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The war miniature would feel much to closer to reality, with shades and subtle highlights only. I compared it before in an early post, between painting Tamiya war miniatures and warhammer or other fiction miniatures. In fact, in product design, when the designer renders the products like car, handphone etc, they are all rendered with extreme highlights to wow the presentation. Because some of the miniatures’ pose and details are exaggerated, giving them a slight extreme highlights brings out the details and the fun of it. If you think about it, the fun part of painting these miniature is the highlighting, or extreme highlighting. I guess most of my painting style belong to that category. My preference is, there must be highlights, but it should be kept to a, not too much, nor not little kind of amount, sort of in between. On the other hand, if you have subtle shades and subtle highlights, then your miniature might look kinda of warm, like the feel of reality.

Of course, if you have a lot of highlights and more fine line type of highlights, then your miniature might look very sharp and crisp. It more a question of your own personal preference or style you would like to achieve. How much? It all depends on how much contrast you would want to bring out in the texture, surface or edges.

Now, the next question, how much highlight? Usually the highlights are not extreme, unless there is a lot of light or spotlight. In fact, if you observe in reality, when there are ample light in a environment or room, most objects would have a light or fine thin of highlight on the high surfaces or on the edges. Highlighting definitely brings out the details and makes the miniature much more lively. This usually does not make the figure lively but rather flat and toy looking. They are usually either only in the plastic moulded colour, or if its painted, it is painted only with just a basic shade of base colour. If you cannot imagine, well, if you ever drop by the toy department in any mall, just take a look at those action figures, eg like Star Wars, GI Joe and such. This would make your miniature much more lively and alive. It is a technique of painting where you enhance the high point of a surface or edge with a light tone to bring out the contrast between the surface and the edge. I am sure most would know what is the definition of highlighting, right? Just to recap, in case some readers miss it. Thought I just share my point of view about highlighting. Recently I read a post from The Back 40K blog about highlighting in miniature painting, this brings quite a few thoughts about highlighting.