The Heretic Legions of Trench Crusade are a vastly diverse force of mortals and mutants quite literally hell-bent on conquering the known world for their archdemon overlords. Among those are the twistedly lavish worshippers of Mammon, the Prince of Greed. They believe in two things above all: that money can buy you power, and that good drip will always remain unmatched. Wearing stolen silk robes and armor adorned with jewels and charms, they behave almost like scavengers; seeking battles to get enough sick loot that it would make a Borderlands player blush. They take literally everything of value, including literally skinning and butchering the fallen to sell on the black market. If that isn’t the embodiment of greed, I don’t know what is. As described in the Core Rules, the acquisition of currency isn’t just for the goal of being wealthy, it’s their religious duty. Somewhat tragically, this traps the Knights of Avarice in a loop of constant desire for greater wealth. It does not matter how much riches you have, Mammon always craves more.
On the tabletop, the Knights of Avarice are a hyper elite force, literally banning you from taking units that haven’t gained enough wealth worth of gear and focusing on using extra access to Goetic Warlocks and corrupt merchants to take the gear from other factions. They sacrifice Fire and Shrapnel weapons to gain access to more potent Gas weapons – you don’t want to damage any of the fancy gear your enemies have, would you?
Their color palette is pretty straightforward – yellow gold armor with a light purple cloth, with black shadows to taste. The art piece we have also is mostly armor, so we can add some more dark cloth colors to break up the brightness of the main colors on units that have more variety. I chose to go for a slightly different color tone than the lovely art piece we have here though. I find a lot of the colors to evoke the classic Byzantine palette of a warmer gold and a rich, royal purple. I think this still makes the themes clear while taking better to some of the darker, warmer oil washes I want to use on the model and letting me push some brighter highlights.
The Paints
Here’s a list of all of the paints I used up front. For everything I used, I’ll list a Citadel counterpart for those that only have access to those/don’t have Pro Acryl (PA) available, as those are often my preferred standard acrylics. You will not need an airbrush for this scheme, but I will use oil washes. If you’re new to them, don’t sweat it at all – this is a great place to learn how to use them as it’s a pretty easy application.
Anything you can substitute or leave out will be underlined.
Acrylics
- PA Dark Purple / Citadel Naggaroth Night
- PA Black Brown / Citadel Rhinox Hide
- Citadel Leadbelcher
- Citadel Balthazar Gold
- Citadel Retributor Armor
- Vallejo Air Chrome
- PA Dark Bronze / AP Fanatic Rough Iron (these are different colors but I think can fill a similar purpose, I use both for variety. I haven’t found a great substitute for Dark Bronze, it’s one of my favorite true metallic paints.)
- Citadel Karak Stone
- Army Painter Fanatic Skeleton Bone / Citadel Wraithbone
- Pro Acryl Shadow Flesh / Citadel Bugman’s Glow
- Army Painter Fanatic Fur Brown – This is a slightly darker/redder color than the colors above, but you can just use those if you’re on a budget here.
- Citadel Contrast Darkoath Flesh
- Citadel Contrast Flesh Tearer’s Red (you can substitute this for any red wash, I prefer this because you can thin it to go lighter/heaver as desired)
- Citadel Phoenician Purple/PA Royal Purple & Citadel Genestealer Purple/PA Faded Plum – these are both colors for highlights, if you want to save some cash and don’t have lighter purples, you can blend the original purple you used with lighter toned colors to just make your own highlights.
- Citadel Blood for the Blood God
- Wash/Glaze Medium or Lahmian Medium
Oils
These are all common paints you can find at most local craft stores. I’m not an expert on other artist grade oils, but there are plenty of options out there that work great. These are the ones I prefer and have experience with.
- Windsor and Newton Artists’s Oil Lamp Black
- Windsor and Newton Artists’s Oil Cobalt Violet (any purple you have here is fine, it’s what I have and it’s a cheaper purple pigment)
- Windsor and Newton Artists’s Oil Burnt Sienna (or any red/orange of choice)
- Odorless Thinner
It’s a pretty high paint count, but most of these are useful and versatile paints to have on hand. In terms of brushes, just make sure you have a separate brush to use for oils, most craft stores have synthetics designed for oils that are pretty cheap. I also like to have small disposable cups on hand or small old drinking glasses/jars to use for mixing the oils in.
