The paper is devoted to gradient damage models which allow us to describe all the process of degradation of a body including the nucleation of cracks and their propagation. The construction of such model follows the variational approach to fracture and proceeds into two stages: (i) definition of the energy; (ii) formulation of the damage evolution problem. The total energy of the body is defined in terms of the state variables which are the displacement field and the damage field in the case of quasi-brittle materials. That energy contains in particular gradient damage terms in order to avoid too strong damage localizations. The formulation of the damage evolution problem is then based on the concepts of irreversibility, stability and energy balance. That allows us to construct homogeneous as well as localized damage solutions in a closed form and to illustrate the concepts of loss of stability, of scale effects, of damage localization, and of structural failure. Moreover, the variational formulation leads to a natural numerical method based on an alternate minimization algorithm. Several numerical examples illustrate the ability of this approach to account for all the process of fracture including a 3D thermal shock problem where the crack evolution is very complex.