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I've been painting a carnosaur and I used the colours I mentioned in the title for the skin of its belly. I feel like I should add a drybrush highlight on the folds and creases of the skin, but I'm not sure what'd work best. What's a good highlight colour for Rakarth Flesh darkened by Fleshshade?

Pallid wych flesh, I used that combo on Hades - https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/749540.page

Cryocat wrote:
Pallid wych flesh, I used that combo on Hades - https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/749540.page

Thanks, buddy!

@SevenSeasOfRhye: One of the best pieces of knowledge that helped me better understand shading / highlighting is that the highlights and shades should be roughly equidistant from each other, in terms of how dark/light they are from the midtone. I was always falling down with highlights because I would shade down to black, and the black would overpower whatever I put down as highlight as the difference between the midtone and black is too great for the difference between midtone and highlight to balance...

For something as light colored as Rakarth Flesh... you have three options:

1. Use a dark tone simply to outline and pick out the details. Don't worry too much about highlights because your midtone is very light already, and the stark shadow tone will overpower whatever highlight you add by drawing attention to itself due to its great degree of difference from the mid tone.

2. Pick a highlight color (white is about as high as you can go), and then pick a color with roughly the same degree of difference between white and your skintone. I think that in this case something like Seraphim Sepia may be better than Reikland Fleshshade.

3. Option 3 is to darken your midtone. You can still project Rakarth Flesh as your main color by painting say, the top half of each flesh surface in that color, the middle 1/4 of the surface with your new, darker midtone, and then darken down to reikland fleshtone for the bottom most part, with a similar off-white (Palid Wych Flesh) as the top most highlight.

UNRELATED TO HIGHLIGHTING/SHADING RAKARTH FLESH: Because this color is on the BELLY of the Carnosaur, this is an area that is always in shadow, so you may want to darken the entire tone as it moves down the model, with the brightest areas on the neck, and going to another tone, maybe entirely brown similar to Reikland Fleshtone for the areas under the body and the tail. You could put hints of Rakarth flesh on the very edges of the belly scales where they peek up on the sides.

Hope this is able to help!

another good tip for bringing shades and highlights into range is to take your midtone and turn it into a wash and apply that over the area - it brings the shades up and the highlights down.