State of the Pile
How big is everyone else's unpainted backlog? These are anonymous, aggregate figures from painters who track their collection in Liber Pigmenta — the whole dataset, not a survey and not a selection. Quote them, link them, argue with them.
Measured on over 428 painters and 44,640 catalogued miniatures. This page recomputes from live data — there is no hand-written date on it.
How big is a pile?
Painters per pile-size band. The two cuts differ only in who is counted: the recurring objection to the first version of this chart was that accounts which entered one or two models drag the median down, so the filtered cut is published beside it rather than instead of it. Both are real; pick the one you think answers your question.
Every painter
Everyone with at least one catalogued miniature, including people who entered a couple of models and stopped.
23 median unpainted models · mean 80 · 428 painters
Painters with 3+ entries
The same measurement over painters who catalogued at least three separate entries — the "they actually use it" cut.
42 median unpainted models · mean 108 · 314 painters
Bars are scaled against the tallest band in each chart, not against each other, so the two cuts are read within themselves and not compared bar-for-bar.
What is actually in the pile?
Every catalogued model by painting status. This is where "unpainted" is defined: the first four states below count toward a pile, the last two do not. If you would draw that line somewhere else, the numbers to do it with are here.
-
Unbuiltstill boxed or on the sprue
14,509
32.5% -
Assembledbuilt, bare plastic
8,209
18.4% -
Primedundercoated, no colour yet
6,899
15.5% -
Work in progresspaint started, not finished
4,637
10.4% -
Paintedfinished to tabletop — counts as finished
1,665
3.7% -
Completebased, varnished, done — counts as finished
8,721
19.5%
The full distribution
Percentile boundaries over every painter — 10 points on the curve. Read it as "this percentage of painters hold that many unpainted models or fewer".
| Percentile | Unpainted models or fewer |
|---|---|
| 5% | 0 |
| 10% | 1 |
| 30% | 5 |
| 40% | 11 |
| 50% | 23 |
| 60% | 36 |
| 70% | 57 |
| 80% | 104 |
| 90% | 201 |
| 95% | 339 |
How these numbers are counted
- A "model" is one miniature, not one box.
- A ten-model squad counts as ten. A Battleforce counts as however many miniatures are inside it. Nothing here is measured in kits, sprues or purchases.
- "Unpainted" means any status outside Painted and Complete.
- Unbuilt, assembled, primed and work-in-progress all count toward a pile. The split above shows each of them separately, so you can draw the line somewhere else and recompute — if you think a primed model is not really unpainted, the number you want is on this page.
- The sample is 428 painters, measured on 12 August 2026.
- Every active Liber Pigmenta account holding at least one catalogued miniature — not only the painters who joined the public leaderboard, and not a survey. The figures update as the data does.
- We cannot tell you how long anyone has been in the hobby.
- It was the most-requested cut of this data and we do not collect it. Account age is not a usable proxy — the app is months old, so it would measure when someone found this product rather than when they started painting. Rather than publish a number that looks like an answer, this is the gap.
- This is a self-selected sample, and it is not the hobby.
- These are people who chose to install a backlog tracker and then catalogue their collection. That is plausibly a group with larger piles than average, or more organised ones, or both. Treat it as "painters who track their pile", which is the only population it can honestly describe.
Where does your pile sit?
Catalogue what you own and find out — no account needed to start, and the same data behind this page will tell you which percentile you land in.