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I've had several attempts when I did Templars a while ago but it usually ended up looking silly/messy so I just left them matt black. My friend recently gave me some SOB for my birthday so I figured I'd have a go painting them. Its mainly that I'am not sure how to get the highlights right without them appearing too stark and bright whilst drybrushing makes too much mess or is too feint.

Payne's Grey
Wash with blue or black (or both)
Walk Away.

Agreed. Go with a dark dark grey, then a black wash.

Or paint them matte black, and leave the armor that way, then spiffy them up by adding other colors to the trim.


Or, someone will tell you the painstaking process of getting highlights right, which I do not know, since I wouldn't want to spend a million hours getting them right on black armor troops.

The eaasiest way I'vefound that gets decent results is spray them black, they spray a gray straight down on top. Kind of a fake zenithol effect. Wash black and they an edge highlight of a dark gray (50/50chaos black fotress gray or darker ) on the areas you want a little crisper.

It's a nice result with little effort. Easily doable in batches for multiple troop units. Just make sure you do your blacks first or you'll have a lot of masking to do.

In my experience the best looking way of painting black is to start from another color.

I'm still talking about an easy technics and for sure not at something "goldem deamon" like..

For my Iron Hands (that actualyl have a very dirty, chipped and battle-damaged look.. ) I started from a very dark grey, like the foundation one of what I don't remember the name, mixed from the beginning with a little bit of black.

I started from a Grey-Black 3/1 rapport.

Once dryed I gived to the whole model (metal parts eventually too) a heavy badab black wash.

Pay attention to do not let the wash "pool" on the model but do not retire too much of it leaving the most in all the crevices.

Finally I layered on the flat area some very thin coat of Chaos Black and redone the highlights in brush-edging with the first colors combo.

After this, I composed another combo with the same colors, this time Grey-Black at 2/1 and I then proceded to the very fine highlights.

This, plus all the trasfers, the battle damages and the pigmets application during basing gived me a very easy way to get out of an otherwise mono-cromatic model palette.

Hope this would help.

I could post you a pic if you'll want. I don't have a step by step however.

Spray black

Paint raised areas (shoulder guards etc) with a mix of black and your choice of a dark blue/green/purple/grey depending on the vibe you're after, leaving pure black in creases.

Edge highlight with 50/50 black and dark grey.

Wash with black if you want to tone down the highlights a tad.

You can also go black, do extreeme highlights with codex grey and then wash black. (I still prefer Payne's grey because of the blue hue)

This only works on grey plastic: paint black, then lightly scrape off the paint (thus revealing the grey underneath) on edges with a scalpel. Sounds bizarre but looks great.

Try using some Adeptus Battlegrey for your highlights on black. Comes out real nice, not too bright, not too dark just right.

You can check the Deathwatch model with the heavy bolter in this thread: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/425400.page

Les from Awesome Paintjobs did a great 2 part video tutorial for painting Black Templars - this is the post with the links

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/281290.page