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Haven't really did any primarily black models before. So I decided to give it a shot on a redemptor. Tried to spice it up with some scrub level weathering. I must say I'm not a fan so far of doing all black. How do you ravenguard and death watch players do this????

The model looks great, love the weathering. It could just be the picture, but the model looks green...not black, lol.

Yeah I don't have the best photo set up. Let me see if I can upload something better. Oh and thanks!

Well you have 2 kind of painters.
Thouse that firmly belive that all black is unnatural(and it realy is) and thus highlights the black with grey, white or blue, or thouse who dont care and just make shure enugh detail is painted in a different colour to break up all the pitch black colour.

Im in the 2nd category, so when i did my first iron hands dread it was allso my first time doing weathering, cuz reality is that even whit alot of metal colour trimming and details, there was so mutch flat black that the dread became damn boring. it was the first time i had that experience. however heavy weathering broke up the boring flat black quite nicely, so if your not going to highlight the black, paint weathering on dreds/vehicles.

All black is a little easyer to live with on the marine troops themself as the model is small and a decent amount of details painted up breaks up the boring black.

I have 2 pieces of advice.
First would be to start off with a dark grey rather than black. That way you can both shade and highlight the model, adding much more depth to it (maybe you did do that here, but it just doesn't show on the picture, if you did just ignore this).
Second is that typical weathering doesn't really work with dark colours in general, especially black. This is because weathering typically uses dark colours, such as black for dents, brown for rust, brown-grey for mud, etc. The problem is that black is simply too dark and the contrast is terrible, making all your work barely noticeable.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to get around this. Just change your colour palete. For scratches use a silver or steel colour, instead of mud use sand or red dirt and instead of a dark brown use a bright orange shade of rust.

The one commandment that my old art teacher at school used regularly was "DON'T USE BLACK! "

Didn't learn anything else off him, mind you...

It's stuck with me over the years, so I very rarely actually use black in miniatures.

I'll tend to start with a very dark grey (I love VMC German Grey), highlight it up with a couple of lighter greys and then bring it back down a bit with a thinned black wash.

As far as weathering goes, I was taught on a painting course that it's all about contrast - sod what you think that you should be using, if you can't see it, it's a waste of time. In that vein, blacks get silvers for weathering and light pigment powders to make them noticeable.

 Chillreaper wrote:
The one commandment that my old art teacher at school used regularly was "DON'T USE BLACK! "

Didn't learn anything else off him, mind you...

It's stuck with me over the years, so I very rarely actually use black in miniatures.

I'll tend to start with a very dark grey (I love VMC German Grey), highlight it up with a couple of lighter greys and then bring it back down a bit with a thinned black wash.

As far as weathering goes, I was taught on a painting course that it's all about contrast - sod what you think that you should be using, if you can't see it, it's a waste of time. In that vein, blacks get silvers for weathering and light pigment powders to make them noticeable.

exactly what he said, plus painting in details to contrast the black armor, GW's eshin grey just isn't dark enough, so I too use vellejo's german grey as a heavy drybrush over black primer models as the 1st step and build up highlights from there.

you can see here on my imgur account as example:
https://imgur.com/a/2ppZ9

I appreciate all the feedback. I don't foresee myself doing much all black painting seeing as I play mostly raptors but having a good understanding of color theory is always needed. One thing dakka has in spades is sound advice. As for this model i didn't build up the colour much. I painted all the rust layers first. Added some varnish and chipping fluid and after that hit it with a light layer of I belive German grey. I did try some edge highlights in grey but then opted to go over then in a silver. All in all i don't hate it but I definetly see what all commotion is about regarding painting black.

I prefer using stark highlights on black like the 'Eavy Metal studio does. I highlight eshin grey and apply a finer highlight of Fenrisian Grey.

For my Black Legion, I paint the model all black and use Ultramarines Blue for edge highlights. This technique suggests depth without getting into complicated layering, and the contrast with other model features is stark.

 techsoldaten wrote:
For my Black Legion, I paint the model all black and use Ultramarines Blue for edge highlights. This technique suggests depth without getting into complicated layering, and the contrast with other model features is stark.

Hmm.. blue highlights! That makes a lot of sense. I might try this. I have a pot of ultramarine blue still going strong.

Two different ways to highlight black from Warhammer TV: