Seeking advice on keeping dark pieces dark

[Kangaroorex]

I am working on a Geiger deep dragon from Valiant miniatures for my son. The problem i have is that I want to keep the wings and dragon very dark. At the same time there is a lot of detail on the wings and body that I want to highlight.  every time I have tried this in the past I have wound up with a color much lighter than I was shooting for.  suggestions and advice would be very welcome.  This applies in particular to the wings.

 

Can anyone give me a hand?  Picture of the dragon included.

 

Thanks for any assistance!

 

 

[Pingo]

The simplest way to do that is to artificially narrow the range you're using.

 

Take a not very light color and use it as your highlight.

 

Check the darkness of the color by painting a brushstroke on a piece of black paper. It is astonishing how much lighter and brighter colors look that way. You may find that you can use a much darker color than you expect to for highlights.

 

Then highlight by mixing that color with your base color, starting with a lot of base and only a little highlight. Don't use the pure highlight color until the very end.

 

Lights look light by comparison to the colors around them, so you can keep the mini pretty dark by doing this.

 

Another hint for next time: To help keep the color range dark, use a black primer instead of a white one.

[Kangaroorex]

I use white as a primer because I know how most of my paints respond to it.  Need to do some experimenting i guess.  I just never get enough contrast out of it without changing the base colour.  The problem I am having is with the highlight.  The moment I add highlight the colour of the wing is going to lighten and I dont want that. 

[DocPiske]

Highlights are by definition lighter; but you could try to bring it back down by appying black or blue ink. Just make sure you are using a transparent ink, not opaque. This also might make the area a little glossy, but glossy dark areas look darker than matte dark areas, at least in full light.

 

Also you could try reducing the highlights to very thin lines; this is called "edging" by some. You can get away with using a lighter value but it will be such a small area it would not change the overall value of the larger piece.

[SamuraiJack]

I use clear blue and clear purple and clear blue glazes to bring those shades back down to the dark range

[Dontfear]

If you want it to appear dark but with a decent amount of contrast than for any area you lighten more areas have to be dark. This means get dark, like really dark, maybe even black. You can still highlight up to white and if you have predominantly dark colors than it will appear dark. The look can be very striking.

[Doug Sundseth]

Mostly what Dontfear and Pingo said. Your midtone(s) should be about half the area of the figure, with shadows taking up 25% and highlights the other 25%. (Numbers approximate and subject to change depending on subject and desired look.)

 

So, if your midtone is a dark blue (for instance), you'll want dark blue on half the figure, an even darker blue (Midnight or possibly even black) for the shadows, and your highlights should start at a slightly lighter dark blue and work up in progressively smaller areas. You can take the highlights quite high, but keep the bright parts to very, very small areas (edges and points, mostly).

 

I'll further note that very high highlights and very dark shadows on a dark figure will look shiny if your blending is smooth and they're placed correctly. (This is the core of Non-Metallic Metal, or NMM, techniques.)

[Kangaroorex]

Thanks all for the advice. I shall try to incorporate this and see how it goes!