How to shade white?

[kharn_the_betrayer]

My fiancee and I are working on planning our wedding and we're talking about putting a SoB and a Marine on top of the cake. With the exception of figuring out how to green stuff a dress bottom onto the sister and a bow tie onto the marine my main concern is painting. I'm doing the marine as a Black Templar as one it fits the tux look and I've painted a small portion of my own BT army so I have experience painting black. My issue is painting the SoB. I'm going to dust off Brother Sergent PB and get going on him to test it out. Does anyone have some experience painting with white. I'm looking for more shading/highlighting tips. I was going to use the foundation grey then build up from there. This is using only gw colors and just wondering which wash would be good for a shade? I was going to also do fortress or codex +skull white then skull white. Any tips?

[winterdyne]

Washes can often come out looking dirty, unless you've got a dead smooth base coat. You'll be after a clean, crisp 'wedding dress satin' white?

 

Shadow grey base, then do all areas in a couple of light coats of space wolf grey, blending it out of recesses. Then highlight that up to pure white on extremes. Give it a nice satin or gloss varnish.

 

For a nice linen white, try a deneb stone base, and highlight that up to white in about 3 mixes. Looks better with matt finishes. A stronger result can be achieved using a khaki / bleached bone base, but that may be too much for what you want.

 

I tend to find neutral tones (greys, as opposed to warm brownish whites, and cold bluish whites) look a little 'stony' - fine if that's what you're after, but when you look at most materials it's either slightly reflective (usually reflecting blue sky) or not a pure white (more yellowish).

 

Hope this helps :-) Sounds like an ace cake!

[HarasinCreed]

I would go with a blue white rather than grey because it tends to look more dirty or paisty.

 

So i would start with ultramarine blue and build it up to saphire blue leaving only the darkest reaseses(cant spell) with the ultramarines blue and then gradually blend from the saphire blue to skull white by gradually adding white try to get as smooth a blend and dont have too much blue other wise it looks a bit weird.

 

Congrats on the wedding

[kharn_the_betrayer]

Thanks for the tips. I'm not a fan of priming things white and don't do any armies that are straight up white. I will look into both of those and see how they fair for my painting skills. I think I need to dust off Brother Sergent PB and see how well he can be painted white. Right now I know he was silver with various shades from some experiments I did with the inks some time ago and lost him before I could strip him again. If you're an Turn signals fan, Brother PB occupies a similar position to Veteran Trooper Smik. Only PB has no position in any of my armies he is just my tester for all color schemes for all armies 40k or not. I want to use him to test it before I do the SoB.

[the_cheat137]

One tip for painting white armor:

 

You can certainly start with a Shadow Grey base, I've seen that work out well, or with a white primer/blue wash base; I've seen that work well too. In any case though, do not paint: Dark Base >> slowly blend lighter to white >> pure white highlights on extremes. If you do that, you haven't painted white, you've painted Blue/Grey with white highlights. Most of the actual painted surface has to really be white! Which means you won't be doing any highlighting, since you can't highlight white!

 

When you do paint on white, you will likely need a few coats of rather thin white. I try to get my white pain down to the consistency of heavy cream; thick paint of course is spotty and streaky, and thinner tends to run all over the surface, into your nice shaded recesses.

 

The white armor on these sisters was done using such a method (they're not ALL white, but a lot of the armor is):

 

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1yjZKhg6xo8/TAJ7-Ku2MCI/AAAAAAAAAFs/c3PFBImMFg4/s1600/DSCI0092.JPG