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So, I''ve been restaring my marines in the wake of the new space pups, the scheme needed an update though, the origional scheme was done when I was twelve....

It's a halved balck and green scheme and I've finished the green, I'm quite pleaased with it but I've gotten to the black and just highligted it with codex grey, pretty simple, and somethimes sloppy if I rushed it, so for the most recent chap I thought I should enquire on here as to the best way to paint black.

Pics:






This is where the sloppy highlighting really shows



and a little sloppy gold


And Finally the half done chap

Well there you have it, I spose whilst the pics are up, What do you think?

Cheers
-Kyley

Well ...a trick I learned on Warseer is:

base black
dry brush codex grey everywhere
dry brush fortress grey all raised and light areas
dry brush white on the extreme edges and light areas
wash with badab black everywhere

- then with thinned down black paint, go over everything that isn't a highlight. Check out his work (Raven Wing)...
http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=165527&highlight=biker

Ya, black washes will definitely help smoothing out the gray highlights.

Yea I second on the reverse of how your doing it currently. Dry brush grey where you want the armor black. Do simple highlights to give it some depth. Then just wash with black until its as dark as you want. Its really easier then it sounds. And when you get the dry brush style down, you can really crank um out. Also you want your grey highlights to be subtle on a black scheme.

If you're willing to do some experimenting, the way really advanced painters do black is to work with 'scale black', which is a lighter shade... then you can use very very close to black dark greys for the shadows and a slightly lighter grey for the highlights, and never use actual 'true' black, as that will spoil the effect.

If your looking for a less flat black:




Base coat with chaos black.

Paint the model with a 80/20 mix of codex grey and chaos black, leaving the 1st coat in the recesses.

Use another coat of 70/30 chaos black again, but this time use it to light up the lit areas on a model (using a light source will help loads)

Use fortress grey to highlight the model, once again paying attention to lighting again.
Make this highlighting thicker than usual.

Use codex grey to do a final highlight inside the fortress grey one, making it thinner so it stands out.


Hope that helps, its alot of work but its well worth it.

I would paint the model Payne's Grey, then do a black wash.

Then do highlights in dark grey, and superhighlights in pale to medium grey (Fortress Grey).

Finally, I would do an ink wash in either dark green (Viridian) or dark blue (Utramarine.)

What happens is that the ink overlays and stains the paler greys, so you get coloured highlights.

This can give you an effect like the Judge Dredd cartoons, where his black uniform is higlighted dark blue.

It's stylised but it can look very striking.

Aaah, interesting, I did once highlight a powerfist blue, it looked quite nice....

I was just asking around about the same thing for painting my chaos dragon and ended up doing a rather light but constant drybrush of enchanted blue... it was skin though so it looked natural where grey wouldnt... I would assume grey would work best for highlights on marines though... heres a pic just so you can see how it looked though... incase you decide to try it

Looks nice that Daemon....

Yeah, I'd deffo go for dry-brushed Grey highlights of some sort(Codex?). Keep 'em subtle and correct any mistakes with Chaos Black/black wash.
It won't be Golden Demon standard, but you'll be able to knock 'em out fairly quick and they should look decent.

Yeah I agree... UNLESS you want an amazing army (that will take FOREVER to paint... and your fine with table top standered... maybe even a little better) then just dry brush codex grey... If you want it to come out like mine did, just water down some codex grey a very little bit (dont want a new grey wash ) then wipe it off on a paper towel till there is like barely ANYTHING.. then go over the black areas very lightly but constant. It should come out like the dragon just grey

shadow grey blended soft into the black with some fortress grey lines on the very edges can look snazzy against brown earth .

O.K. So I tried the drybrushing codex grey, succsessive drybrushes adding more skull white untill I got to pure skull white, I did come across the problem of it being a bit grainy and in particular on flat surfaces, legs, shoulder pads, but I hope that past experience will serve me well and they should be sorted out with a few black washes (if you look below it's REALY noticable on the shin.
Also remember it's a bit lighter that it will be to compensate for the wash.
When this is all dry I'm going to try the nice idea of washing it, I'm thinking blue as this will contrast well with the green but because it's very subtle it (hopefuly) won't clash
If anyone thinks a different colour would be good before I've done the blue one I can change it, if nobody object's I reckon I'll carry on with the blue, see you in about an hour

I looks good to me!

Well here he is after the black wash

And after taking this shot I went with some thinned down chaos black and did a little more on the legs. Blue wash next

The P-3 paint line has some different shades of black ( i know sounds wierd) that play well off one another. Also in that range they have a "Armor wash" that is just amazing. It works on pretty much everything, I have some black on minis comming up i will show my technique in my pblog.