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Hey painters. So this might seem a silly question but how do you use a muted palette? I have a tendency to bring colours up quite strongly, is it as simple as stop highlighting so much or just not going as bright on the highlights?

I love seeing miniatures painted this way, really adds to the grimdark of the game.

Advice and pointers welcome !

Pick muted colors, paint with those, or take normal paints, and reduce their saturation by mixing in a bit of white or something.

I almost exclusively paint in this style, so here's a few tips:

- Avoid sharp highlights where possible. Use very light drybrushes or gradual layers to build to your upper tones, and use plenty of washes and glazes to tie it together so you don't get clear 'bands' of different shades/colours. On the subject of washes, I find it helps to achieve this look to always use a wash as your last layer of paint on an area; it makes sure that you get the muted effect, ties your colours together and emphasises the shading while dimming the highlighting. In general, the brightest shade you want visible on the finished model is roughly the same as what the mid-tone would be if you were going for a cleaner, brighter style.

- Limited your colour choice can help as well. Ideally, I find the best way to achieve a unified muted palette is to use no more than about 10-12 different paints on a mini, everything should be made from variations of these. This ties the overall palette together nicely to create the desired look.

- Use lots of colour mixes and have a consistent set of colours you use to mix. Say you're painting a model with dark brown fatigues and red armour panels; when you darken the red, use the same brown rather than a black. This helps in two ways, desaturating the colour overall and tieing the two areas together. It's worth noting that the reverse of this can also be useful if you want to emphasise a particular area; if that same model also has an off-white helmet for example, that you want to draw attention to, use a cold grey to mix your shade colours, as this will allow you to create contrast though warm and cold colours rather than having to excessively highlight, which ruins the effect.

- Similarly on contrast, textures and finishes help a lot here. You can generate a lot of contrast even between two areas of a similar colour if one is rugged and worn, and the other is much cleaner. For example, if you were painting a model in white armour with a light grey cloak, you might want to make the cloak grimy and frayed while the armour is less weathered, as if the cloak has borne the brunt of the conditions leaving the armour relatively clean. If you painted both in the same way, you'd end up with a very monotone model.

- Don't forget what you know about more conventional painting! Even on the grittiest, grimiest model there will be times you want something to look clean and sharp (usually things like faces, banners, insignia ect), so do keep in practice with the more traditional methods.

The most important thing is to start from a muted palette. If you start from normal highly-saturated game colors and use fewer highlight steps the model will look flat and unfinished, but not muted. Instead you want to start with de-saturated colors from the beginning. For example, the GW catalog style might do red with a bright primary red as the base, highlighting with bright red-orange, or maybe even a white edge highlight. For a muted palette you might mix a lot of brown into that red to make a very dull base color, then highlight slightly whiter shades of the original red-brown. Or you might use slightly less faded base colors, but a brown/gray oil wash on top of everything to pull the intensity back. I'd suggest doing some reading on traditional art painting and things like representing atmospheric haze across long distances in landscapes. Obviously a lot of the mechanics of painting will be different, but you can learn a lot about how to choose and mix the right colors.

Also, if you don't want to spend so much time mixing, paints aimed at the historical modeling community tend to be much more muted and realistic than gaming paints. Start there for your palette choices and only go into gaming paints if you want a bold color.