Trench Pilgrims are the fanatic faithful of Trench Crusade - ragged processions of zealots, flagellants and war-prophets who walk into no-man's-land carrying shrines, relics and censers. Their look is built almost entirely from poverty: bone and parchment-coloured rags, cracked wood, rope, and the marks of mortification - blood, bandages and dribbled votive wax. It is a wonderfully characterful warband to paint, and most of it is done with washes and drybrushing.
The signature look
The base is a pale bone-tan - robes, rags and wraps built from the recipe above. Because so much of each model is one colour family, the scheme lives on variation: shift each garment a little warmer, greyer or dirtier than its neighbour so the layers of cloth separate. The accents are dry brown wood and rope, wet crimson blood, and off-white candlewax with a gloss touch at the drips.
Painting the rags
- Basecoat all the cloth in the bone-tan, varying the mix slightly between garments.
- Wash generously with a sepia or brown shade - on layered rags this one step does most of the modelling. The washes guide covers keeping it even.
- Drybrush or layer back up towards pale bone on the raised folds, leaving the recesses warm and dirty.
- Glaze a few garments with thinned grey or green-brown so the procession reads as gathered rabble rather than a uniformed unit.
Relics, wood and rope
Crosses, staves, shrine frames and cart wheels take dry, cracked browns - basecoat a mid brown, wash dark, then drybrush up to a pale grey-brown so the grain and edges catch. Rope and bindings go a lighter straw-brown. Keep all of it matt and tired; nothing the Pilgrims carry is new. Iron fittings - chains, censers, nails - should be dark gunmetal with rust stippled over, more relic than weapon.
Blood and candlewax
The Pilgrims' devotion is written on their bodies. Bandages get a thin red wash seeping from their centre; scourged backs and stigmata take small, deliberate touches of deep glossy red - a blood technical paint or gloss varnish over dark red. Then the detail that makes the warband: votive candles and dribbled wax on shrines, helmets and pauldrons. Paint the wax in warm off-white, shade lightly with sepia, highlight the drips, and add a spot of gloss at each drip so it looks freshly melted. An orange-yellow glow around lit wicks - a simple layered dot of orange, yellow, white - finishes the shrine pieces.
Weathering
These people have walked to the front line. Work dust and dried mud up from the hems - a dusty earth drybrush over the lower third of every robe (see drybrushing), heavier stippled mud on bare feet and boots, and grime dragged from knees and elbows. The bone cloth takes weathering beautifully because every stain shows. Base them on churned earth and duckboards using the basing guide, and let a few models trail bandages or rope onto the base to connect the procession to the ground.
Tips and common mistakes
- Vary the bone. Ten identical bone-white robes look like a choir; ten slightly different dirty ones look like pilgrims.
- Blood with intent. Small, placed marks of mortification are unsettling; random splatter is just messy.
- Gloss the wax drips. That tiny highlight is what makes candles read as wax rather than icicles.
- Keep metal scarce. The less iron gleams on these models, the more their poverty and faith carry the scheme.
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.