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Paint it Black |
Jan 23, 2005 |
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What you see here is a Dark Rider from Games Workshop that I decided to use as a test piece for painting black. Now, black is a pretty tricky colour to paint. Usually it becomes either too grey from the highlights, or too dark, without any highlights at all. I wanted a dark mini, that looked black, but that still had highlights and shades like a “normal” mini.
To avoid making it too grey, I looked for suitable colours to highlight it with, and looking through my paint collection I decided on VMC (Vallejo Model Colour) German Grey + GW Rotting Flesh for the horse body and the rider’s cloak, VMC German Grey + VMC Silver Grey for the horse’s mane and tail, and finally VMC Black + VMC Neutral Grey for the leather gloves and boots. The German Grey is a very dark grey colour that is a great base for painting black. For shading I chose GW Chaos Black on all areas.
By using different highlight colours I tried to get a little bit of variation in the overall look, something that unfortunately is very hard to photograph since the difference is so subtle.
I started by painting the horse with VMC German Grey, and highlighted as usual by adding a little GW Rotting Flesh for each layer. It is very important that the layers are as thin as possible, almost just coloured water. I also chose some key areas to highlight to avoid that grey look. It is important that the most of the mini is really dark.
After a couple of layers I washed the horse with GW Chaos Black to get some shading, and to tie the layers together a bit. Then I continued with the highlighting using the same colour mix as before the wash, and after a few more layers it was time for a new black wash, and so I kept going until the horse was light enough in the highlight areas. The washes provided enough shading, so I didn’t have to actually blend them in.
This is the method I used on all black parts of the mini, and in the end it came out pretty nicely I think. The important thing is to wash the mini with black washes and to only highlight a few areas.
The green blade is painted using GW Dark Angels Green and GW Rotting Flesh, and it is a nice contrast, or complement if you will, to the rusty spear blades sticking out of the ground. They were actually placed there because I accidentally attached the horse too far back on the base, so it needed some visual balance. It became a pretty cool effect that I might use again sometime.
Hope this little write-up was useful!
/Anja
For more tutorials and a huge gallery of her work, please visit Anja's High Valley Miniatures website.
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