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Any one ever highlighted with just a very very thin white paint, using it like a glaze or some thing and building up highlights slowly with just that color?, instead of using lighter tones of the base your painting over like people usually do?

Is this common or whats up.

I have never tried it. You'd need very thin paint for that to work, and the trick with that is that thin paint tends to want to "slide" off of raised edges and down into the crevices.

For myself, that's why I start with white underneath, and then use thin paints over top. Keeps the whitened "highlights" while getting darker towards the recesses.

It wouldn't be impossible, but you're working against the natural "physics" of what the paint wants to do.

It would be a very bad idea because, aside from trying to get the paint to behave properly (it won't), that's now how color works. For example, red highlighted by mixing the base red with white just becomes pink, not bright red. You need to highlight using brighter reds, potentially mixing in some yellow/orange depending on the color. Similarly, shading that red by mixing it with black just gives you a grayish mess and you want to use a dark brown instead.

But, as with most painting things, the best way to find out is to just try the idea yourself.

I do something like this to shade my blacks on solid surfaces (armour, weapons) or if I'm doing a non metallic grey metal, but I start with greys instead of pure white. You can acheive a nice effect with just a few increasing tones of lighter grey to white over black. I'll try and find a photo where I've used it.

You can see the effect on horus claw, and the armour of the guy below. I tend to use this more when space is short and I don't have the room to work up my greys like I would on a larger area.


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I'd say this would only work in blacks though. On other colours you'd need to mix your white in, or as peregrine mentioned in the case of red mix a warm lighter colour to highlight. You can use a small amount of thin white to provide your final highlights once you've worked through your lighter tones.

Thanks, Peregrine, Queen, Tree, appreciate it.

edit - What about glaze, that is what is the correct thing for what im talking about doing?

Pre-shading works a little bit like that though. It lets you get some highlights using just black, white and your color.

Yeah it is basically glazing. I just use paint and water though.