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So yeah, I've pretty much reached the point where I can detail my models very well (Getting small details, hand painted designs, etc.) but I realized that they are missing something.

I haven't highlighted any of them.

So I sat down to highlight them, then realized that I had no idea what I was doing. I don't know what colors to use, where to apply highlights, how, and pretty much everything associated with it. So if someone could point me towards a guide, or preferably, just give me some tips. I play SM with a primarily Catachan Green and some DA green if it helps.

Haven't done so many minis yet, but what i learned from tutorials is to paint the outlines with a slightly brighter color.
This adds a whole new level to the minis.
I haven't tried advanced techniques like blending and so on. But this works good for me.

try using brighter colors over darker and.. i think edgehighlights are easiest..at least for me.
So try painting edges of your models with lighter color or something like that.
And it works for me but im not really good painter but i hope this helps

I highlight using fine lines on the edges of a color at least 1-1/2 shades lighter, if not two shades lighter. For colors like Dark Angels Green, if you only highlight with one shade lighter, it tends not to show up very strongly. However, if you want a more muted highlight (less "pop"), then I would only go up one shade.

If you're highlighting a brighter color, you can add white to most colors to create a brighter shades. For reds, I use a light brown or yellow (or both) mixed in with the red. For browns, I use a lighter brown or a lighter yellow.

What Heffling said.

Take a blob of the colour you want to highlight. Mix in a bit of white, or for less dramatic effect, a lighter tone (yellow into green, for example.)

If you want to do really fancy highlighting, do two or three overlapping layers, making each one smaller and lighter.

Heffling wrote:I highlight using fine lines on the edges of a color at least 1-1/2 shades lighter, if not two shades lighter. For colors like Dark Angels Green, if you only highlight with one shade lighter, it tends not to show up very strongly. However, if you want a more muted highlight (less "pop"), then I would only go up one shade.

If you're highlighting a brighter color, you can add white to most colors to create a brighter shades. For reds, I use a light brown or yellow (or both) mixed in with the red. For browns, I use a lighter brown or a lighter yellow.

Yeah, he knows what he's talking about.

I play word bearers, which are a really deep crimson. I use Red Gore (washed with thinned down badab black), and then use mechrite red for the highlight. I'd say that's a relatively subdued highlight. If I wanted to get a brighter highlight, I'd mix in KK or BB (kommando khaki and bleached bone, respectively) with the red gore.

Cream colors can be mixes with basecoats to make instant highlights. It's a very useful technique, especially when you don't have a lot of paint available to you. Try that!

And on the actual process of highlighting, try it out with edges. I find highlighting flat objects (like space marine shoulder pads and legs) very difficult, and it takes a lot of practice and perspective to get right. Edgelighting is rather straightforward, and allows for easy extreme highlighting (putting another color over your highlighting in selective areas) and all that jazz. if you play Space marines, you won't get too much experience with highlighting. Almost all fantasy models are good for highlighting, I've found. Good luck!

I second Heffling on the reds, and will go a step farther: NEVER add white to red to highlight, as the resulting pink looks really strange on everything but flesh. (See Killkrazy's mandrill's nose for example of that).

Often, your best bet is to just use a lighter mix of a similar color, for example Dark Prussian Blue as the base and Prussian Blue as the highlight.

As to where, generally the edge highlighting works well enough. When you want to step it up, start considering where the light falls on the object, and start there. This is where looking at real world objects and how they highlight in various light really pays off (and has the nice side benefit of making otherwise boring trips to say the dentist more interesting as research). I find that many objects are not actually the color my brain decides they are, but a great deal lighter with darker recesses. It seems our brains sort of average out the hightlights to shadows in deciding what color something is. To use Killkrazy's avatar again, very little of the mandrill's snout is "blue", but if asked later we would give that as the answer. Our brain figures out the color based on the highlights and recesses quickly.

What I find to be a good practice is to start painting with a lighter color than you want to end with, then doing a layer of highlighting on that, then washing the area to darken the effect and even out the gradation. Here's a few examples from my army:

Ogre flesh: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/311412.page#1968723" target="_new" rel="nofollow"> http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/311412.page#1968723

Metal: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/120/311412.page#2246066

Good luck to you!