steps into the arena with two gladiators from 
For the final article (from me) in the Crucible Army Project, I'm going to walk you through painting a black horse. Painting things black, and ending up with something that...
- is highlighted to bring out detail, and
- appears to be black (not gray)
...is something that often gives painters trouble (me included); so here I'll present one method for achieving that goal.
We'll start out with a horse that I've undercoated black (because of all that metal, and the fact that he'll be black when I'm done, naturally). You can see that I've already painted the metallic bits and some red parts – I've used the methods described in previous articles to finish those areas.
You can see that I made a mess of the black parts while I painted the metals. Black usually covers nicely, so this is no big deal; I just went in with a #2 brush and carefully repainted the areas that would end up black.
Next up is a picture of my palette. What I want you to see is that I've got some black paint, some blue paint, and (on the right and between these colors) a mix of the two. My mix is pretty dark. I used mostly black paint, with just a tiny dab of blue. There's no exact formula for the amounts here; I simply grabbed some black, and added blue until I had the color I wanted. This dark blue-grey will be my initial highlight color.