We’ll be painting up an Anointed to go alongside a Heretic Priest; two essentials that you’ll likely see in every roster.
The Process
Priming/Airbrush
To start, we’ll do a Black Primer base coat. If you have an airbrush and like working from a Zenithal, you can do that with a light grey/white, I used Vallejo Grey primer for mine here. It’s important to note that we don’t really use transparent paints in this scheme, I just prefer working from a Zenithal because I find it easier to see the highlighted areas on the model. If you don’t have an airbrush, going for the classic black prime is absolutely all you need, and this step is mostly just preference.
Brushwork:
First, paint robes, uniforms, and jackets in PA Dark Purple. Next you can get fatigues, belts, and other more “practical” garments in PA Black Brown. The purple should be the main show, but this can help break things up a bit – the main thing here are the pants on the priest.
Next up, we’ll move to metallics. Chainmail, vents, pipes, weapon hilts and bits, and other “functional” weapon parts like gun casings can be done in Citadel Leadbelcher. For other parts of weapon handles and more decorative details, go for PA Dark Bronze and/or APF Rough iron. I like the way Rough Iron looks on blades quite a bit, but the world is your oyster. You really just want to mix it up so it doesn’t look like one big hunk of the same metal.
All of those main armor plates you can hit with Citadel Balthazar Gold, which will be the majority of some of the heavier armored models you’ll see a lot in a KoA force.
Now we’re going places. Hit all of your bandages, weapon wrappings, and loose cloth bits with Citadel Karak Stone, as well as any bone areas with APF Skeleton Bone.
If your model has exposed skin, base coat it here with PA Shadow Flesh. After that dries fully, wash it in Citadel Contrast Darkoath Flesh. You can thin this more if you’d like, but it’s already pretty thin for a contrast and works well as a heavier wash. After that dries, we’ll go back for a last wash with a thinned down Citadel Contrast Flesh Tearer’s Red, about 3-1 water to paint. You can use a regular red wash here, this is just my normal red wash I use for acrylics. We want that burn-scarred look and this will add a lot of depth to the skin.
That’s it for our base coats. We’re going to move to oil washes now. I’ll give a quick and dirty tutorial for it here, but oils are not as hard as they may seem and have a ton of great uses in our hobby. We’re specifically using it as a catch-all wash, but you can totally get more creative and use oils as-is or as pin-washes.
Let’s get your supplies together first:
- Your dedicated brush for oils
- A small dish/cup as mentioned above to mix your wash in
- Paper towels, you definitely want disposable ones for this in my experience.
- Your oil paints
- Odorless thinner
If you do have an airbrush/fume hood I tend to do mine in there, and if you have some gloves it can be nice to wear them, it does get a little messy if you’re sloppy (which I tend to be just for speed’s sake).
The first step is to actually make your wash mix. At the bottom of your dish you want to mix your wash in, put in a small dollop of your colors. I use a 2-2-1 mix of Lamp Black – Purple – Burnt Sienna. Pure black oil washes tend to not be great to use, you can add a ton of extra chromatic shading by just slightly tinting the black with other colors. It seems like a small thing, but it does go a long way. You can find your own mix that works for you, but this is what I prefer as it works well across most of the colors already on the mini.
Next, we’ll thin it down with odorless thinner. I prefer to just pipette little amounts at a time and mix it together in the dish with my brush. I can’t give a perfect ratio here for this, but in general you’re looking for a consistency almost like a vinaigrette or an oil salad dressing. In general, going in small increments of thinning is easier because you can quickly clean off areas that end up too shaded, but if you go too thin and it ends up just rolling off the mini, it’s usually easier to just restart. Don’t stress too much about this, it’s something you’ll quickly pick up on as you do it more. Vince Vinturella has a lot of video content related to oils, and if you want some visual examples definitely check that out. Remember oils don’t mix well with water, so don’t wash your brush in your water pots – use some odorless thinner to clean your brush as you need to and wipe it on a paper towel.
