Intense colours

[Dr Death]

Its been one of my failings as a painter for such a long time that i can never seem to adjust the intensity of a shade, every colour i use tends to look bleached and particularly through the course of highlighting or shading. Is there a hard and fast guide for keeping the intensity of a shade throughout the process of highlighting and shading?

Dr Death

 

[supervike]

Welcome!!

How are you mixing your shade and highlight paints?

For instance, if you start with a red color, do you add black for the shade and white for the highlight?

Using a complementary color mix for shading may help. When shading red, try using a darker green mixed with your base red for shading.

For a brighter highlight to red, try highlights of orange and yellow.

Also using a very diluted wash of inks over your painted areas will increase the vibrancy and depth of the color. This can be easily overdone though, so be careful.

Maybe you could post a pic or two and hopefully some real help will come along...

 

[Ritual]

Highlighting everything by adding white usually creates a bleak result. This can look cool on the right mini, but if you want intense colours you should avoid this.

 

[Drake Farstrider]

Yeah what they said.

I don;t think I use much white to lighten my colors. I do use black to darken though. I may have to try that adding green to my reds as a darkener. Interesting thought.

 

[Equus]

I\'ve used washes before, as supervike mentions. I was originally intending usually to \"bind\" the colors together a little more and smooth transitions after shading and highlighting, and ended up with much brighter and intense colors than I intended.

 

[Shawn R. L.]

Having a good solid, pure, white, under where the intense color is going to be is crucial.

 

[Galante]

You can also be doing what I do, which is to start with your shadows and work from there to your midtones and highlights, which will affect your midtones, or in this case, the intensity of the colour.

You could perhaps paint your midtones first, several layers until you have a nice, solid and intense colour, and then go to the shading and highlighting part.

 

[Godlikebuthumble]

Well, pretty much everything has been said now...
I usually also find it hard to achieve really bright colours on a black undercoat. I can get a yellow to have an even coat and everything, but somehow it lacks the \"wow\" as opposed to painting on white primer... Otherwise, just what the guys said.