A warcolours field guide · Built for the INKredible range

Zenithal Priming and INKredible Inks: Painting a Trench Pilgrim Like a Grimdark Oil Painting

Harsh overhead light. Pitch-black recesses. A Heretic dragged out of no man's land and rendered less like plastic and more like a canvas. Three stages, one true ink range, no layering required.

Why a true ink does the work a thick paint can't

A zenithal prime already does the hard work — it lays down a monochrome map of every shadow and highlight before a drop of colour touches the model. What you paint over that map matters more than usual, because anything even slightly opaque flattens the contrast you just spent an entire priming session building.

This is exactly where a genuine ink earns its keep. warcolours INKredible is formulated to stay properly translucent even at full strength — it tints the white zenithal highlights and pools into the black recesses without ever choking either one out. Reach for anything semi-opaque instead and that same transition muddies fast. A true ink doesn't, because staying transparent is the whole point of the formulation, not an afterthought.

The model: a Heretic in Muted Desolation

Hooded, gas-masked, dragging a heavy wooden cross through the mud — the same Muted Desolation palette that runs through the Drybrushin' range gets its ink-and-light counterpart here. Where dry brushing builds texture from the top down, this technique builds atmosphere from light and shadow first, colour second.

The three stages

Stage one — the zenithal undercoat

Coat the miniature entirely in warcolours Undercoat Black. Every recess — under the coat, beneath the mask, inside the folds of the hood — needs to hold that black completely; this is where your deepest shadow lives for the rest of the piece.

Then, holding the miniature upright, spray warcolours Undercoat White strictly from directly above. Don't angle it — the whole point of a zenithal pass is that it mimics a harsh, single overhead light source, catching the top of the hood, the shoulders, the ridges of the gas mask hose, and the upper face of the wooden cross, while leaving the undersides in pure black. What you're left with is a monochrome roadmap that does the lighting work before you've touched a single colour.

Stage two — true ink over the zenithal map

Now the INKredible range goes to work, one wash at a time, each one settling into the light-and-shadow map you've already built rather than fighting it.

The hood: INKredible: Carmine, worked over the whole cowl. At full strength it reads as dried blood; thinned, it settles into the folds and lets the zenithal highlight bleed through as something closer to old, faded gore.

The trench coat: INKredible: Umber across the coat and leather pouches, pooling naturally into every fold the zenithal pass already defined — instant, dirty gradients with no blending required.

The gas mask and gear: a pass of INKredible: Olive Green over the canvas straps and metal fittings for corrosion, followed by a thinned wash of INKredible: Black to push the mask itself toward ash and soot rather than clean metal.

The cross: INKredible: Burnt Sienna, which stains the wood grain the zenithal highlight already picked out, ageing it instantly.

Stage three — edge highlighting and grimdark detailing

The final pass pulls the model back out of the mud and sharpens exactly the details that need to read at tabletop distance.

Edge highlights: a fine-tipped brush and three colours, applied only to the sharpest edges — Layer: Ochre 1 along the coat's worn edges for a pale, sun-bleached tan, Layer: Red 1 along the hood's edges for a bright, almost fresh crimson against the dried Carmine beneath it, and Layer: Cool Grey 1 on the hardest edges of the gas mask.

Metal wear: the barbed wire around the cross and the coat's buckles picked out in Metallics: Pewter, then given a thin wash of INKredible: Ochre to simulate pitted, rusting iron.

The base: a No Man's Land in miniature — thick mud texture worked with a touch of warcolours Gloss Varnish mixed in for a wet, churned sheen, with rusted wire and spent shell casings scattered at the model's feet to finish the story.

Written by the warcolours forge in Nicosia, Cyprus. From our hands to your brush.