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Anyone know good techniques for painting black hair, preferably for Dark Elves etc? The usual highlighting with grey doesn't cut it for me, I feel that it makes them look too old instead of capturing the shiny black appearance. Also if anyone has good techniques for painting black leather or cloth feel free to speak your mind.

Ask any person with black hair and they will tell you that the extreme highlight of black hair is brown. Everyone I know with black hair (a.k.a. 95% of people I personally know) or had black hair (but now has gone bald/hair has turned gray) has browns/dark browns on their hairs when they catch light.

Personally I highlight black hair with dark flesh or scorched brown. Graveyard earth and bestial brown are also viable. Just remember to do it in very small amounts. Good luck.

use a grey that doesn't have a lot of white mixed in. codex grey is too bright. you need something with less white in the grey. if you know what that means.

Thanks for the advice, I will try out using browns and see how that works out. I'm curious though, what would you do if you wanted it to have a colder look? I feel like browns are more of a warm highlight. I've seen in some pictures models highlighted with an almost shadow grey color

Adeptus Battegrey or darker (a 50/50 Adeptus Battlgrey/Chaos Black mix) for a cool tone.

If you want something cold, why not use blue?

This is actually quite a challenge to pull off well. Take a look at this site. I found it very helpful:
http://blog.brushthralls.com/?page_id=1942

It offers theory and examples of painting different types of black...

Really, really, really dark blue.

BloodQuest wrote:Really, really, really dark blue.

Possibly more like the blue/gray like, is it the fenris or space wolves gray that I am thinking of....