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- Apr 2, 2025
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I'm late so there's already lots of good suggestions. When I need help, I always look for Duncan Rhodes on YT. His current channel is Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy, I think. He used to be the main on-screen personality for the official Warhammer channel for all the painting videos. He is not only an incredibly talented guy, but he's very good at the actual 'teaching you how to do it' part without it being a 45 minute video. So both his channel and the Warhammer official channel (particularly the old Duncan stuff, but the new people are okay too) are terrific.
If the question is; how should weathered armor look? I don't have a good answer for that because mostly armor shouldn't look weathered, haha. So the question is; do you want realistic weathering or Dark Souls weathering?
Realistic weathering - you're looking for areas where water can collect on the metal. If a knight or man-at-arms were stuck on long campaigns where you might even be expected to march and sleep in your armor (the Hundred Years War saw this happening), you are going to have issues with rust that you can't readily remove. Under/around the neck, around the top of forearm/elbow joint, on the lower arm just above where the gauntlet overlaps the lower arm armor, and depending on the terrain - maybe the feet and ankles. Look for areas water could pool and sit. Also look for areas where armor is contacting non-armor material goods. Cloaks, surcoats -- anything that will get soaked when it rains is also going to cause rusting around it because the wet material is holding moisture against the metal.
For a starting finish - there is no correct answer. Historians don't have a truly solid understanding of what kind of finish armor had during its working life. There are a lot of conflicting theories. We're reasonably certain that munitions-grade armor (later medieval period and afterward, cheaper, almost never fitted to the specific wearer) would have basically been dull-grey. No polish. Not even a final cleaning. Crank it out, wipe it off, throw it on a poor person. So for armor like that you'd start with a more gunmetal look an work down from there.
Polishing armor was EXTREMELY labor intensive in the medieval period. It also made the armor much, much harder to take care of (i.e. required more dedicated servants to clean it, and more often). So it's likely only the richest people had that mirror-polish to their armor. Some armor was also blackened, which actually protects against rust fairly well. Armor could also be painted, but we don't know how common this was.
Short version for realistic weathering based on polish? The shinier the armor - the worse the rust should actually be if you're playing on the idea that everyone is out on campaign. The cheaper armor should be darker in color to begin with, but ironically will resist rusting a bit longer and better than the high-polish armor. And blackened armor would be pretty expensive as well, but also should show less rust than either of the other types.
If you do blood stains on the armor - you should focus some rusting there as well. If you don't clean blood off your armor, it will rust - same as a sword. The same goes for if you decide to cake your armor with mud and grime -- anything that's potentially made of or trapping moisture is also going to bring rust with it. OH, and basically ANY mail on a figure that has some rust should also show some rust. Mail has a lot of crevices to collect rust - but also bear in mind that mail is somewhat self-cleaning, so it shouldn't really be -too- rusty.
If you're just looking to do Dark Souls stuff.. go nuts, I guess? There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason. Most fantasy weathering looks, to me, like everything is a stiff breeze away from just falling apart because it's in such terrible shape.
