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If you want a dirty white starting with a pure white undercoat isn't actually a bad way to go because you can weather it down. You actually tend to look "clean" if you start from a grey and highlight upwards, but starting from a pure white and dirtying it up can work well if that's the look you're going for.

There's various ways to weather that could be appropriate. A few ideas might be...

Acrylic washes.

Painting acrylic dark greys/browns in to crevices. Also stippling them.

Weathering powders.

Oil washes.

Unthinned oils (or only slightly thinned). You can paint them directly in to the crevices and then use a clean brush, clean tissue or cloth to blend them in to the rest of the area. The advantage of oils over acrylics for this is that you can really work them, add more, take some away, blend it in, stipple it, basically just keep working it and it won't dry out on you and leave you with an "oh crap" moment where you have to restart it because you did something that didn't work. I'd recommend using a gloss varnish before you start oiling though.

For example, this was done with oils over a pure white basecoat...



Instead of just using beige like that, you could use a mix of browns and dark greys to create a rougher, dirtier and more gritty effect.

 Greyguy13 wrote:
Good to know! How many layers of whites, and greys should be applied? As for oils I currently have nulin oil and agrax earthshade to attempt on my chaps. Are either of those sufficient enough for proper oils? I mainly have GW paints...

Thanks.

GW's washes are all acrylics rather than oils. When I talk about oil paints and oil washing, I mean the stuff you get from art shops that comes in tubes.

You can use acrylics as well, but I find oils to give a different sort of effect.

Have a look at these videos...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S2fpoCDtAI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPDOqj9Kk3s

So that's painting a horse, but the same sort of thing applies to painting a dirty white. If you see how he does the veins in the 2nd video, you can do that with a white acrylic base coat and apply a small amount of oil paint where you want an accumulation of grime, then swap to a clean brush and feather it out so you don't have an ugly stark contrast. You build it up in layers before it dries, add a bit of brown paint in to a crevice, feather it in, add a bit more, maybe feather it in, maybe don't, maybe add a bit of another brown or a grey and smoosh is in to the colour you already had.

That sort of stuff. With a bit of practice it's actually a reasonably fast way to paint a good looking dirt effect over white.

But it's just one way, not necessarily the best way, just a way I personally like. You can also use weathering powders or if you're good with a brush, you might be able to achieve a similar effect with regular acrylics.