Painting Black

[Firestryke31]

I'm sure it's just that my search-fu skills are poor, but I cannot find anything telling how to paint a good, not-boring black. My father is doing Chaos Space Marines, and he wanted his boss guy (mostly) black with gold trim. He's an army-style painter, I'm an individual-style painter, so he asked me to do his boss. I also plan on doing Goff Orkz for my army so I figured it would be nice to know how to do a reasonable black.

I'm going to use a variation of the gold in this article for the trim. I was thinking of using a very dark gray as the base, then shading down to black and highlighting up to a lighter shade of gray, but wanted to see if I could find something else from a more experienced painter for inspiration before trying it.

I'm using Vallejo paints, but I'm sure I could find (or mix) rough equivalents to other paints.

Thank you for your time!

TL;DR: How 2 paint blk good kthxbye?

 

[freakinacage]

i would use the black as a base. highlight would depend on the general colour scheme for the rest of him. flesh added to the black can make a nice highlight, just don't go overboard with it

 

[Firestryke31]

So I should just go black->highlight? I'll see if I can find a flesh color that will contrast a bit with the gold in the final mix, but if I can't do you have any other ideas for a highlight color mix?

Edit: And so of course I just found this tutorial. Based on it I was thinking of using Vallejo's London Grey for the highlight.

 

[sivousplay]

I kinda like to go the opposite route ... pick an interesting color that you have elsewhere in the mini that you'd like to accentuate ... base the "black areas" in that color mixed sorta 60/40 color/black. And, then to get it darker, do several very thin black washes to get it to the amount of black you like. Then you get some highlights of the "interesting" color poking through and it unifies the "black area" w/ the rest of the mini.

 

[Firestryke31]

The problem is that the mini will be primarily black, so if I go that route it will seem more like a dark version of that color than black due to the large amount of it there will be. Unfortunately I have about 2 hours to try it out, then I'll have to wait a week or so before I can paint again. If I decide I don't like one method, I can always paint over it and try again (I'm not getting paid, and no matter how badly it's painted it'll still look better than the rest of the army

).

 

[Wyrmypops]

I like highlighting black with turquoise.

I did an assassin figure. Course it had to be all black, but figured I could get some diversity in it. Would highlight different textures with different colours. Still a black to white tonal range for all, just with a different colour introduced while in the grey range.
For the leather straps and holsters I added a blue. A rich, juicy and dark one. Might have been Regal Blue, or something similar. The idea being we're used to seeing black leather with a blue tint in photographs, and a blue/blue/white palette is employed in many movies like Underworld.
For plastic looking areas, like gun casings, I let it going through grey alone. It has an artificial feel to it, so cleanly grey.
For the close fitted skin suit I got to bring out the much underused Turquoise paint. The psychology behind it is that, look around, what in life is dark turquoise. Answers on a postcard send them to "nothing really, except for faded tattoos". We see black highlighted with too much grey and it no longer looks black, it looks grey. With too much blue it can look more like a dark blue than a black highlighting with blue. But with turquoise in the mix, we see it and relate to it as a highlighted black.


View attachment 2174

How many stages is personal preference. For a start could go...
Black.
Black/Tuquoise.
Black/Tuquoise/White.
Turquoise/White.
White.

 

[cassar]

black and white are the exact same, the absence of colour so add the same as the trim, if the trim is gold i would try to do the highlights in gold/yellow but very faint like the gold's reflecting off the black

 

[mule]

You could try using a neutral dark from 'the real colour wheel'. I'm working on an OSL piece at the moment myself. Use a dark blue/dark brown mix to break down from the black, then add a shade of grey to lighten it further. Depends on how much effort you want to put into it.

 

[Firestryke31]

Blarg, why did my dad have to choose such a complicated color for such a complicated mini. Too bad I can't do any more painting until Friday/Saturday. London Grey ended up being a bit brighter than I thought, so I'm thinking of doing a transition to Dark Grey, then maybe up to London Grey. I really don't want to spend too much time on this mini, since I don't want to feel bad when my Green Tide washes over it and it's friends

(as well as the fact that I have my own crap to finish).

 

[cassar]

that which does not kill us, makes us stronger! good luck mush.

 

[Chrome]

I remember Taggi making an absolutely gorgeous black based on scorched brown(At least I think that was her base) and then mixing it up towards and through black...

 

[Torn blue sky]

that which does not kill us, makes us stronger! good luck mush.

Nah, that which does not kill us, just really f**king hurts!

And as mentioned, there are many ways to highlight black. If it's predominantly black use dark blues and work it up with space wolves grey or turquoise. With black the "less is more" rule applies, remember.

 

[Einion]

Painting black should be easy, I don't know why we have to complicate things so often. Use neat black for the shadows, highlight with whatever you want to go toward as the lightest colour (or by adding white and a little dot of blue, green, red).

Einion