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I picked up a pack of blood angels death company the other day and realised that I've had no experience painting black armour so highlighting it seems a little alien.

Could any of you guys or gals give me any hints or tips on what colours to use and how not to over do it.

Cheers in advance.

You probably have to us edge highlighting as you can't add shadows to black. What i've seen that works is dark greys or dark blues. Using grey results in a more "dull" looking armor and blue creates the effect of a slight shine.

But even the darkest grey of blue of GW might be aleady to strong depending on your taste. You might have to mix a tiny bit of black into the color to darken it. Then if you feel fancy you can highlight it up with non darkened grey tones after that in different smaller layers.

What you also could try is use a really dark red to give the black a red shine. It might look cool for your blood angels.

And i once tried to use purple and even pink as an experiment for my slaanesh dark apostle and i kinda like it.
But i never finished the model.

Might want to start with a medium to dark gray as a base color, then use a black wash for the darker shades. Mostly edge highlights in some off gray color: gray blue, gray purple, gray green.

The "quick and dirty" method is to leave the black unshaded and apply fine edgelining in grey. Not the most realistic approach, but it looks pretty good, if applied cleanly.

The more realistic method is to use another color mixed with black as your base, allowing you to actually apply shading, and highlight up with progressively less black mixes. As mentioned, the choice of color will affect the final feel of the surface (grey gives a sense of diffuse light, as on worn cloth or other matte surfaces, cooler blues give a silken or glossed sheen, warmer reds generally look more menacing, etc.). If you have an imagined light source, the choice of color can also be used to reflect the appropriate temperature (think warm incandescent vs. cool fluorescent light bulbs).

Adeptus Battlegrey in the old line or Mechanicus grey (I think) in the latest line is about the darkest grey out of the pot you can get from GW.

Of course you can always darken your grey with black or blue your call.

Shading a dark grey means that you have dark grey armour, not black. There are no shadows on black. You can't shade black since black is as dark as it gets. Same thing as trying to highlight white.

Convincing black is done with subtle highlights, blue for a "clean" look or grey for an older, more worn and weathered look.

Cheers guys, now I've had some hints I shall try not to over do it lol

Working with black armor I've found pretty tough tbh. One thing I've done with my chaplains was have them all black, then paint the details like normal such as faces, jewelry, crozius, books, etc.

Then do veerrryyy careful and subtle highlighting/drybrushing with greys. I've found it to be tricky and have had mediocre results at best. With that in mind, you probably shouldn't listen to me at all. LOL.

helotaxi wrote:
Shading a dark grey means that you have dark grey armour, not black. There are no shadows on black. You can't shade black since black is as dark as it gets. Same thing as trying to highlight white.

Convincing black is done with subtle highlights, blue for a "clean" look or grey for an older, more worn and weathered look.

Shading a dark grey with black has the same net effect as highlighting black with dark grey, unless you assume that surfaces can only be lightened and darkened by pin-washes and edgelining. That aside, I have to disagree with you, helotaxi, for broader reasons.

Remember that the goal of all this shading and highlighting is to mimic (and exaggerate, in most cases), at scale, the effect of light playing off of a much larger object (and this isn't even taking atmospheric perspective into account, which could easily be argued as a necessity for scale model painting, if realism is the goal). Look around you at some black objects - are there any shadows on those? I'm definitely seeing them around me. This is also the reason that traditional canvas painters very rarely use pure black when painting black objects - their goal is to recreate what we see when looking at the object, not the object itself.

Physical objects simply aren't rendered evenly in black #000000. However fine, all objects have a texture that affects how we perceive the reflected/refracted light (which can, itself, vary in quality) and, thereby, the color. We're accustomed to this, though, so very matte black cloth can still be recognized as black, even though the bulk of it actually appears as various shades of grey. Look at this example (don't mind the butt - it was the best example I could find to illustrate the point):

Only the very deepest shadows would be faithfully reproduced using pure black paint. The vast majority is comprised of various shades of what I would call charcoal grey.

Even glossy surfaces, which have much starker delineation between the lights and darks, may, depending on the lighting, appear predominantly grey. Take a look at this armor (a gorgeous mid-15th c. rig produced for Toby Capwell by the amazingly talented Robert Macpherson... sorry, I tend to digress when it comes to armor):

Once again the presence of "black paint" black is pretty minimal, compared to the apparent greys. And yet, the armor is black.

Now, I realize that only one of these examples was actually armor, but I wanted to stress the prevalence of "non-black black" at extreme ends of the potential range of luster for an imagined black armor. If you want to see actual painted examples of matte black armor/weapons, look at the studio schemes for Infinity models - they have much more in the way of matte synthetic materials than shiny metals.

Subtle highlights/fine edgelining can certainly look good - believe me, I'm not at all against the technique, generally speaking - but it's far from being the most realistic way to represent a black object at scale.

Terrible examples. The first is all texture and not really black. The sheen of the individual threads override the actual color and all you are seeing is the highlight. In the case of the second, again you're looking at reflections and the shine does odd things with highlights. Find something that is flat black. There is the black "body" of the surface/object and the highlights. There is no transition between the body and the shadows. You simply can't get darker than black. I'm not saying/implying that the highlights have to be limited to the GW bog standard edge lining, but if the bulk of the surface isn't black anymore, the object isn't black and doesn't give a good impression of black either. It looks grey, or whatever you used as the main tone. If you want a good idea what to strive for, prime the mini black and then examine it in reasonable light.

As far as i've seen it the discussion is about painting good looking black armor and not about painting the color black itself. So i don't see why those are terrible examples. We are probably all agree that both pictures show an item that we would call "black" but just differently textured.
So depending of what kind of texture the death company armor should have painting black can still start with a color that isn't black. Just take the model i posted earlier. He is black with a strange pink highlight, right?

Wrong. If you look very carefully you'll notice that his armor is in fact a very very dark grey but not black itself. This can be seen on the decorative trimming by his feet as i have never touched those after priming. Just compare those to the rest of the armor.

If you mix you colors you can start a black looking armor with a non black color and as a result can use actual black wash for shadows and adding visible features depending on what surface effect you want to go with.

I have seen some techniques that started with a dark grey darkened by mixing some black in it and then a repeated black wash. This creates a black armor that still has some visible features. And you can still add edge highlighting afterwards for a more shiny effect. But this is very time consuming as you have to apply many many layers of black wash.

Also this might be an interesting read: http://fromthewarp.blogspot.de/2010/12/painting-black-armour-learning-how.html