that hands those people a finished model opens a door this hobby has kept quietly shut for decades.

If your first instinct on reading about the G1X was relief rather than dread, you are not the problem, and nothing below is aimed at you.

The thing painters are actually afraid of

Here is what nobody says at the club, because it sounds pathetic when you say it in a room.

It is not "this machine will out-paint me". Anyone who has looked closely at the sample prints knows it will not, at least not yet. The fear is quieter and worse than that. It goes: if a box can produce something 80 percent as good in four hours with nobody watching, what exactly have I been doing with my evenings for the last nine years?

That is a question about meaning, and it is corrosive in a way that a question about quality never is. You can answer "my blending is better than the machine's" with a photograph. You cannot answer "was any of this worth it" with a photograph.

The specific damage it does is to motivation. A painter in that headspace does not throw their brushes away. They just stop starting things. The primer stays in the cupboard. A model gets base coated and sits there for eight months. The hobby does not end with a decision, it ends with a slow drift, and the thought underneath the drift is always some version of why bother.

So let us dismantle it properly, in two parts. First the technical part, because a lot of the dread is built on an overestimate of what the machine can do. Then the part that actually matters.

Seven things this printer cannot do

It cannot print metal. This is the big one and it is baked into the hardware. In 3D mode the G1X runs CMYK plus double white, a water soluble support and a transparent resin. There is no metallic channel, and there is no way to add one, because metallic paint works by suspending actual flakes of aluminium or mica that catch light directionally. That is why a gold pauldron flashes as you turn the model in your hand. A CMYK printer can only produce a picture of gold: a fixed grey and ochre gradient that looks identical from every angle and dead from all of them. Even the varnish channel on the G1X belongs to the flatbed UV printing mode, not the 3D one.

It cannot vary sheen. Same reason. Your model comes out with one surface quality across the whole thing. No wet gloss in the eyes against dead matte robes, no satin on a leather belt, no gloss blood on a matte blade. Sheen contrast is one of the strongest realism cues we have, it is entirely physical, and the machine has exactly one setting for it.

Its colour gamut is smaller than your paint rack. HeyGears quote coverage of over 97 percent of the standard CMYK gamut, which sounds enormous until you remember that CMYK is a printing gamut and it is meaningfully narrower than what pigment can do. Fluorescents live outside it. The deepest saturated reds and violets live outside it. And because colour is jetted over white resin rather than built up over a dark undercoat, the darkest shadow the machine can reach is limited by ink density in a way that a black primed recess simply is not.

It prints the mesh it is given. All of it, and nothing else. Every scrap of texture has to already exist in the digital file. No sand, no static grass, no crackle medium, no cork, no real chipping, no pigment ground into a recess with a stiff brush. There is a reason our basing with natural materials series ran to seven parts. Almost none of it can be jetted.

Detail is softer than resin. The reviewer's own verdict, and it is a physics problem rather than a software one. Jetted droplets spread slightly when they land, so edges round off. For a display piece full of crisp panel lines and sharp filigree, that softness is exactly where the eye goes.

The colour is only as permanent as an inkjet print. This one deserves more attention than it gets. Photopolymers are documented to yellow and grow brittle under UV exposure over time, and Stratasys publish their own troubleshooting notes on yellowing in clear photopolymer parts. Put a full colour print on a shelf near a window and you own, in a real sense, a photograph. Acrylic paint under a UV resistant varnish is a considerably more stable thing to hand to a grandchild.

You cannot change your mind. Chip a painted model and you touch it in with the same paint you used two years ago. Chip a colour print and there is white resin underneath the skin, and the only fix available to you is the exact skill you bought the machine to avoid.

The part that actually matters

Everything above is a stay of execution. Hardware improves, gamuts widen, someone will eventually solve the metallic problem with an interference pigment channel, and a painter whose entire self worth rests on "the machine cannot do edge highlights yet" is going to have a bad decade.

So here is the observation that genuinely resolves this, and it took us an embarrassingly long time to notice.

Somebody still has to paint the model. They just do it in Blender.

A full colour printer needs a full colour file. Overwhelmingly, miniature STLs are not that. They arrive as untextured grey geometry, because for twenty years the colour was understood to be your job. To feed the G1X, someone has to sit down and decide that the cloak is oxblood rather than crimson, that the metal is worn brass with verdigris in the recesses, that the skin has warmth under the jaw and coolness at the temple. Someone has to make every single decision a painter makes, and then execute them with a digital brush, and they will be judged on exactly the same things: colour theory, value structure, restraint, taste.

The painting moved upstream, into the hands of whoever is willing to learn the tools. That is a change in the job description. The discipline itself survives the move intact, and anyone selling you the idea that colour has been automated is quietly hoping you do not ask who chose the colours.

What the illustrators already worked out

Painters are arriving at this crossroads about three years after illustrators did, which is enormously lucky, because it means the hard thinking has been done for us and we can simply read their notes.

The comparison was never with a machine. You already were not the best painter on Instagram. There has always been someone with better wet blending, a better light box and more time, and you painted anyway. Adding a machine to a list of people who can beat you changes nothing structural. It just makes the list feel different, and feelings are not evidence.

