Cheers for the comments chaps, they really are appreciated and help keep me going
Gandlaf the Grey wrote:
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The skin is great on he fell beast but my only point is that it looks lighter on the underside wings than it does on top. No mistaking some very fine painting though.
I'm afraid this might be due to my not so great photography and how the miniature is catching the light as the wings look alright to the eye. Likewise I think some of the blending on The Necromancer has been lost on the photo, it goes from a flat black down to the light blue at the bottom, but I'll try and take a couple of better snaps when I update the Fellbeast.
[Warning wall of text]As for the highlighting I seem to have adopted a bit of a backwards technique for it but I like the end results and it seems others do as well so all is good. Basically I don't really like the look of line highlighting, at least at the level I would need to do it at to get through all these miniatures, so what I do is build up light dry brush layers (just two in the case of most troops) then I repaint the recesses in the base colour, this is followed by several thin washes of an appropriate colour which tones down the dry brush look to give a more natural highlight. In the case of Sauron he had many more layers, working from a black/boltgun mix which was washed black then dry brushed up through boltgun/chainmail/mithril, this was followed by 4 layers of very watered down sepia wash which again had a mithril dry brush then finally I painted on a thin layer of straight black wash to darken him down and tie everything together. I did the same with the Necromancer except using black/shadow grey/codex grey/white for the colour progression and blue and black washes.
Well that's enough rabbiting on from me, as a quick aside I managed to clean up the Fallen Dwarves at the weekend so once the Fellbeast is done I can get cracking with putting them together.
Once again thanks for the comments!
Phil