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Yo dakkas...

As the title says, I'm looking for alternatives to highlights. Lately I've been discouraged by my lack of skills when it comes to highlighting the space/chaos marine armor in particular for example (its so god damn small!), it always comes out flat (especially under a led lamp for close examination) that makes me want to bury my head or something

So, yeah... looking for options or a workaround.

Was considering layering, but that may be more than I can chew- errr, paint.

The other thing that crossed my mind was metallic paint mixing -metallic is highlight for itself, right? So if I would mix base paint and metallic, would there be any need for highlighting armor? I've never done metallic before but that always crossed my mind as I wanted to see 'metal' army in person

Tried drybrushing before for quick effect, can't get past the 'chalky' effect. I haven't tried wet drybrushing tho...

I dunno... hope someone can lift my spirits because no matter how precise I am, I suck at highlighting them small runts, and just lose time as a wasted effort.

Paint with washes. Start with a white undercoat, use a thinned, slightly lighter version of the colour you want, then wash with a thinner, darker version of that colour, or an appropriate colour wash.

The washes leave highlights and shadows - use floe improver or a clean wet brush to force the wash from the raised areas into the recesses.

Another fun one is to use white/grey and black primer. first coat and black then hit it with the white or grey primer at a 45 degree angle.

Then when you paint do many thin coats rather than a heavy thick one that way it doesn't cover up the dark and light as much.

 Desubot wrote:
Another fun one is to use white/grey and black primer. first coat and black then hit it with the white or grey primer at a 45 degree angle.

Then when you paint do many thin coats rather than a heavy thick one that way it doesn't cover up the dark and light as much.

This is my preferred method - airbrush your shadows with the primer, then lots of thin coats for the base.

I accidentally ended up painting a hard edge too by drastically overthinning with the airbrush - turned out surprising good.

This guy shows a way to do it with a brush - probably the way I would be doing it if I didn't use an airbrush.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEQzu2xK0Bg

I like the azimuthal lighting airbrush method described above. Personally I think highlighting makes things look really cartoonish, and I don't like the effect at all. I do really light drybrushing on a few key edges after doing lighting effects using the airbrush, and I'm very happy with the results.

You're lucky, you're painting power armor. That's huge compared to kabalite armor!