How to Paint Undead Warrior Miniatures

Beginner~45 min

An undead horde is the perfect first batch-painting project, because everything that usually counts against speed counts for it here: rough, uneven results read as decay, missed spots read as grave-dirt shadow, and the two fastest techniques in the hobby — a wash and a drybrush — do nearly all the visual work on bone. We'll paint five to ten skeletons at once, assembly-line style: every model gets step one before any model gets step two. That order isn't just faster (one paint mix, one loaded brush, ten models); it also guarantees the squad matches on the table. The sequence within each model is darks before lights — black primer as the universal shadow, quick basecoats, one flood of wash to age everything, then a single drybrush pass to pull every skull and rib back out of the gloom. Total time is about 45 minutes of brushwork for the whole unit, plus drying waits you can spend on the next step's prep.

Supplies Needed

•Black spray primer
•A bone or ivory base paint (any range's aged-bone colour)
•A dark brown wash (any range's all-purpose brown shade — the star of this guide; or thin dark brown paint about 1:3–4 with water)
•An off-white or pale bone for drybrushing
•A dark iron or gunmetal metallic for weapons — deliberately not bright silver
•One muted cloth colour: dried-blood maroon, rotten-leaf green, or mud brown
•An orange-brown for rust, plus a torn scrap of packing foam to apply it
•A size 1 round brush, a flat drybrush (or doomed old brush), and two pots of water
•Basing texture and, ideally, a few dead-grass tufts

Step-by-Step Instructions

Batch Prime the Horde in Black

Line every model up on a strip of cardboard and prime them all black in one session — 20–30 cm range, short sweeping passes that start and end off the models, rotating the strip between passes. Priming gives paint something to grip on bare plastic, and black is doing double duty on undead: every eye socket, every gap between ribs, every hollow under a jaw is a deep recess, and black primer pre-fills all of them with shadow you will never have to paint. Get down level with the models and check the undersides of arms and chins, then let everything cure 30 minutes. No spray access? Brush-on primer thinned to milk, two quick coats per model, works fine — undead forgive a rough prime better than anything else you'll ever paint.

Tip: The assembly-line rule for the whole guide: finish each step on every model before starting the next step. Never let one skeleton get ahead of the pack.

Basecoat All the Bone

Work down the line painting every exposed bone surface — skulls, ribcages, arm and leg bones, spines, and finger joints — with your bone colour thinned to milk, using the size 1 round. Here's the liberating part: one coat, applied a little roughly, is the goal. A basecoat is normally two careful thin coats, but on undead we want the black showing through in every recess, so deliberate under-coverage does the shading for us. Hit the raised surfaces, skip the deep gaps, and move to the next model. Ten skeletons should take about ten minutes.

Paint the Weapons and Armor Scraps

Next pass down the line: every rusted sword, axe, spearhead, shield boss, and scrap of ancient armor gets one coat of dark iron or gunmetal, straight from the pot (metallics dislike heavy thinning — shake the pot hard instead). Deliberately choose the dark metallic over bright silver: these blades have been in the ground for centuries. Sloppy is genuinely fine here — the wash in step five will pull every rough patch together, and streaky metal reads as pitted and neglected, which is the story we're telling.

Paint the Tattered Cloth and Leather

Last basecoat pass: the ragged loincloths, shredded cloaks, and leather scraps hanging off each warrior. One thin coat of your muted colour at milk consistency, letting the black primer survive in every fold — that surviving darkness is what makes flat cloth read as rotten and torn. If you're painting a bigger horde, split it between two muted colours (say, half maroon and half mud-brown); slight variation across a unit suggests each warrior died in a different decade, which is exactly the right story.

Flood Everything with the Wash

Now the transformation step for the whole unit at once. A wash is thin, dark paint that flows into the recesses of the model on its own and settles there, painting your shadows for you — and undead are its perfect canvas, because a skeleton is practically all recess. Don't own a bottled wash? Make the guide's star yourself: thin dark brown paint about 1:3–4 with water until it flows like ink, plus the barest trace of dish soap so it settles into the recesses (dip a toothpick tip in the soap and stir with that — even one full drop is far too much). Confirm the basecoats are dry, load the size 1 round heavily with the wash (bottled ones come at skim-milk from the pot), and flood every model completely: bone, metal, cloth, everything. Don't be precise — steer it around with the tip and let it run. Then the discipline: leave the whole unit untouched for 15 minutes. This is the step that turns flat bone into aged, grave-stained bone.

Tip: On skeletons even the tide marks that would be flaws elsewhere read as staining — but if a pool collects somewhere really flat, like a shield face, wick it up with a clean damp brush before it dries.

Drybrush Every Model Back to Life

Once the wash is fully dry, the single highest-impact pass of the project. A drybrush is a near-dry brush flicked across raised texture so the last traces of paint catch only the high points — instant highlights, and bone texture is the best surface for it in the entire hobby. Load the flat drybrush with off-white, unthinned, and wipe it on a paper towel until a test stroke leaves only a faint ghost — when you think you've wiped enough, wipe once more. Then flick it briskly across every model: over skulls, down ribcages, along arm bones and knuckles. Every brow ridge and rib springs forward from the washed shadow. Two light passes per model, concentrated on the upper surfaces where overhead light lands.

Tip: If the bone turns chalky and scratchy, there was too much paint on the brush — let it dry, dab the worst streaks back with the bone basecoat, and re-wipe the brush drier before continuing down the line.

Sponge Rust onto the Weapons

Final detail pass, and it's a fun one: tear a small piece of packing foam, dab it into the orange-brown paint at single-cream thickness (unthinned enough to stay crisp), press most of it off on a paper towel, then press it lightly against blade edges, shield rims, and spearheads — the spots where water would sit and rust would bloom. Torn foam makes naturally random speckle that a brush can't fake. Restraint sells it: three or four rust blooms per weapon tell the story; total coverage just looks orange.

Tip: Any rust patch that goes too far is painted straight back out with the dark metallic — keep it on the palette while you sponge and you can edit freely.

Base the Unit and Seal It

Finish all the bases in one batch pass: texture paint or PVA-and-sand across each base top (clear of the feet), dry fully, then dark earth-brown basecoat at milk, a quick pass of the same brown wash, 10–15 minutes' drying, and a drybrush of pale tan — the exact skill set from the models, reused. Keep undead bases barren: a dead-grass tuft or a half-buried skull beats anything lush, and both are optional — bare cracked earth is perfectly on-theme. Rim every base black, then mist the whole unit with matt varnish from 20–30 cm (or brush on two thin coats per model) and give it 30 minutes — a horde gets handled in fistfuls, and varnish is what keeps fistful number fifty looking like day one.

Pro Tips

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The unit is the artwork. Nobody inspects skeleton number seven — spend your care on the group effect and the front-rank models.
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Inconsistency is free flavour on undead: vary the cloth colours and how heavily you drybrush, and the horde looks ancient rather than factory-fresh.
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The Contrast shortcut: over a white or pale grey primer, a single coat of a bone-coloured Contrast paint — a translucent paint that shades itself as it dries, bright on raised bone and dark in recesses — replaces steps 2 and 5 in one pass. Leave it strictly alone for 15–20 minutes while it dries; touching half-dry Contrast is what causes blotches.
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This entire guide is a template for any horde: swap bone for fur or carapace and the batch logic, wash, and drybrush carry straight over.

Related Techniques

Washing Drybrushing Contrast Painting

Paint This With Your Own Paints

Batch logic is universal — paint choices aren't. Generate a personalized horde guide and get this exact assembly line mapped to the paints you actually own.