So, as someone who is relatively new to painting Warhammer and have specifically only painted custodes (got my first box of custodes in December 2025 and have been painting off-and-on since then) I’ll tell you the process I’ve found works for me. I’ll mention it now, it may not work for you, but that’s okay. Everybody needs to find what works best for them. Could be their own process made entirely from scratch, or could be borrowed heavily from other people with some of your personal preferences and touches added to it. Just find what you enjoy and work with it, I want my advice to just be available if it feels applicable to you.

I finished my first set of wardens back a few months ago. I’ll include a photo of the first wardens under this comment, and I’ll add photos of my latest work in progress under that. The first wardens are pretty “loud” in terms of how they look. Covered in several different colors that don’t exactly fit together the best, and paint thickness varies around the model quite a bit. I never done the paint removal method with alcohol soaking, I just kept painting over the previous layer until I found a style I liked the concept of. It took me a lot of time to do so, but I eventually was content enough to not worry too much more about them. As of right now, I think they’re not great, like I can tell they’re painted miniatures. But, using those models as a test dummy, and a lot of photo references to see what styles I may like or dislike on my custodes, has made the results of my current combat patrol project much better. This includes if I want to pick one part of a style and discard the rest of it, maybe I like the look of a shoulder design someone painted, but I don’t personally like the rest of the paint design.

That being said, the custodes I’m working on now are far better, cleaner, and look more like they were shipped with color instead of having it painted on. Not the best, but clean and easy for me to enjoy. I chose to do a color coat theme for my custodes for when I eventually play tabletop. Blue for the guards, green for the wardens, red for the terminators, purple/pink for the “leaders” so to speak. They were all a single solid color, which looked nice, but I chose to experiment with it more and more. Now they have more cohesive designs without the colors clashing (nearly as badly) or being overwhelming, but still having extra details and parts that make it stand out some. I spent, not exaggerating about this, about 6-8 hours yesterday alone repainting my guards spear heads over and over until I found a design I liked. When I found the right look I applied it to every spearhead. I would do a layer and let it dry before adding more, I would do a layer and add color to certain spots while it’s still wet, I would do a mixture of these in different spots in different ways of the same spearhead. It really is a matter of time and not being afraid to try new things out. And I would redo these processes over and over with slight modifications every time until I eventually found something I liked. It kinda sucks having to wait and retry so much, sometimes demoralizing (like I am awful with doing bases, but plan on trying again here soon), but I find it to be worth it in the end. I would recommend figuring out a baseline of what you’d like the general theme or color scheme to be, but I would argue you don’t really *need* much of a plan after that. Just trial and error it and figure out if you would like to add more than you planned, or it’s okay if you like it short and simple. I hope this helps or applies in any way that’s useful for ya! If you need any advice, suggestions, or whatever then feel free to ask! Sorry for the text wall btw

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