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I was watching an instructional video about painting Black Templars, and I can't tell what he's doing when he does the first highlight. Can anybody explain this to me?

The part I'm talking about is at 2:26 in this video:

How to paint Black Templars Space Marines part 1 by Lester Bursley


It might be the sped up video, or it might be the color, but I can't tell what he's doing at all.

He's using a mix of codex grey and chaos black to do edge highlights where the light reflects off of the model - it's a very subtle effect when you use such a dark color, but it's effective in the end result. The problem is that his light source is drowning out the color that's being put on there.

I personally am not a huge fan of this particular paint job by Lester...it's a TON of work for not a whole lot of detail on the model. The end result really just looks black and white, without much contrast at all. Everything is very clean and fundamentally correct, it's just not a terribly exciting paint job.

Really though, thats the problem with doing a pure black model, the black will always mute the subtle details you you normally see on other brighter colors. Same goes with pure white models. If you want to do Black Templars with some good details showing up, Id suggest priming it white, and them black washing it in layers until you get the desired black. That way on the high spots youll still have lighter colors for your details to match up with.

You can always paint them adeptus battle grey/ mechanicus standard grey then wash in badab black/ nuln oil high light the armor in fortress grey (I don't know the new equivalent) then wash again with badab black/ nuln oil. It creates a really rich black that has shadowing naturally that isn't just flat black.
The highlighting is clean without overpowering the black as well.