Devaluation lands on commodity output first. The illustrators hit hardest by generative tools were the ones producing interchangeable work to a brief where nobody knew or cared who made it. The ones with a recognisable hand and an audience who wanted their version of a thing came through in much better shape. The equivalent here is real. Fifty identically batch painted troopers are a commodity. A character painted with a specific idea behind it, by a specific person, is not.

Flooding a market with machine output makes the handmade legible. This is the counterintuitive one, and photography is the precedent everyone forgets. The camera was supposed to destroy portrait painting. What it actually did was take away the documentary job that painters had been stuck with for centuries, which freed painting to become interesting. Something similar happened in our hobby on a smaller scale: pre painted plastic miniatures have been on shelves for over twenty years, and the painting hobby has grown alongside them the entire time. Contrast paints were going to kill painting skill in 2019 and instead brought a wave of people in through the door.

Process is the product. Nobody completes a jigsaw for the picture. If the finished image were the point, you would buy the poster. The hours are the thing you are actually purchasing, and a machine that skips the hours is quietly selling a completely different product to a completely different person. Our post on painting a competition miniature is four fifths self doubt and one fifth painting, and that ratio is not a bug in the hobby.

Nobody has automated wanting something. Every model on your shelf exists because you had an idea and chased it. Taste, intent and the specific pleasure of having decided are the scarce goods, and they were always the scarce goods. The brush was only ever the delivery mechanism.

Seven antidotes, in ascending order of spite

Mindset arguments only carry you so far. What actually fixes the drift is finishing something. Each of these is chosen because it is a thing the machine structurally cannot do, so every one of them is a small piece of evidence against the voice in your head.

1. Paint a metal that moves. True metallics, or non metallic metal if you want to show off, on something with big clean armour plates. Turn it under a lamp and watch it flash. The machine cannot do this at all, today or in its next three revisions. A Soul Reaver Warrior Priest at £12.99 is about as much armour as you can buy for the money, and the Black Knight Rider gives you barding and a blade to practise on.

2. Paint light rather than colour. Object source lighting, where a flame or a plasma coil throws coloured light onto everything near it. A printer can reproduce OSL only if a texture artist already painted it into the file for one fixed lighting scenario. You get to decide where the light lands. The Dragon Knights Captain and his flaming spear at £12.99 is practically a tutorial waiting to happen.

3. Paint sheen. Pick a model with at least four materials on it and finish each one differently: gloss in the eyes, satin on leather, dead matte on cloth, a semi gloss on a lacquered pauldron. This is the single most invisible skill in the hobby and the one most obviously beyond a machine with one surface finish. Aedria, our 75mm Dark Sorceress at £16.99, has skin, cloth, metal and hair on one figure at a scale where the difference shows.

4. Build texture with your hands. Real grit, real cork, real moss, real water effects. Nothing in a print file, nothing on a nozzle. The Altar of Sacrifice terrain kit at £14.99 is 158mm of surface begging for weathering powders, and it will outlast any of us.

5. Freehand something that exists in no file anywhere. Be fussy about the model you pick for this, because freehand needs flat undecorated surface and a great many sculpts do not have any. Plenty of ranges, Atlan Forge's included, arrive with the heraldry already sculpted into the banner or the shield. It looks superb and it takes a drybrush beautifully, and it is also somebody else's design decision, frozen into the geometry before the model ever reached you. Which is rather the theme of this whole article. Go hunting for blank slabs instead. The BlightShield Witches Squad by DakkaDakka at £22.00 gives you five big bare shields and a lot of smooth robe, which is about as close to a primed canvas as resin gets. Put your own heraldry on those and the squad becomes unreproducible, permanently, by anyone.

6. Kitbash. A printer can only ever output what somebody modelled. A conversion is a model that has never existed as a file, which makes it the one object in this entire discussion that no machine can be pointed at. Build kits like Angels of War at £26.99 arrive as components specifically so you can make choices with them.

7. Paint one model slowly. This is the real cure and the other six are warm ups. Take one centrepiece, give it a month, and put in more hours than any sane person would. Not for the tabletop, not for a deadline, and definitely not efficiently. The Dragon Dreadnought at £45.99 will absorb everything you throw at it. Deliberately spending forty hours on something a machine could approximate in four is the most complete answer to why bother that anyone has ever come up with, because the whole point is that the hours were the thing.

Where we stand

It would be a bit rich for us to write a thousand words of caution about a 3D printer, given what we do all day. Every model on this site comes off a printer. We are extremely fond of the technology, and if the G1X turns out to be as good as it looks we will be genuinely pleased for everyone it helps.

We sell our miniatures grey on purpose. As the front page has said for years, we are miniature painters ourselves, so we know what a model needs to be a pleasure to paint. That has never meant we think painting is compulsory. It means the thing we are actually selling is the four hours you are going to spend at the desk with a lamp on, and a machine that removes those four hours is selling something else entirely to somebody else entirely.

Both things get to exist. One of them has a Kickstarter. The other one has you in it.

If reading this has made you want to prove a point to a printer, use code WELCOME for 10% off your first order, and go and paint something a machine cannot.