How to Paint Grimdark Miniatures: Rust, Ruin and Ragged Cloth
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🎨 How to Paint Grimdark Miniatures
Rust, ruin and ragged cloth
"Grimdark is not about painting badly. It is about painting damage well."
Grimdark is one of the friendliest styles for a newer painter, because almost every mistake can be read as weathering. A patchy metallic looks like corrosion. An uneven wash looks like grime. Once you stop fighting that and start aiming for it, these models get quick and very satisfying to paint.
What follows is the fast route to a good tabletop finish on the Trench Warfare Crusaders range. It uses metallic paints, sponges and drybrushing, and you can get a whole warband done in a fortnight of evenings. Adjust it to whatever paints you already own.
The models photographed on this site are painted differently, and I have said why at the end for anyone who wants to chase that look.
🎨 Build a limited palette first
The single thing that makes a warband look coherent is using fewer colours than you think you need. Five or six across the whole force is plenty.
A reliable grimdark palette:
- A dark neutral for armour and metal. Gunmetal or a very dark grey.
- An earth tone for leather, straps and canvas.
- One off-white for robes, bandages and cloth.
- One accent used sparingly. Oxidised copper, deep red, or brass.
- A skin tone, kept pale and slightly sickly.
- Rust, which is really two colours: dark orange brown and a lighter orange.
Use the accent on roughly one tenth of the model. Grimdark palettes fail when the accent becomes the main event.
🧱 Prime and block in
Prime the whole warband in one session so every model starts from the same base. Black primer suits this style: it sits in the recesses and does half your shading before you begin.
Block in your main areas flatly and do not worry about neatness yet. Everything gets dirtied later, and time spent on tidy edges at this stage is time wasted.
🦀 Corroded metal, the core technique
This is the look that carries the whole style, and it is three steps.
| Step | What to do |
|---|---|
| 1. Base | Dark gunmetal over the black. Leave the deepest recesses black. |
| 2. Rust | Stipple dark orange brown with a torn piece of sponge, concentrated on edges, rivets and lower surfaces where water would sit. |
| 3. Bright | A much smaller amount of lighter orange on top of the rust, then a fine silver edge highlight on the sharpest corners only. |
The sponge is the important part. A brush makes rust look painted on. A sponge makes it look like it happened. Tear the edge rather than cutting it, and always dab off most of the paint on kitchen roll first.
🧵 Cloth and robes
Robed models are everywhere in this range, and flat cloth is what makes a miniature look unfinished.
Base your off-white a shade darker than you want it to end up. Wash the whole area with a thinned brown, let it pool in the folds, then drybrush your original off-white back across the raised folds. Finish with a dirty brown glaze on the hems only, where a robe would drag through mud.
The Medic Nun and Penitent Monk are good models to practise this on, since both are mostly cloth.
🩸 Grime, blood and restraint
Weathering works best when it follows physics. Dirt collects low, rust runs downward, and wear appears where hands and straps rub.
- Mud on boots and the lower third only, never above the knee.
- Streaks running down from rivets and rust patches, not sideways.
- Blood used very sparingly. A little reads as menace, a lot reads as comedy.
🪨 Bases tie it together
Basing is where a warband stops looking like separate models. Pick one recipe and use it on every model without exception.
A simple churned mud base: texture paste, a brown base coat, a lighter drybrush, then a gloss varnish in the lowest points to read as standing water. Add a few pieces of broken duckboard or wire if you want more character. Our Rangers of the No Man's Land bases set gives you sculpted ground if you would rather not build it up yourself.
⏱️ Batch painting a warband
Paint your leader first and work the palette out on that one model. Then do every remaining model one step at a time, all together. All the metal, then all the cloth, then all the rust. It feels slower for the first hour and is dramatically faster by the end.
🪞 Where to go next: glazing and NMM
Everything above is built for speed. The studio models you see photographed across this site are painted the slow way, with glazing and non-metallic metal, and it is worth knowing why in case you want to head in that direction eventually.
Glazing means building colour in many heavily thinned, transparent layers rather than one opaque coat. Each pass shifts the tone slightly, so transitions end up smooth in a way drybrushing never quite manages. It is slow and it is unforgiving of impatience, but it is the technique behind almost every blended surface you have admired on someone else's model.
Non-metallic metal paints the appearance of metal using ordinary matte paints, no metallic pigment at all. You are painting the reflections rather than the material: a hard bright line where light hits, a dark band beneath it, a cooler bounce below that. It takes real practice to place those values convincingly.
There is a practical reason a shop uses it. Metallic paints contain suspended flakes that flare under photography lights and photograph flat and grey. NMM reads correctly on camera, which is why product photos and painting competitions are full of it while tabletop armies mostly are not.
My honest advice: do not start here. Paint a warband with metallics first, learn where light and grime actually fall on a model, then try NMM on a single character once you can see it in your head. Starting with NMM is how people end up with a half-painted model and a lapsed hobby.
Ready to start? Browse the Trench Warfare Crusaders range, or read our guide to building your first warband. Everything is supplied unpainted in high detail resin, with supports removed and surfaces cleaned. Glue and paint required.