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Hi everybody, I've been painting my Orks on and off for the last few weeks after nearly six months of modelling (and they're not all done yet!). Anyway, here their colour scheme (from base colour to highlight):

Skin: Orkhide shade/Knarloc Green/Goblin Green/50-50 mix Goblin Green + Bleached Bone
Metal: Occasionally Tin Bitz, usually Boltgun Metal/Chainmail
Leather: Scorched Brown/Bestial Brown
Pants: Chaos Black/Fortress Grey
Shirt: Liche Purple/ ?

It's the ? I'm worried about. What's the best way to highlight purple? Do I just add Skull White to the Liche Purple? If you have a killer purple recipe, please share. I've noticed some great-looking purple armies in White Dwarf before, but I'm not sure how they paint them.

Add Bleached Bone, not Skull White.

Agreed with MasterSlowPoke.

You could also play with pink tones for the highlight. In small amounts.

Start darker than Liche purple and use Liche purple as the highlight.
If you don't you run the risk of ending up with a pink ork! Yikes!

Yup bleach bone will help you have a more real look than white ( to harsh) I like to add the lighter purples and pink personaly. Heres a few pics they are small exampels but, I hope they help. Not sure what your painting level is but, The other thing you can do is a step hightlights and glaze it all back down with your starting color to blend it all in smooth.

Here is my favorite recipe for a darkish purple:

Base coat Black
Cover all non creased areas with 50:50 Black and Liche Purple
Straight Liche purple highlight
final highlight of Liche purple and tentacle pink. About 33% pink and 66% purple.

you have plenty of options, pretty much any pastel will do. I have highlighted it with pink, dwarf skin, rotting flesh, electric blue and bleached bone, they all give a slightly different quality to the tone, but overall each works well as a highlight. Purple sits directly between warm and cool tonally, so pretty much anything goes, only yellows will grey it out, the rest will highlight nicely.

You can add the highlights, yes, but darken the shadow area's to make the overall effect look better too. That way you won't have to have lots of highlights to make the model stand out as much.

Well, purple is red and blue together.

You have green skin for troops.

Red is a contrasting color to green.

Highlight with some dark red like GW "scab red" or something with a wine color or burgundy.

It is a great way of getting that contrast without everything looking like Christmas colors.