SprueTube: Paint Recipes, Build Logs and a Pile of Shame Worth Counting

You have just finished the shoulder pads. Not the whole model — the shoulder pads. But the edge highlight went on clean for once, the transition is smooth, and you are, frankly, delighted with yourself. So you pick up your phone, take fourteen photographs of a 32mm plastic man under a desk lamp, and then stop dead, because there is nowhere sensible to put them.

Instagram will bury it under a reel of someone dancing. Reddit will give it eleven upvotes and a comment asking what paints you used, which you will answer, and which will then scroll into the void forever. Facebook will show it to your auntie. None of those places were built for a half-painted miniature, because none of them have any concept of half.

That is the gap SprueTube was built to fill: a free site for miniature painters where the work-in-progress is the point, not the apology — with paint recipes that do not evaporate, build logs that read start to finish, and your pile of shame finally counted. It is made by us, at Loaded Dice, and it lives at spruetube.app. Here is what it does, what it deliberately does not do, and whether it is worth your time — and if it puts you in the mood to actually paint something, the model paints are right where you left them.

What SprueTube actually is

A free site for miniature painters and model makers. No subscription, 13 and over. You make an account, you post photographs of models, other people follow you and comment, and you do the same back. So far, so familiar.

The difference is in what a post is made of. Every post carries up to eight photographs, and three pieces of structure that no general-purpose feed asks for:

• The game system: Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, Kill Team, Necromunda, Horus Heresy, The Old World, Warcry, Blood Bowl, Middle-earth, Star Wars: Legion, Bolt Action, Infinity, Malifaux, D&D and RPGs, historical, scale models, or terrain and scenery.
• The scale: 28mm, 32mm, 54mm, 75mm, 1/72, 1/48, 1/35 or 1/24 — because a 1/35 tank and a 32mm hero are not the same hobby, and pretending otherwise makes both feeds worse.
• The stage: which is the interesting one, and gets its own section below.

That structure is doing the heavy lifting. It means the feed can be filtered to only the thing you care about, tags actually mean something, and search returns models rather than memes.

The WIP stage is the whole point

Every post sits at one of eight stages, in order: sprue, assembled, primed, basecoated, shaded, highlighted, based, finished.

That list is the spine of the entire site, and it is the single feature that makes SprueTube different from everywhere else you could post a miniature. On Instagram, an unfinished model is a failure you are pre-apologising for. Here it is a stage, with a name, and a next one to reach.

Two useful things fall out of it. First, you can ask for help at the precise point you need it — a post marked shaded asking why the recess wash has pooled will get better answers than the same photograph with no context. Second, it makes progress visible, which turns out to be the thing that keeps people painting.

There is a genuine psychological argument underneath this, and we have written about it separately in our look at what the science says about Warhammer and your brain. The short version: visible, incremental progress is far more motivating than a distant finished army.

Paints used, listed under the photograph

The most-asked question in this hobby, by an enormous margin, is “what did you use for that?” And the standard answer — a reply buried nine comments deep in a thread that will be unsearchable by Thursday — is genuinely terrible.

On SprueTube you name the paints on the post itself. They appear under the photograph as a list, attached to the model, permanently. Anyone who finds that post in six months finds the paint recipe with it.

Name whatever you actually used. Nobody is checking your brand loyalty — Warhammer Colour, Vallejo, Army Painter, AK Interactive, or the mystery pot with no label that you have owned since 2014.

Paint recipes: the answer, saved properly

A paint list on a post is good. A paint recipe is better, and SprueTube has those too.

A recipe is the scheme itself, lifted out of any one model and saved as its own thing: base, wash, highlight, technique, the actual paints, and the note that says “thinned two to one”. You write it once. You apply it to the next ten models in the unit, and the ten after that when you come back to the army eighteen months later having completely forgotten how you did the armour.

This is the bit that solves the real frustration. Ask any painter what they lose most often and it is not a brush — it is the Warhammer paint scheme they worked out over three evenings and then failed to write down. A recipe makes that answer an object: attached to the photo, saved to your own collection, searchable, and re-applicable to the next model.

You can also start a recipe directly from a post you have already made, so the paints you named under the photograph become the skeleton of the recipe rather than something you retype. This is the closest thing the hobby has to a proper notebook, and unlike your actual notebook it does not get a thumbprint of Mephiston Red on page one.

The stash: your pile of shame, counted

Every painter owns models they have not painted. The hobby has a name for it and makes the joke constantly, right up until the moment somebody asks how many boxes are actually in the cupboard, at which point the room goes quiet.

