Black color painting tutorial

Hello,
After many years of not doing anything, I've finally decided to share with the community my way of painting black color. I hope that You will find this article useful.

For painting black elements I use only those 3 Vallejo Model Color paints, Matt Medium and Citadel Chaos Black. Chaos Black is being used for deepest shadows, because it's a little bit glossy. I use a little bit of medium for making washes.

This is how these paints look like on my palette

And this is the miniature:

1. First step is making big lines using black gray paint in places where the armor will be shining. It's important to make another shining spots in the shadows, but those will have to be darker.

2. In the next step I mix Blue Grey Pale with Black Gray until I have a color like this one on the next picture. It's a little bit like 60% Black Gray and 40% of Blue Grey Pale but I'm not sure because I'm just mixing until I get color like this one.

 And then I paint a smaller line inside this big one.

3. Add more Blue Grey Pale

4. Then I paint another small line inside the bigger one.

5. Now I make washes using black from Vallejo, and another one from GW, and the last one is from Blue Grey Pale. I never use ready washes, always do them myself, just mixing paint with water and a little bit of medium.

6. After that, I just spend a lot of time painting spaces between layers of grey paint with Grey Pale wash until they will be blurry. It's not easy, and for that step I use only the tip of my brush and I'm moving it along layers.

7.Now as you can see it's just a big grey line. So now I'm using my black wash for the blurry spaces between the grey line and the black space. For that I move side of my brush across and just hook the edges of the lines. after that step it looks like this.

8.In this step I'm making the same thing with chaos black wash. But now I hook just the edge where it's alredy black because I just want to make the darkest places more glossy. Black from vallejo is very matt so without this step you would just have a very dark grey miniature.

9. In the last step I just make edges more visible with a mix of blue grey pale and just a little bit of black grey. I also added a little bit of clear blue grey pale in the spots where I want the armor to be the most shining.

10. And this is how the miniature looks after painting more spaces then just one leg ;)

As you can see his right leg is too grey so I will have to work a little bit on that with black washes.


I would like to recommend You visiting my facebook page, because this is the place where I show most of this what I'm currently working on:  https://www.facebook.com/Flameon.Miniatures

Edited in 2021:

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On the other hand on my YouTube Channel  you can find free video tutorials, video presentations of finished miniatures and trailers for video tutorials recorded exclusively for my patreon page.

I hope to see you there there because more free tutorials are on they way!

Regards
Flameon