Alright, you’ve got your wash and your minis. Now to apply it! You want to basically cover the entire model with the wash, barring any open skin areas. It’s not a huge deal if they get a little on them, but we want to leave the skin with a bit of that base shading we did with acrylics. Something to understand about oils is that they “cure” rather than dry out, and the part that actually “dries” in a wash is the thinner evaporating into the air. Oils have a really long general working time, but they can become a bit easier to work with as they settle in, so after you apply a healthy dose of oil all over the model, let it sit for about an hour to start the early stages of the curing process. It’s fine if they have some pooling, the next step will be cleaning that up.
When we go back to the minis, get your clean oil brush and load it up with some odorless thinner – you don’t need a crazy amount but you want enough that it’ll come off on the model. There are a lot of folks who like to let their model cure for a bit longer than this (3ish hours) and then come back in with a makeup sponge or cotton swab to clean it up for a grimier, streakier look, but I prefer this method as it works a bit more like a traditional wash. All you really need to do is dab all of the highlighted areas and flat panels with your brush – the thinner will run all of the pools into the recesses of the model. You can go in and soak up that excess in crevasses where the wash accumulates a bit too much, but that’s all you really need to do. Once you’re happy with the wash being very thinned on flat surfaces but collecting in the shaded areas, let them cure for about a day. The wait feels like a long time, but it’s nice to have the oils as cured as much as possible; without a full cure, the hydroponic nature of them will make your water based acrylics struggle to adhere to the surface.
By the time these are all cured you’ll have a really awesome canvas to use for the rest of your highlights.
Before we get into those, I want to let you all in on a trade secret: Vallejo Model Air Chrome. This stuff is absolute magic for metal highlights – it’s very potent, but a tiny drop into whatever metallic your base color is will give you a super bright and slightly silvery-diluted version of your original metal. This makes it great to use for the highest highlights on metals while still maintaining some of your base color. You’ll see me reference it a few times, but I highly suggest grabbing a bottle as it makes highlighting metals a breeze.
The very first highlight step will be what I call “cleanup highlights.” The all-over oil wash method sometimes can get you a little too much wash on the large areas even after cleanup, so I like to go back and highlight the large areas with an initial block highlight of their base color. This also helps bring back some of the sheen to the metallic areas that the matte nature of the oil washes dull out a bit. I primarily did this with the armor panels and cloth parts, but you can do this anywhere you deem is a bit too shaded.
For the purples, I opt for an initial layered highlight of Citadel Phoenician Purple, followed up with another layered highlight of 50/50 Phoenician Purple and Genestealer Purple. The fine edges you can go back with pure Genestealer purple to highlight with the edge of your brush, but be a bit sparing here to keep some of the richness of that base purple.
For the browns, I want those to stay pretty dark so I leave those with just that cleanup highlight, but if you want an edge highlight you can mix in a 50/50 mix of PA Black Brown and PA Shadow Flesh for a nice leathery highlight.
Gold armor get’s highlighted in Citadel Retributor Armor initially, with some choppy almost “feathered” block highlights going out towards the edges. For the true edge highlighting, you can mix a small drop of that VMA Chrome into your Retributor Armor for those crisp fine highlights. For all of the other metals you highlight, do the same thing – a tiny drop of the Chrome plus the base color. You really only need a tiny bit – ballparking like a 5-1 or 6-1 ratio, but I use such a small amount that it’s a bit hard to measure a ratio for this.
For any exposed skin, use APF fur brown and PA shadow flesh to highlight the skin after the washes. Remember we want this to look a little leathery and burned so you don’t need to go too bright here. After this, I like to go back to all of the nice detailed wounds, scars, and boils and glaze them with a 50/50 mix of Glaze Medium and Blood for the Blood God technical paint to really make that flesh look like it came from the gates of hell.
After all this, all we have to do is base them up! I went with Geek Gaming Scenics Scrubland for mine, as I wanted to break up the purple with a compliment of green, however I definitely think you can do pretty much any type of basing you want for these and they would work great with a traditional “muddy trench base” as well if you want to take that route.
That’s a wrap for these, they’re a ton of fun to paint and play, and if you’re interested in the Heretic Legion but want to devote yourself to the Prince of Greed himself, definitely give the Knights of Avarice a look. Feel free to comment below if you have any questions on how to paint any other units of the roster or what you might like to see next.
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