Chaos black Tyranid carpace without shading/ highlighting

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**Plumbumbarum**

I'm fiddling with the idea to leave my Tyranids carpaces just chaos black. The thing is, I found that I prefer the look of non shaded/ highlighted black carpace over shaded one. What do you think? Do you have examples of sth like that with your models? Thanks in advance.

**Plumbumbarum**

Something wrong with the question I guess...

**Soup_Nazi**

I've tried to leave black unshaded but it never looked right. I ended up adding a dark grey highlight or just a shiny wash to reflect light and look like it is painted...on my chaos that is.

**Exalbaru**

If you like it you like it. I left it like that on my Talos Pain engine and thought it was fine but everyone at FLGS was giving me crap about not painting it and being lazy. Went back and painted over it shiny black and it did look better

**Tarthenal**

You could add a coat or two of gloss varnish, the shine will reflect any natural light and give the illusion of highlights.

**Aelyn**

If you really don't want to use any highlights or shading I would recommend that you use an off-black, probably about a 2:1 mix of chaos black with the complementary colour to your flesh tone - black's got a very strong pigment so it'll barely be noticeable.

Gloss varnish is also a good solution, and I personally like chaos black followed by a very thin extreme highlight of adeptus battlegrey, and then a gloss varnish. The highlight is there to give the gloss a helping hand, but isn't really necessary.

The main issue with pure Chaos Black is that true black simply doesn't happen in reality. The pure-black carapace would kinda suck the eye in and would potentially make it tough to make out the form of the model. Of course they are your models, and if you like the idea of void-colouring acting as a sort of dispersion camouflage in reverse, then go for it.

**The Dwarf Wolf**

It is fun to see someone talking about ilusion of highlights, as highlights are meant to be exact an ilusion of light touching the mini...

For a pure chaos black nid carapace, you can use the gloss trick, or go for another technic: aply a drybrush of white (yes, white) over the base coat of black, and them wash the surface with a "not so dilluted" black wash (i would say, 1 to 3 parts of black paint to water). If needed do a second wash. The white easily absorb the wash color, and turn into a black, only some shades lighter than the base one...

**Clang**

I paint 'all black' stuff with a dark grey followed by a black wash - anything else tends to end up looking like a featureless black blob.

Definitely worth experimenting with gloss though - I've sometimes had good results drybrushing gloss varnish over a matte black (or dark grey as above), but as with all drybrushing, the results depend a lot on the texture you're drybrushing over.

**Kroothawk**

Leaving the base coat unmodified will make the model look half painted.

**Plumbumbarum**

Thanks for all the answers and advice! I planned on using gloss varnish but that also depends on whether I will use matt or gloss on the body which is space wolfs grey (shaded heh). I will test the tips from here on hormagants and maybe finaly make the decision, this is the worse part than actual painting for me - I have 3 totaly different painting schemes and those have variations too, I'm strongly considering Hive Fleet Rainbow at this point.

Aelyn wrote:
... if you like the idea of void-colouring acting as a sort of dispersion camouflage in reverse, then go for it.

Heh that's a great way to put it. I think the contrast with the body is stronger when the carpace is all black chaos black and this along with black grimdark blackness is what works for me.