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See I never thought about it from the viewpoint of competitions, I just think about them looking good to me and having a realistic look appropriate to their setting.
I shall now look at heavily highlighted models the same way I look at Sports Taekwondo, brilliant for scoring points in a competition, but rubbish in every other setting


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I’m joking......about the painting not the Taekwondo, that’s still ridiculous.

For edge highlighting black i recommend trying P3's Coal Black. It's a super dark blue, nearly black color that is still lighter than pure black but dark enough you don't get that "glowstick Tron look" from your minis.

I don't have any models to show examples of but it's a great color nonetheless.

It's about 2-3 shades darker than Thunderhawk Blue (which I don't even know if GW makes anymore).

If it were real, would power armour be so reflective? Surely you wouldn’t want to give away your location so would want the reflection levels of fabric combat fatigues.

Just while we’re talking about concepts of realism in the way we paint the minis.

Like tanks, we don’t paint tanks to have a huge bright reflective spot like on power armour. We paint them to have Matt finishes. Edge highlighting on tanks is usually just to bring out the detail but not as necessary due to the size of the model

mrFickle wrote:
If it were real, would power armour be so reflective? Surely you wouldn’t want to give away your location so would want the reflection levels of fabric combat fatigues.

When your armor is bright yellow, it wouldn't make a lot of difference if it's shiny or not.

While Marines in Rogue Trader often wore camouflage, since then Marines have generally wanted to be seen. It's part of their whole shock and awe thing.

 insaniak wrote:

mrFickle wrote:
If it were real, would power armour be so reflective? Surely you wouldn’t want to give away your location so would want the reflection levels of fabric combat fatigues.

When your armor is bright yellow, it wouldn't make a lot of difference if it's shiny or not.

While Marines in Rogue Trader often wore camouflage, since then Marines have generally wanted to be seen. It's part of their whole shock and awe thing.

This is a fair point and is relevant to what I was saying about painting your unit ina way that says something about them rather than thinking about light sources etc. If your marines are into shock attack and want their opponents to be blown away by them then paint them like avenging angels.

My roots in 40K go back to RT and 2nd Ed and those are the aesthetics I think in when imagining the universe. Grim dark doesn’t have a light source for me, if the battle is conducted in the day the sun would be obscured by the smoke from machine engines, artillery and bolter rounds. I’ve been thinking about doing a custom chapter purely in black and white to try and capture some of those art works, but I am not nearly good enough at painting yet

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:

shmvo wrote:
It's definitely easy to get trapped in a GW or even a wargaming bubble when it comes to miniature painting. There's so many different approaches to painting minis out there that completely skip on most or all of the 'essential' techniques that you see used in wargaming pieces.

It was kind of a big thing for me when I saw scale-modellers (historical tanks and the like) not even really considering light and shadow. That whole approach tends to use weathering and dust tones to accentuate details, rather than light and shadow. Texture is king in that world, not shading. It's a completely different approach with totally different techniques that gives a great outcome.

Lots to explore and IMO if you ever get frustrated with seeing certain techniques time and time again just venture outside of the kind of modelling you'd normally look at and you'll find a wealth of alternative appraoches.

That often comes down to the larger scale of those models though your 1/48 and 1/35 etc. Because they are larger you can focus more on realism and less on forced contrast, but that generally becomes more important on your smaller scales like 28/30mm etc, where the contrast is used to create the illusion of scale. When I'm working on larger scales like my recent gandalf, I pushed the contrast a lot less because of the larger scale.

I don't think it's just a scale thing but also with historics, particularly vehicles, the goal is usually having something that could be mistaken for reality, whereas miniature painting the goal is often some sort of artistic hyper-realism.

You see it in Forge World's style vs GW's style where FW tends to follow a style more akin to historic models even though they're the same scale as GW's models. The DKOK models have only very subtle shading and highlighting, with visual interest added more with weathering effects, dust, dirt, scratches. Sometimes even when using techniques like edge highlighting, they're done in a way where it looks like dirt or paint has been rubbed off in a scratchy way rather than trying to simulate lighting effects, or shading done by adding darker muddy tones to look like the crevices have built up more dirt.

After spending some time away from the miniature painting world and going back to historics, I've come to prefer models that look a bit more realistic rather than having forced lighting. Things like NMM, I admit take more skill than I have, but I also have no interest in learning because it doesn't visually appeal to me.

I think you definitely get "bubbles" where people follow a certain style simply because that's the style that's common, it becomes an expectation that you paint in a certain way. Newbies are almost expected to paint in a wash / drybrush style, average painters are expected to do the whole shade / mid tone / edge highlight thing, high level painters are expected to have forced contrast / lighting with time consuming silky smooth blends. When you get out of the miniature painting bubble and into the historical bubble, the expectations can be a bit different.