How to Paint Warhammer: The Old World

The Old World is a rank-and-file game, and that is the fact every painting decision here follows from. Your unit of work is a regiment of ten to twenty models on movement trays, seen as a block from three feet away, not a squad of five studied one at a time. A scheme that takes forty minutes a model is a scheme you will never finish an army in.

So the method leans hard on batch work: basecoat the whole regiment in one pass, shade it in one pass, drybrush or highlight it in one pass, and accept that the rank-and-file get three steps while the champion, standard and musician get five. Bases matter more than they do in a skirmish game, because twenty of them sit edge to edge and a rushed base ruins the block that a good paint job just earned.

The armies are historical fantasy rather than invented sci-fi, so the palettes are earthier than Age of Sigmar's - wool, leather, steel and provincial liveries rather than saturated armour and ethereal glow. That also means colour is a choice: an Empire state regiment can wear any province's livery, and picking one is how your army stops looking like the box art. Each guide below gives the signature palette and the painting order, and hands off to the generator so you can recolour it.