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 sockwithaticket wrote:
Well you tell me based on a couple of examples:

I think your examples demonstrate exactly what I'm talking about. Look at the white wings on the chainsword marine's back thing: they're really flat, to the point that all that nice feather detail almost disappears entirely. If you used an off-white base highlighted with brighter whites you'd add some depth and shading while still keeping the look of "pure white".

Yeah, Peregrine has the right idea. Items in real life that are "white" are rarely just pure white -- whether it's white wings, cat, sports car, etc. An item will actually look "more white" if you use off-whites, slightly greys, little-bit blues, and only pure white sparingly, to bring out the punch.

On these wings, for example, if I just painted them a white block, there would be a little (natural) shadow, but the wings would look more dull, even though they would, when photographed, have a color average closer to pure white:

 Peregrine wrote:

 sockwithaticket wrote:
Well you tell me based on a couple of examples:

I think your examples demonstrate exactly what I'm talking about. Look at the white wings on the chainsword marine's back thing: they're really flat, to the point that all that nice feather detail almost disappears entirely. If you used an off-white base highlighted with brighter whites you'd add some depth and shading while still keeping the look of "pure white".

But the feathers are flat I believe, flat with grooves between them. You could accentuate it more by using a darker or more graduated shade if you wanted. You could have also painted the main part of the feather off white and then the edges pure white, but it depends what you want. If you finish the model with a satin rather than a matte natural lighting will tend to pick up the edges more IRL than you see in a photo.

The Stormcast feathers in Talys' post appear to be more cylindrical, so it'd make sense to have them more graduated.

I quite like the contrast that sock achieved by only having the black edge highlighted and the white shaded.

If either of the GW whites are giving you grief try adding some airbrush thinner (or any other acrylic thinner) as opposed to water. I found that with water the paint sometimes curdled and dried way too fast on my brush and so I tried adding some vallejo airbrush thinner. Since the thinner will have a fair amount of solvent (smells like a solvent I use at work in inks, but I cant remember the name haha) and dispersants/levelling agents it should hold together and slow down its drying time much better than just water.

The thing about whites are they're practically chalk (not exactly chalk but titanium dioxide with other filler in there) dispersed in a water based resin dispersion. There tends to be quite a high concentration of this white pigment in them compared to the pigments of other colours so they can clag up a lot easier. My bet is the GW paint manufacturers might be overdoing it especially in the ceramite white.

The rear shot shows a bit better the shading I did on the wings of the backpack icon. To be honest my photo set up is pretty basic and white things atop packs seem to suffer most from the limitations.




AllSeeingSkink, thanks for the kind words.