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heyy i've tried to highlight the armor of the guardians but still,, they dont loook good
i think there're some tutorial teaching how to hightlight but i want one that is specific for eldar unit, as they have all these curve lines and all.
is there any tips or teaching that i can have to highlight the black colour of ulthwe? they look lifeless without highless

much thanks

If you can paint with very dilute paints that would help; especially with the 'curvy' and elegant Eldar shapes because hard-edge lining is not going to work in this case.

Highlighting black is tricky... imo, it's best if you use extremely dilute, gradual layering. I don't know what your other complimentary colors are - but let's say you are highlighting with gray.

Start with extremely dilute 4:1 black : gray... highlight most of armour, excluding any recesses and areas needing shadow. This might take a few passes/strokes but it will be smooth, Eldar smooth.
Then extremely dilute 2:1 black : gray (basically add a drop of gray to above = 4:2 or 2:1) ... now work with a smaller highlight area concentrating on areas that will reflect light (on top of the model and near the focus areas "face").
Then go... 1:1 on extreme highlight areas.
Finally place reflective 'spots' with pure gray, or even a gray, bleached bone mix.

That is how I do it anyway...

thanks for the tips, it sounds pretty detailed but is it possible if you make a simple tutorial just on highlighting ulthwe guardian?? with picture showing how each steps work will be great!

I think the GW website has a tutorial on painting guardians. Go have a lookie.

Highlighting black? Not fun. Black is a very high contrasting colour. Personally, I would paint a dark gray rather then black. Then shade with pure black and highlight with various light grays.

You could try this.
Take some black and lighten it just a little with white. You dont want too much of a change though. Make it a very dark grey. Now highlight the area's you want done. It wont look like much but it this is just the beginning.
Now lighten that colour a little more. Just a little. Now do the same thing. You dont have to do all the areas you did, just what you think need it (will be most though).
Now do this again, lighten the colour more. Do the parts that need the highlight. Because this is the 3rd colour you will start to see a big difference.

I'd advise against using white or gray when highlighting black. It typically ends up just making the black look washed out. You're much better off using a nice brown or blue as a highlight color, which will add much nicer tones to the model.

Tarot wrote:I'd advise against using white or gray when highlighting black. It typically ends up just making the black look washed out. You're much better off using a nice brown or blue as a highlight color, which will add much nicer tones to the model.

Ditto.

There isn't actually such thing as the color "black," just really dark shades of all the other colors (I guess the Greeks had it going there....). So the natural highlight would be less dark versions of those. I prefer brown, myself. Not really partial to crimsons and purples...

You can get away with white mixed into the final couple of stages of a layered highlight, but anything more than that will look chalky, and if you're not comfortable doing very thin edge highlights I wouldn't bother with white at all.

Use Deep Blue or Deep Purple. Also, to minimise the amount of Highlighting you're going to need to do, what about Basecoating in Dark Grey, and then a Badab Black Wash or two?

i think i had to use black to basecoat beacuse im doing ulthwe eldar.. but i'l try using darker brown or purple thanks

I would have gone with a dark gray and used a few washes of badab black to get the effect. Gives you an almost black, but still dark grey (black generally doesn't look black in daylight) colour.

Popsicle wrote:Use Deep Blue or Deep Purple.

I used to do this when I collected Ulthwe. Sorry, they're all in another country now so I can't show pics of how it worked. But I liked having the effect that there was color in the highlight, not just a tint change.