3 Colours Up – Painting Black Armour
May 26, 2016 by elromanozo
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Thanks Romain.
I always thought black was an easy colour to paint but if it’s done incorrectly you can lose a lot of detail if too black or make it looked washed out and grey if you go to the other extreme.
This really struck a nice balance.
Great tutorial, I mess up black most of the time 😀
very nice as all ways Romain.
Thank you ! I think this tutorial was needed… It was requested a lot. Also, I wanted to save people from the mistakes I see on tabletops everywhere : people using pure black, not even highlighted, because they don’t know what else to do… people using grey with a black wash, making it dirty… and those terrible “cobwebs” blacks that you get when you simply paint all of the edges grey… or worse, dry-brush. You end up seeing brush strokes everywhere. Honest attempts, all of them, some of them even worth studying (there’s good ways to dry brush, for example)…… Read more »
Thanks for the tutorial. Great video as always, love your techniques.
Great tutorial, will give this method a try when I get my Black Diamond stuck together.
I was always a ‘pure black with Ghoul grey dry brushing’ painter of black, but haven’t done any for a long time so would like to try for a better effect this time.
Thank you for your continuing help, every paint job makes my painting better.
love your work.
Awww… You are kind.
Actually, “every paint-job makes my painting better” is the best compliment anyone could pay me !
super stuff Romain, you started with grey armor and the more you highlighted and the lighter you highlighted the darker the armor became. Fascinating to watch,, colour theory sans colour.
Thank you ! It’s actually still colour theory : it’s called a contrast of value !
Also, you’ll notice that my shadows are “colder”, more “blue/green” than my highlights (Greatcoat grey is slightly blue, Deck tan is, well, tan), because cold tones are instinctively perceived as “further away” by our brains. So it’s a nice way to cheat and vary tones here… and to add a temperature contrast.
It’s all in my Colour Theory series ! 🙂
Awesome sauce! Now I can start on the Deathwatch Overkill Space Marines.
“It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.”
This was great, I was especially taken with the colder vs warmer shades mentioned above and came through strongly in the video. The model looked lovely in he end as well, it makes it such a pleasure to paint on the details when the core of the model looks as good as that. I’d love to see a tutorial on painting armour like this when there is a strong contrasting colour on the armour as well — say a blue armour where the breast plate is red. I’m. Not sure whether you can airbrush the main colour and then use… Read more »
Thank you very much indeed !
Liquid mask and tape is useful in this case. I would, for example, tape all of the miniature but the head in order to airbrush it first (basecoat and pre-shading) then use brushwork. If this were a different tutorials, I would probably have painted the front panel with white primer, and masked it before even priming black. Then I’d have removed the mask to get a nice white front panel to work on with my brush. However, it’s small enough that one can very well paint it over black, as with most details.
Thanks for the advice @elromanozo ! That sounds like it will test my abilities but I’ve bought some liquid mask and will try it out
I’ve seen silly putty used to good effect when masking, you have to work it in to some areas with a fine pointed tool, but the beauty of it is it’s re-useable..