Deciding the color for your highlight.

There was a really great question over at the Bolter and Chainsword about highlighting colors and how to decide what to use. One poster was asking about the best way to highlight red. I thought I'd post my reply here as well, as I thought it was a great question.

The best way to decide on a highlight is to try and think about what happens to the color when it's hit by the sun.

In this particular case, if you look at a red car in the sun, you'll notice that the sides of the car would be a solid red color (the base color if you will) where as the bottom will be a darker red color (shading), while the top that's being hit directly will be a slightly orange color due to the light from our yellow sun (highlight).

So, take your base color and mix in just a touch of orange, thin the mix down with matte medium and/or water (I prefer the medium as you can thin it further without seperating the pigments), and apply a very thin coat to your desired highlight area. you can even thin the mix down further if you want to layer the orange up to the topmost point of your highlight. Just do multiple very thin coats.

Often people will just add white to a mix for highlights, and on some darker colors this can work great (purple, black, blue, some greens), but in some cases, red for example, it'll just turn the paint into a pastel. Red with white would make pink for example.

6 inches from the sun

It's freakin' hot. Really hot. 100degrees + since like June. It's September tomorrow.
Add to that now that it's humid here too (Arizona's monsoon season) and not good at all for any spraying.

So, basically, I've not gotten anything done... painting wise. I've got some Royal Venom Assault marines that have been cleaned up, modified, based, greenstuffed and are just waiting on primer in order to get them started. But as humid and hot as it's been, there's no way that the spray primer is going to look good.
I made that mistake last year on a couple of test models, and the result was a really grainy, badly coated mess. I painted it anyway since it was just a test model, but i was not happy with the result in the least.

I'm debating picking up a Land Speeder to work on while I wait for the weather here to improve. I can get it converted (yay magnets) and cleaned up in the meantime. Nice thing about Arizona is it's great in the wintertime for painting. I've got one of the Warhammer 40k Assault on Black Reach captains as well I picked up for like $2. he's all cleaned up, but not based. I should do that.

Not much else going on otherwise, but I'm looking forward to reading the new issue of Mysterious Adventure Magazine by my friend Scott Godlewski. He's an incredible talent, and the other guys doing stories are really good too. It makes for great old-school comics. If that's the kind of thing you enjoy, I highly recommend picking up a copy. It's a small print-run, but well worth the effort to find.