How to display painted miniatures

Models are painted to be seen. The tragedy of the hobby is a beautifully painted figure living in a foam tray. Whether your collection is six models or six hundred, the display question is the same: what shows the paint job, and what protects it?

What is the best way to display painted miniatures?

For most collections the answer is a glazed shelf case — glass or acrylic front, wooden or painted frame, sized to your shelf depth. The glass does the dust work while the eye does the admiring. IKEA-style detolf cabinets became the hobby standard for exactly this reason: cheap, tall, and one shelf takes an entire army's characters.

If a case feels too museum for your desk, open shelving with a dedicated dusting routine works too. The trade is simple: open shelves show the models better but cost you a monthly feather-duster session, and open models near a sunny window will fade.

How do I stop painted miniatures fading?

Keep them out of direct sunlight. UV bleaches pigment and yellows varnish, and a south-facing windowsill is the worst address in the house. Display lighting should be LED — it runs cool and emits almost no UV — and ideally pointed at the wall behind the models rather than straight into them.

The same rule governs prints, by the way. A gallery print hung in permanent sun will fade like anything else; a wall that gets indirect light will keep its colour for decades.

How do I display my single best model?

Not every hero belongs in a cabinet row. The model you are proudest of earns a different treatment: photographed properly and promoted to wall art. A framed print of your character sits above the cabinet, needs no dusting, and reads across the room in a way no 28mm figure ever will. Upload your best photo to the character studio and the preview is free.

This is also the answer for models that have retired from the table. The physical mini goes into the case with its squad; the print goes on the wall where visitors actually look.

How do I light a miniature display?

Small, warm and raking. A strip of LED puck lights or a picture light above the shelf, angled down at 30-45 degrees, will pick out shoulders, faces and basing detail exactly the way a museum lights a case. Avoid blue-white LED strips at full power — they read clinical and flatten colour. If you can dim them, dim them; hobby cabinets look best one notch below "bright".

What about magnetic or modular displays?

Serious collectors increasingly build magnetic shelving: steel sheet under a painted or papered surface, magnets in the bases. Models never tip, reorganising is instant, and transporting a squad to a game night means lifting a whole panel. It's the tidiest answer to the "my display is also my army" problem, and the miniature wargaming community has a decade of build threads on it if you want inspiration.

Rotate, don't hoard

The quiet secret of good displays: they change. A cabinet where every model has stood in the same spot for two years stops being seen — by you and by everyone else. Rotate characters to the front, retire finished armies to a printed page, and let the shelf tell this season's story. When a model comes off the shelf, that's exactly the moment to print it as-is from a good photo, so it stays in the room even after it has gone into storage.

And when the cabinet is full and the wall is next, our guide to gifts for the hobby table has a few ideas for the painter in your life who has run out of shelf — including, of course, their own character on the wall.