Tips on painting white

Suthers

Member
Hi everyone,

I wondered if I could request some of the collective wisdom of the forum on the subject of painting, and more importantly highlighting, white on miniatures. Since getting back into the hobby I feel my painting has started to get up to a pretty decent standard, but the one colour I still struggle with is white. My usual technique is a fairly straightforward one of base colour, wash/shade and then highlight up with either the base colour, a lighter colour, or both. This seems to work well on most things but not so well with white because I can't seem to work out a good combination of base, shade and highlight. Any tips? I'm particularly looking to paint things like cloaks and also potentially some white horses for my elves.
 

wint65

Member
White is a interesting colour to do you can get sets of different shades of white but I have all ways done white starting with an off white as a base colour to shade I would use one of two colours alight grey or a light blue depends on what it is but for clothing a light blue wash then use an off white to blend in then o do a mix of 60-40 of off white and pure white which I thin to a milky state which I paint on giving a couple of layers then a pure white on the highlights


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Suthers

Member
Thanks for the advice, I shall try it on a test model and see how it turns out. Would a bone colour work as the off white base or is it best to mix up something specifically?
 

winterdyne

Member
White (and black) are funny colours to paint. Neither can be painted 'flat' and look right - there's always some reflection on it that tints it.

So generally, they're boiled down into two branches - warm tones (tending toward red/yellow) and cool tones (tending toward blue), with neutral sitting somewhere in the middle.

Hard surfaces tend to be cool, and soft / fabric surfaces tend in general to be warmer.

For a warm, ivory white: Basecoat with a light brown (PA Weathered Wood, old Spearstaff Brown), then up with a bone (PA Light Mud, old Bleached Bone) before a pure white (VGC Dead White, old Skull White) of your choice in the mix, with pure white only on very extreme highlights.

For a cool, satin white: Basecoat with a mid blue-grey (VMA bluegrey, old Shadow Grey), then up with a light bluegrey (VGC Wolf Grey, old Spacewolf grey) before pure white very extemes.

For Neutrals stick closer to grey mixes.

Avoid using pure black except for the darkest parts of shading on black surfaces (black is generally a very subtle grey gradient with quite bright, very tight sharp edge highlights on lightward edges and mid-contrast on shadeward).

Avoid using pure white except for the lightest of highlights on white - opposite to black, white tends to have a very subtle gradient up to the lightward edge, with a sharp highlight on the shadeward.
 
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