Repainting Pre-painted miniatures

This is for anybody wondering how I go about repainting Heroclix and Star Wars pre-painted miniatures or any other pre-painted miniatures you might want to repaint .

the first thing to do is to remove the base,  assuming you want to rebase it to use for role-playing or for a collection piece,  if not leave it in place.  Soak the figure in hot water for about ten minutes and you should be able to gentle prize the figure off its base,  although a word of warning some of them are more difficult to remove so if you decide to cut it off with a knife etc be careful.

To straighten any bendy bits,  the star wars figures and ships are notorious for this,  immerse the figure in hot water for several minutes and reposition then immerse in cold water while holding it in position.  the theory is that this resets the plastics memory and you may have to do it several times till it holds

I don't remove all the original paint because it's basically almost impossible to do so without destroying the figure,  basically remove any flash lines and scrape of the excess paint while taking care not to damage the figure detail.

Then undercoat black ,  some miniature painters matt varnish the figure before undercoating,  I don't bother but the choice is yours. 

Now its just a case of painting in the colours of your choice,  the nice thing about repainting the marvel and d.c. heroclix is you can do a variant costume i.e. armoured Spiderman