Highlights

[Hells_Clown]

I've come to realize something. I find highlighting difficult. Most How-to articles on the subject don't do much for me as they seem to go like this: "I used Color X to highlight Color Y..." but they don't say WHERE they put the highlight or why there and not someplace else.

 

Now maybe I'm dense as a load of bricks but sometimes I just stop painting a model cuz I don't know where to go after the base coats. Highlighting a cloak isn't that hard for me, there are clear lines to follow, but on skin or a staff or an axe head it's not always easy to know. Then I have to figure out where highlights on other parts of the mini go so that they all flow and look natural n stuff. That's one of the reasons I find NMM so difficult.

 

Yeah, I can look at pics from others, and I do all the time. I even have a folder on my computer with pics to study. But I can't always tell how a particular section was done. It looks like they just added white there but when I do that it looks terrible and I know there was more to it. That's why I want step-by-painful-step guides on how to do these things. 700 hours of close up video of Anne painting her newest masterpiece? Heck yeah!

 

So is there any hope for me or should I burn all my paint stuff and move into a cave and stare at the wall until I find enlightenment?

[Enchantra]

OK, here is my two cents:

1) You are not dense.

2) Highlighting takes practice.

 

Alright. First off, take your basecoated mini and stick it under a powerful light. Look for the areas where the light hits it well, that is where you highlight. Usual places on a face to highlight are the bridge of the nose, chin, and cheekbones and sometimes the forehead depending on the model. Usual faces on an axe or sword would be the plane that gets to most light, then fading the highlights out slowly towards the darker areas.

 

Vaitalla can also give you some good pointers as can Paintrix.

[Digital M@]

Do you have a FLGS with any game tables?

 

 

If so, see if anyone ever comes to the store to paint. If someone does, or even if there is not anyone, bring your paints to the store and start painting in public. I am willing to bet you meet another painter who can show you.

 

You probably only need a few hands on pointers and you may even get to meet other local painters or help get others interested in the hobby..

[Mengu]

Here is another way to look at it. Imagine it's raining on the figure, the places that will get wet first, are the ones that get the highlights. The places that will stay dry longest are the shadows. Another trick I use when placing shadows is I'll turn the mini upside down, and place the shadows on bottoms of the folds, underbellies, armpits, etc.

 

NMM is a whole different beast. You'll have to go back to the many published articles on this subject...

 

Edit: One other tip, look at paintings. Examine dark and light areas. You can learn much from them.

[zaphod]

A good place to start is the top down highlighting method. This is EASY despite what you think. Hold your mini under a lamp so the light is directly above it. You can see where you have to place the highlights.

The actual technique depends on a) your skill and tech level, and b) the effect you are trying to get.

For drybrushing (a more skilled or experienced painter may only use this for hair and fur say, or maybe rocks), you want to brush or stroke your highlights ACROSS the areas you want lighter. A robe is a prime example as you can brush across the folds to lighten the raised areas.

For Layering or blending, you tend to want to FOLLOW the folds or raised areas. Obviously, the two techniques are very different, and at arms length, the final result may look similar, but under the Electric Eye of the Macrobeast, there is absolutely NO comparison!

The top down or stop sign style of highlighting is easiest, and remember, the premise here is to picture the figure as an octagon, and the higher the face or fold is, the lighter the highlight. Thus, objects or faces pointign down woul dseem darker and those pointign up would seem lighter.

This can be altered if you move your light source around. For example, the Jade Priestess I used has a lightsource above and to the right side of the figure (from the figure's perspective). This is important to remember as you cannot highlight your armor and robes one way, and then have all your gems highlighted differently!

Anyways, I will let that digest, and then we shall see. I am sure there are others who can explain much more succinctly than myself :D

[Star Drifter]

I tend to aim for raised surfaces, and/or where the bones may be closer to the skin. Cheekbones, center of forehead, knuckles, collarbones, ribs.. depending on the angles of the mini's limbs and what parts are shown "in front."

 

Visualize where the light is coming from, and what surfaces it would strike first. I want to think that a coloring book and some cheap colored pencils could be an exercise in doing this, as well.

 

It seems that there are two places you can commonly imagine the light from coming - either directly above the min, or above and slightly in front of it. This keeps it so that groups of minis - either in a collection or on a gaming table - all look to be "lit" from roughly the same source. Once you can imagine those rays of lights hitting, you can learn to "see" where they'd concentrate. Like the actual painting, it takes a little practice.

 

From my perspective, "where" to highlight is almost just as much preference as what colors to use. As long as it's consistant on the entire miniature, and coming from the same direction, then it should work out okay.

[Paintrix]

Some tricks that helped me:

 

When trying to figure out a difficult highlight, such as a blend on a weapon blade face, I'd take the pic into Photoshop, 'divide' it up with parallel lines or a grid, and sample (eyedropper tool, if you use PS) the color in each area. That would give me approximately the color created as the blend progressed from lightest to darkest, and also helped me see where the lights/brights and darks were.

 

Prime a mini dark, then very, very lightly drybrush with a light color. (Choose a 'spare' model for this!) Work from the top down, and let your brush strokes 'fall' from an imaginary point above the miniature. Your drybrushing is going to illustrate, and accentuate, how light falls on the mini--and where it would normally receive highlights. Some of the same effect can be produced with a light spray of white primer, from overhead, on a black model. Warning: this will not illustrate all the areas that should receive highlights. It's a start, though.

 

Similarly, when painting, sometimes I'll mark out where my highlights should 'end up' with a bit of thin light-colored paint, right over the base coat. It's a good way to check if they're consistent before going through the painting process. Put it under a strong lamp: do you see any light thrown on your base coat 'outside' the area you've marked for highlighting, or in a radically different area? You may want to extend or move the highlight.

