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I am painting some Bran redmaw (white shoulderpad) SW kill team. I thought baby blue would be to "friendly"/bland. Baby blue does not make great colour contrast.

I am not happy with the colours now. And I am not happy with basic SW colour scheme. There is so little colour contrast there.

Help is welcome!

If you want to go more grey, then use something like Administratum grey. Or if you want to keep it the grey/blue and not as bright then just mix your way up from The Fang until you find a blue highlight you like.

I did a 1 to 6 of mechanicus standar grey and the fang as base layer.

Layer 2 was 1 to 4 with stormverming fur and russ grey.

I need to do the last highlight. Mayby 1 to 2 of russ grey and fenrisian grey.

But the bottom line is the colourscheme is a bit dull there is little colour contrast inherent in the colour pattern.

Bright edge highlights or working some more blue in there pergaps? Its hard to make out the colours in the photo with the minis on the box like that.

SW colour scheme is quite poor in colour contrast imho. Sugestions are welcome. All models are work in progress to get a feel of the colours.

The most important thing is to make sure you put pack markings on the other shoulder pad. That's your main source of contrast colors on Space Wolves.

If you have wolf pelts and tails, don't use grey and white. Use brown and beige so as not to blend in with the armor.

You can always paint the bolter casings red or yellow, which is in keeping with pack markings (and Space Wolves complementary colors in general) and adds in a bit of color.

For the Scout, don't use the same grey for his clothes as for the armor. Any sort of brown from dark leathery brown all the way to light beige will look good.

If you want darker grey with the armor (I did that on my Wolves), try to make your metals a lighter shade for contrast.

Work with the base. Make sure it's finished as this adds another part to the model where you can implement contrasting colors, and try to get colors on there that don't overshadow the model but don't just continue the grey mass that you are trying to get away from.

Have you put shade or wash on any of your models?

I found that in most cases my models look a little bland and I think "oh I've made a bad choice with this colour scheme" and then I put a wash on it and then it works better.

once your done your base use a light dry brush of space wolf gray I believe it's still called. That will break up the sameness of your base costs. Use metallics on the detail parts of the models.

Yeah, new spacewolf GW colors are low-contrast.

Perhaps try a remix of the older Space Wolf Colors. They tend to be a deep-blue-grey and the highlight was a well white/grey tone with little blue Contrast was pretty good.

True grey tends to be very "flat" because grey is a neutral range between black and white. So you are instantly range limited by the "grey range only". Solutions are to use a very dark shade. Darker than Administratum, something like Vallejo Model Color German Grey 70.995 Which is a GREAT shade color for neutral greys as it is neither warm nor cool IMHO. I make liberal use of this color for shading work where I don't want to use a pure black.

For a "cool" black shade, Privateer Press P3 Coal Black (a blue black) is a useful shade color.

I am actually a fan of the modern Russ Grey (layer) and use it extensively as a base color and highlight with Vallejo game Color 72.747 (this is an air color, works great on brush for highlighting) Wolf Grey shading down with a mix in of German Grey or if I want a more blue shade with Vallejo Game Color Sombre Grey 72.748.

I'd also recommend once you find a scheme you like, and this is for everyone, maintain a paint book. It will make your life easier. It should have swatches, triads, schemes, etc all noted down and indexed. You will note that even the P3 web video guy has one, even though he doesn't use it on camera it is sitting there on his paint desk.

Have a look at the older colours, they worked well and change it to your needs

While I am stil sceptical, they are comming along better. I stil have to do highlights with the last/brightest colours. Also adding the pack markings.

Picture.