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I've just finished a Chaplain, and after looking at a few tutorials I decided I'd highlight his black armour with an edge highlight of dark blue. I'm not particularly pleased with the results.



You can see it best on the legs in this picture.


It doesn't show up that well on the photos (and it's actually quite subtle in 'real life' too) and I could certainly have been neater - I might touch it up, but it depends whether I just want to do something different with it. Partly I think it just doesn't stand out enough, but on the flip side a grey highlight can sometimes look too 'lazy'. I'm happy to stick a grey highlight on small areas, like the grip of his pistol, as it just accentuates the shapes. But for larger armour plates, I'm really not sure what to do.

So I don't really know what my question is other than, what can I do to make this better?

My suggestion is to take a lighter blue and go back over the highlights very finely so some of the darker blue is still visible. It will give the contrast your looking for without a huge glaring highlight.

Like Angelos said. They look nice, but they're pretty big and dark. Try to tidy them up and add some brighter highlights.

Nice one, thanks guys.

Do you think I should go 'pure' blue for the second highlight, or something like Russ Grey?

you need to layer your highlights a bit so theyre not so stark. keep with the blue, but mix it into your black, adding more with each layer until you get to pure blue, then add a little white, and finish with some fine lines and dots in pure white to represent the light reflecting.

I've been doing some experimenting with black recently and tried edge highlighting in blue but it just never sat right with me so went for a dark grey.

I've been using grey as well (like for my Luna Wolves) but I really want to try for a blue, I'm thinking of trying one of Reapers blacks that is like a midnight blue and using that. Of course once your base coats pure black not really able to do that. But anyway, I like the blue on your's I agree with the others - add some lighter highlights in and it'll really pop!

So one thing you might want to look at when painting black, since it s a very hard color to paint.

Base your guy in a white or a grey, then paint very thing layers up to black, its a lot harder to go from a darker to lighter color.

What you want to do is get your lightest color, and your darkest color out on your pallet, then paint with your lightest, pull a little bit of your dark color in, mix, paint, repeat until you get a desired effect, by doing this you can get your highlights as you need them.

I'd also concur with using grey as the best highlight for black, if you want it to look really sharp use pure white on corners or other points.

I personally use a warm black (corvus black from forgeworld) and then highlight with eshin grey, then again with a 50/50 eshin grey dawnstone mix