http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/56.page JForum - http://www.jforum.net TLDR= I used to do a lot of how-to's on CMON. I am also a professionally trained artiste (BA in drawing, going for BFA in Metals [Jewelry] currently). So, with that outta the way I want to address some of the problems I see on YouTube vids/ general hobby knowledge on this blog.
Trust me, you are doing something totally wrong, but it's not your fault.

I want to start off with something simple that comes up a lot: Painting Black and White.
You're going to have to do this at some point in time, and usually results are... let's say.. lacking first time around. This is because it requires planning before you paint. Both black and white are the maximum value you can get in a neutral tone- meaning, you can't go darker than black, you can't go lighter than white (yeah, I know about the super-duper Nasa-made Vantablack chances are you're not shelling out the money for that for minis). People take acrylic paints for granted- they dry quickly and (usually) opaque, so you can layer on all these colors, but the key to painting black and white is to adopt a watercolor or colored pencil mindset. By this I mean if you are using either of these medium, you cannot go over things once the layer is down. You either reactivate and move the WC paint around- or in case of colored pencils, you've built up a waxy layer so thick that you can't put more colors over the top. Thus, you need to reserve black for the areas that well be the darkest, and your white paper will be the whitest (or, you use white-out for highlights).
So in both these colors, you are actually using a very SMALL amount of the actual color. You are getting the ILLUSION of a black or white object through shading. Values are a whole nother topic that are equally important, but require more time and effort for examples and for me to explain, so we'll get into that in another post.
As a quick remedy, stop using black and white and use a very dark or light grey instead. This is also another problem that people run into: mixing black and white. Black absorbs color and light.. a LOT- to the point it also absorbs energy. If you've ever sat on a black car seat that's been out in the sun, I know your pain. This means it will overpower other paints with even just a tiny bit. To this end, to make an off-black grey, you'll probably need a 2:3 ratio of white to black, but for a very light off-white, it's more like 9:1. There's a reason I buy my oil paint tubes in 37ml for black and 200ml for white, that's all I'm saying.
Then the next problem rears it's head: Grey is boring!! It's hard to add depth to just grey tones, even using lighter values. Professional artists usually make their own dark tones on the canvas by mixing colors, and this looks better than pre-mixed paints. Failing that, there is one thing you can do to fix your black/ white painting problems: Don't use black.
Instead, use a color that is a very dark off-blue grey, called Payne's Grey:

By Publunch at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
As you can see, it looks really dark and it gives a cool-grey color when white is added. In fact, adding a tiny amount of Payne's grey to a lot of white gives you the color of a "Clean" white object, close to color #D9E7EF
Payne's grey also helps in NMM to give a kind of "blue steel" look.

(Had to do it myself, just knowing that it's come up.)

So, takeaway here: Buy white in bulk, get a tube/ bottle of Payne's grey acrylic, use at least 1/3 the amount of black you think you need- treat it like Arsenic: tasty in small amounts (Almonds), deadly in large!
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