where to place highlights

mystic badger

New member
I\'m having difficulties to place highlights and shades, in fact where exactly must I place them, especially with flat clothings ?


HELP !
 

Gilvan Blight

New member
Your best bet is to follow this idiom:
Art Imitates Life.

Take a look at things around you, or do a google image search. The highlights should be wherever light hits your object, and well the shadows would be where light does not.

A couple tricks for mini painting: put a light next to your primed mini, really close and take a picture, then immitate the highlights when painting. Another trick is to use some spray paint and hit the model with a short burst in the direction you want the light coming from. This works best with white spray over black primer but I\'m sure other colours would work.
 

Dragonsreach

Super Moderator
Staff member
What mini are you currently trying to paint?
Because chances are someone on here will have painted it so you can do a search of the galleries and find a good example which will identify the Shadows/Highlights for you and you could work from there, emulating what you see.
 

airhead

Coffin Dodger / Keymaster
flat clothing?

as in no wrinkles/folds? Rare in mini sculpting.

as in non-gloss? Certain shadings still apply, the bottoms of the folds are darker and tops are lighter.
 

airhead

Coffin Dodger / Keymaster
mystic badger, in case I haven\'t said so earlier, welcome to the forums.

Generally (there are always exceptions) minis are painted under a \"halo\" of light. Imagine a upper diffuse sourse of lighting (cloudy day, office, etc.) where shadows are under overhangs, and upper surfaces are highlighted.

If you are still having trouble, take some close up pics of things like someone\'s shirt - without flash (someone you know and ask first). Look at the differences in the color from the area under a fold/crease to the color on the top of that same fold. Our minds are trained to see it as a single color, but it never really is.

There are some good aids in the \"articles\" section here as well as several other good mini painting sites.

Post some pics in the WIP section and you\'ll get some good advise on improvement.
 

rextalon

New member
Along the same lines as the OP. I have a question about highlighting black. I\'m painting a really big tank model black. (It has to be black, don\'t try to talk me out of it.)

I was thinking that I would put a lamp at an angle on one side of it and use those natural highlights to tell me where to put highlights of gray.

Then I\'d put the lamp on the other side of the model and at a different angle and use that natural lighting to tell me where to put the highlights of dark grayish blue.

Does this sound like a good method?
 

Eryops

New member
Something simple that I look at every now and again is comic books. Peruse a few that have nice art and see how the artist has sculpted the muscles and shaded certain areas. It\'s not the greatest, but if you get the right book, some artists are good at doing this.
 
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