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So I'm thinking of using a white armor paint scheme for my Sisters of Battle. I understand that for the white to look good it has to be built up from grey. My question is once I have my nice white armor all properly shaded with ink in the recesses, how do I highlight it? Silver? Or a pale blue?

Pure white for edge highlights, then something like elf grey for the rest of it if you are using a cool white as it is really close to white. Cooler white schemes use blue washes, usually thinned.

You don't want to basecoat models in pure white. If you look closely at white colored objects in your environment they aren't pure white except for the very edges. Most are shades of very light grey due to how light and shadows. Paint the power armor in a very light grey/off white and then highlight pure white.

phydaux wrote:
So I'm thinking of using a white armor paint scheme for my Sisters of Battle. I understand that for the white to look good it has to be built up from grey. My question is once I have my nice white armor all properly shaded with ink in the recesses, how do I highlight it? Silver? Or a pale blue?

The two previous posters are correct in that the mid tone is not pure white and to reserve the white for the top most highlight. I would like to caution however, that for whites and light colors, you need to go easy on the strength of the shadows. Since there is not much difference between the mid tone (off white) and highlight (almost white or pure white), if you attack the midtone with a strong shadow, this will overpower the highlight.

Here is an example: I painted this model's dress with Dorn Yellow, a very light tone. I then shaded it with purple, and as you can see... the dark tone (in this case pure purple) totally overpowers the midtone. The problem is especially severe on the lower left of the picture and I've already toned it back a lot elsewhere...



You can see in the almost complete model how the shadows eventually became a very light color and it still reads as a shadow. I did this by mixing midtone into the shadow until I got the desired result. Highlighting and shading any light color including whites generally follows the same principal.



Regarding what color to use for shadow - I would pick a tone that you are using elsewhere in the model as shadow and apply accordingly to tie everything together. e.g. if you are using gold and shaded it with blue... I'd tint the shadows on the white with a hint of blue. so on and so forth...

Good luck!

I use ulthuan grey highlighted with white scar for white. This is a good way to create the look of depth, instead of a flat white. Shading is questionable, i've used mixes of lahmian medium and stuff like the fang, mechanicus standard grey, depends on the tone you want.