 

As for flow and natural highlights: having a consistent 'light source' is necessary. (I most frequently paint as if the light comes from overhead, all around. This produces a very natural look.) Looking at the front of your mini, if you have the strongest highlight on top of an armor plate, all other plates should also be highlighted on top.

 

Some painters do their work with thin strips of color, side by side, with no blending. I'm trying to think of one that would be a good example for you to study; this might help you see where color can be placed.

 

Highlighting isn't easy. Some of the time you will just need to pick an arbitrary point for your strongest highlight and work 'towards' it: i.e. a vertical plate that doesn't receive much light; you can have the brightest point at the top, the bottom, the center, or all four edges. Not trying to make you tear out hair in confusion--just illustrating that you're sure as heck not dense.

[claymoore]

The "stop sign " rule that Glyn mentioned is considered by many to be the standard for highlighting/shading in miniature painting. Sheperd Paine taught this technique in his seminars and books including the sadly out of print Building and Painting Scale Figures If you imagine the figure under a halo of light about 12 inches above it the idea would be similar to examining it illuminated by a light coming head high over your shoulder. If this light were hitting an octagonal shape you could assign values to the planes with the top being lightest and bottom darkest. On your figure this applies to it as a whole and to parts of the figure like horizontal folds in cloth. With a fold the top and the edge are highlighted and the underpart shaded. Vertical sections of the figure like the side of the arm opposite to the light and recessed sections of vertical folds need to be taken into consideration seperatly for shading because they are light blocked areas that do not follow the stop sign rule.

I hope I have not confused you while trying to explain this. Once you know what to look for I think you will devise your own methods for visualization.

Clay

[awong]

The stop sign rule that Claymoore is talking about can also be found in Accion Press books' -

EURO-MODELLISMO MONOGRAPH, HOW TO PAINT IN ACRYLICS VOL.I

 

Oddly, the pictures do a good job of illustrating the concept while I can't find any text referencing the pictures (very weird editing for this set of books). But, studying the illustrations should help. The nice thing is, it should still be in print.

 

See Liliana Troy's site under Painting References for a description and pic.

 

Thanks

AWhang

[Hells_Clown]

The stop sign rule that Claymoore is talking about can also be found in Accion Press books' -

EURO-MODELLISMO MONOGRAPH, HOW TO PAINT IN ACRYLICS VOL.I

 

Oddly, the pictures do a good job of illustrating the concept while I can't find any text referencing the pictures (very weird editing for this set of books). But, studying the illustrations should help. The nice thing is, it should still be in print.

 

See Liliana Troy's site under Painting References for a description and pic.

 

Thanks

AWhang

I like the one book I have from the EURO-MODELLISMO line, painting in Black & White (though there are plenty of figures in there with color other than B&W) and have considered getting the others. I bought two paint guides from Andrea press but they were more "This is how I painted this model" type books while the Modellismo book tells what colors he used, how he blended, etc. Those books have more detail and I still have questions!

 

I'm now enlightened and I'm as miserable as ever.

[claymoore]

The stop sign rule that Claymoore is talking about can also be found in Accion Press books' -

EURO-MODELLISMO MONOGRAPH, HOW TO PAINT IN ACRYLICS VOL.I

I have both I and II in the Euro Modelismo series Painting With Overhead Lighting. These books have some value but I find there info on basic shading and highlighting to be poorly presented. It was not until I read the passage "This is the style used by famous American and English painters like Bill Horan, Sheperd Paine and Derek Hansen" that I understood them to be writting about the stop sign rule. They even use a hexagon in their diagrams instead of an octagon. While I appreciate the book having been wreitten in English it resembles a Babblefish translation.

Even though it only covers figures in one chapter I recommend Sheperd Paine's "How to Build Dioramas", a Kalmbach book, over the Modelismo books.

Clay

[zaphod]

I'm now enlightened and I'm as miserable as ever.

Good! Don't be :D Just practice a whole bunch :) A personal note about highlights and making colors "pop" out at you:

If you are lightening your base color by say adding white, and you think the highlights look good, add another two levels after this! It will really make a huge difference! Maybe even "realistic" style painters can agree that highlight placement may change, or the width of a highlight area, but the level of highlightingfor most competition level pieces seems to involve lightening almost or to white...

Just my two cents....

[Orsino]

The hard truth is that one can't highlight for all lighting conditions and viewing angles without precisely mimicking the shape and reflectivity of the real article being modeled. What most of us do is to try to approximate the look of an article under typical mostly-from-above illumination.

 

As an exercise, acquire a digital image of a person--perhaps even a completed mini paint job--that looks remotely like what you want to do. Manipulate the image, reducing the number of colors and/or increasing the contrast in order to posterize it. A good image editor will have a built-in posterizing tool that will take care of this. The idea is to exaggerate the highlights and shadows in the face and hair, reducing the picture to a palette of a few colors; three to four each for hair and face suffice for most of us painters, I think. Then break out the paints and try to duplicate the resulting digital image; with practice you'll undo (on the mini) some of the posterizing, blending the highlights more naturally into the rest of the figure.

 

A comic book may also be handy for this study. As you said, it's all in knowing where to put the highlights, so that they send the proper messages to the viewer's brain about the light source, its direction, and the shape and sheen of the object.

 

The only problem I have with the various skillful NMM minis I've seen posted online is that they portray a figure under very specific lighting conditions. The illusion is spoiled to some extent, I've found, when one actually holds the mini and rotates it in the light. This doesn't, by the way, reduce my admiration for those painters with good NMM technique. I just find it less satisfying in the end than using real metallics.