How to Paint the Black Grail (Trench Crusade)

The Black Grail is Trench Crusade at its most nightmarish - a plague of corrupted flesh and shambling body horror boiling out of the ground where the war is at its worst. There is barely a uniform in sight: this warband is rot, sinew, grave-soil and gore. That makes it the single most forgiving project in the game, because - as with any decay-themed force - mess is the point. Pooled washes, uneven layers and heavy-handed stippling all read as more corruption.

The signature look

The base tone is a putrid grey-olive - dead flesh and rotten cloth blurring into one another - built from the recipe above. Over that you layer three kinds of horror: pallid, sickly skin on exposed flesh; wet crimson gore in wounds and mouths; and grave filth - dark corpse-earth caked over everything below the knee. Any metal present is scrap, and should be more rust than iron.

Painting the rot

1. Basecoat everything - flesh, rags, hide - with the putrid olive ramp, keeping the tones muddled rather than neat.
2. Drench the model in washes. Brown in the recesses, a touch of green over larger flesh areas, purple or red glazes around wounds and swollen tissue. Let them pool; the washes guide explains why that works here.
3. Drybrush the raised areas back up with pale bone-olive - see drybrushing - so the texture of the sculpt does the shading for you.
4. Pick out pallid skin in a lighter sickly tone so the anatomy reads at arm's length.

Gore and wounds

This is where the Black Grail earns its horror. Paint wound interiors, mouths and exposed guts in deep red, shadowed to near-black at the deepest points, then gloss them - either gloss varnish or a dedicated blood technical paint. The wet shine against the dry, matt rot is the single most effective contrast on these models. Thin tendrils of gore dragged from a wound with a fine brush add motion, but a little goes a long way.

Grave filth and weathering

Where other warbands are weathered, the Black Grail is buried. Stipple and drag dark corpse-earth up shins, hems and trailing flesh - do not tidy it. Follow with a lighter dried-mud drybrush at the very bottom so the filth has depth. Rusty scrap metal - blades, hooks, buckles - gets orange-brown stippled over dark gunmetal with almost no clean metal left showing. Base the warband on churned grave-dirt with pooled water effects if you like; the basing guide covers muddy ground and water.

Tips and common mistakes

• Let the washes pool. On most armies pooling is a mistake; here it is texture. Lean into it.
• Matt rot, gloss gore. Keep the body dead and dry so the wet points of red genuinely shock.
• Vary the flesh. Shift the skin tones between models - grey, green, jaundiced - so the horde looks like many corpses, not one repeated one.
• Stop before you polish. If you find yourself neatening an edge, put the brush down. The Black Grail is the rare scheme that careful technique can actually make worse.

When you are happy with the palette, open this scheme in the generator to swap paints between brands, nudge the mood or add a secondary colour.