The stash is a proper inventory of that pile. Each entry is a box, a unit or a single model: what it is, who made it, the game system and scale, how many you own, what stage it is at, when you bought it, and any notes. It uses the same stage vocabulary as posts, so a box sitting at sprue in your stash and a post marked sprue mean exactly the same thing.

Two design decisions worth knowing about:

• Privacy is asked, never assumed. Your stash starts private. The site asks you once whether you want it visible on your profile, and until you answer, it stays yours alone. Nobody gets to audit your cupboard without your say-so.
• Finishing a build log finishes its stash items. Mark a project as finished and the stash entries linked to it sweep across automatically, and the site tells you how many moved. No double bookkeeping.

You can also list things you do not own yet as wishlist, which is either sensible planning or an enabling device, depending on your temperament and the state of your bank account.

Build logs: an army that reads as a story

A single post is a moment. A build log — a project, on SprueTube — is a collection of posts grouped in order so that an entire army, warband or diorama reads start to finish.

This is the format the hobby used on forums for twenty-five years, and it is the format modern feeds destroyed. Scroll an Instagram grid and you get finished models in reverse order with the story removed. A build log puts the sprue shot at the beginning and the finished squad at the end, with everything that went wrong in between, which is the useful part.

Bringing your back catalogue with you

Starting a profile from zero is miserable, so there is an Instagram import. Worth being precise about how it works, because it is unusual:

• Your archive never leaves your computer. The export file is read in your own browser. Only the photographs you actually pick get uploaded — not the gigabyte of direct messages and story archives that Instagram bundles in.
• Imported posts keep their original dates. A model you painted in 2022 arrives dated 2022. This is deliberate: it stops five years of back catalogue detonating in everyone else's feed at nine o'clock on a Tuesday.
• Mentions in imported posts are not notified. Nobody gets forty alerts because you imported a year of tagged photographs.

Run it twice and it skips what it already brought over rather than duplicating it.

What it deliberately does not do

Being honest about the absences is more useful than listing features, so:

• No video. None. This is a deliberate architectural decision, not a gap waiting to be filled. There are already excellent places to watch someone airbrush for forty minutes; this is not trying to be one of them.
• No streaks, no badges for turning up, no karma. There is nothing engineered to make you compulsive. Recognition is for models painted and newcomers helped, not for volume of talking.
• No engagement-bait feed. There is a chronological Following feed for the people you chose, and a ranked Discover feed for finding new ones. You pick which you are looking at.
• No Google ads. The advertising on the site is our own, for our own shop, and that is it.

There is also search across posts, tags and people, painting challenges, bookmarks, and browser notifications if you want them — including on an iPhone, if you add the site to your Home Screen. A native iPhone app is in the works but not out yet; anyone promising you otherwise is fibbing.

How to start, in five minutes

Step 1: Make an account. Email and password, or Google. Pick a username you would not mind being known by for several years, because you will be.

Step 2: Post the thing on your desk right now. Not the best model you have ever painted — the one currently in front of you. Tag the system, the scale and the stage. It does not need to be finished. That is the entire premise.

• Light it badly but consistently: a desk lamp and a sheet of white paper beats a phone flash every time.
• Get closer than feels sensible, then crop. A miniature photographed from arm's length is a grey smudge.
• Name the paints while you still remember them. You will not remember them.

Step 3: Add five things to your stash. Not all of it. Five. The full audit can wait until you are feeling emotionally robust.

Step 4: Follow ten people painting what you paint. Use the game-system feeds — Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar are the busiest, but Necromunda, historical and scale models all have people in them.

Step 5: Comment on three posts properly. “Nice” is worthless. “How did you get that transition on the cloak” starts a conversation, and a small site only works if people actually talk in it.

Is it worth your time?

If you paint occasionally and post nothing, probably not yet — though the stash alone is a decent reason to sign up, because knowing the number is the first step to making it go down.

If you are mid-army, stalled somewhere around the fourth identical Intercessor, then yes. Build logs, a paint recipe you will not lose, and ten people who care that the shoulder pads came out well are, genuinely, the things that get an army finished. A tidy pile of primer, brushes and basing materials helps too, but it is the accountability that does the real work.

And it is free, so the worst case is you lose ten minutes and gain an accurate count of your unpainted plastic. Which, admittedly, some people would describe as the worst case.

Final thought: the hobby's real problem was never a shortage of places to show off finished models. It was that everything in between — the sprue, the failed wash, the paint recipe you worked out and then lost — had nowhere to live. SprueTube is a place for the in-between. Post the shoulder pads.

Further reading: Is Warhammer Good for Your Brain? What the Science Actually Says and Stormcast Eternals: Army Analysis.