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Hi all, I’m gonna be doing a CSM unit in largely purple. My instinct when planning the colour scheme is to shade the recesses with a purple shade, what ever the Citadel one is called. And this is my usual go to with shading, purple shade for purple paint, red shade for red paint, nuln oil for everything.

What I’m wondering is could I be doing something more creative with shades. Would blue on top of purple frovind the necessary dark areas but also something else. I have not really experimented with wash shades but have noticed that on gold a brown or green shade can provide different but great effects. Is there a sceince to using different colour shades to the primary colour???

I've just recently started playing with other colours for shade, having fallen in to a "blackwash everything" mentality over the last decade or so. This video by Midwinter Minis was the main catalyst for change when they used a dark purple for the shading on a blue model, and worked some pale blue-green in to the highlights for a deeper colour range. I've since tried out the concept on to my test Harlequin (below, not that you can see the purple shade for the red sections in the picture, unfortunately, but you might be able to see it on the blue parts).

The trick with this technique seems to revolve around [ur;=https://usabilitygeek.com/colour-theory-introduction/]colour theory[/url]. Once you know which colour you want as your main colour, choose a colour one or two spaces round the colour wheel as your shade colour, and a colour one or two spaces the opposite way round the wheel to work in to your highlight mix. On my Harlequin, I used a dark purple as the shade layer, followed by red as the main colour, and working orange in to the highlight mix (OK, red to orange is one of the best known of these colour transitions).

For you, perhaps you could use a dark red (or I've heard good things about Rhinox Hide due to being a dark but reddish brown) as your shade colour, paint up purple as your main colour, and add just a hint more blue in to the later highlights. Washes are a bit more difficult to use in the same way, because their transparency will often let the colour underneath show, but perhaps you could play with mixing up a black-red wash and see how that goes, even if you need more than one coat.

Using green washes on red can give richer transitions. A blue over purple will also work well. I also use a brown mixed with yellow over bone to give a really nice hue over the raised parts - using the wash to 'stain' the raised parts - which gives the bone an aged look.

For strong hue colours, you can sometimes either mix their complimentary colour into the base (green for red for example) but yellow into purple probably won't do much. Reds or blues are probably your best bet. These will bias your purple to one of those primaries though, so bear that in mind when highlighting. Purple probably gives you some good options for contrast thinking about it. A warm highlight with a cold shadow. These are things I need to experiment with myself.

To add to SmallChanges, here's another color wheel I found useful. It discusses Color Harmonies (eg. analog, complimentary) which are a good starting point in selecting colors, if you don't mix.
https://www.tigercolor.com/color-lab/color-theory/color-harmonies.htm

I can't find it, but find a color wheel with yellow on top, and purple on bottom.Yet another way to shade is to take "one step towards purple" and to highlight, "one step towards yellow". So you can use purple to shade red and blue, and yellow to highlight green and orange. No, wait. That's it.

Saturation is pretty important. Often a saturated dark color (eg. dark green) will be used as a shade, while a unsaturated light color (eg. light green) will be used as a highlight.

Then there's *bleeping* color theory with brown. If you paint fantasy miniatures, you will paint brown 24/7. The problem of brown is that one color of brown is different than another, depending on how you mix it. And light brown encompasses both desaturated browns (pale brown) and orange brown (hard to use without turning your brown miniature orange...). Or skip the color theory and never buy an orange brown.

So I tried a blue wash on my metallic purple, testing it out on these second hand CSM unit. I dry brushed a metallic red and pretty happy with the result. The blue is very primary and the edges in these models are not sharp in places so it’s a bit blotchy up close but looking down at the table I’m pretty happy with it. It’s created a sort of colour shift effect