Edge highlighting means painting a fine line of lighter colour along the raised edges of a surface, simulating the way light catches a hard edge. It is what makes armour look like armour rather than a painted shape, and it is the technique that most visibly separates a finished model from a base-coated one.
It is also slow and demands brush control. The good news is that the control comes from paint consistency and brush loading far more than from a steady hand, and both of those are learnable in an evening.
What edge highlighting actually does
Two things. It defines the shape of a surface by drawing its boundary, so the eye reads a helmet as curved and a shoulder plate as flat. And it creates a focal hierarchy: bright edges pull attention, so wherever you place them is where people look.
That second point is the one most beginners miss. Edge highlighting is not surface decoration applied uniformly. It is a way of directing the viewer's eye.
Paint consistency
Slightly thicker than you would use for a base coat, but still thinned. Too thin and the paint runs off the edge into the recess below, leaving a fuzzy smear instead of a line. Too thick and it drags, forms a raised bead and refuses to make a clean stroke.
The target is paint that flows off the brush without spreading beyond where you put it. Test it on the palette first: a stroke should hold its edges rather than creeping outwards. Our guide to thinning paints covers reading consistency properly.
Loading the brush
Less paint than feels right. Load the tip, then wipe most of it off on the palette edge and check that the bristles have reformed into a point.
An overloaded brush deposits a blob the moment it touches the model and then floods down the panel. A lightly loaded brush runs out sooner, which is fine, because reloading every few strokes gives far better control than trying to make one load cover a whole shoulder pad.
Side of brush versus tip
Both work and they do different jobs.
The tip gives precision. Use it for short edges, corners, small details and anywhere you need the line to stop exactly at a specific point. It is slower and more prone to wobble because you are relying on hand steadiness across the whole stroke.
The side of the brush gives consistency across a long edge. You lay the brush almost flat against the surface so the belly of the bristles rides along the edge, then draw it along. The edge itself guides the brush, which produces a straighter line than freehand precision does. This is the technique for long armour panels, and it is the one most people should learn first.
Controlling pressure
Light. The brush should barely contact the surface. Pressing splays the bristles, widens the line and pushes paint over the edge onto the face of the panel.
Rest your hands together or brace them against the table so the model and brush move as one unit. Trying to hold both in mid-air and keep them steady relative to each other is much harder than bracing.
Not every edge needs highlighting
This is the most important idea in the article.
Highlighting every edge on a model produces something that looks like a wireframe drawing. Every panel glows equally, nothing stands out, and the result reads as busy rather than lit. It also takes three times as long as it needs to.
Think about where light would actually fall. If light comes from above, then upward-facing edges catch it and downward-facing edges do not. Highlighting the underside of a shoulder pad as brightly as the top actively fights the illusion you are creating.
A useful hierarchy:
- Always highlight the upper edges of large, prominent surfaces: shoulders, helmet crests, the tops of armour plates, weapon casings facing upward.
- Sometimes highlight vertical edges and side panels, more faintly, to define shape.
- Rarely highlight downward-facing edges, undersides and anything in deep shadow.
- Never highlight every edge on a heavily detailed area. Pick the two or three that define the silhouette and leave the rest.
One-stage, two-stage and spot highlights
One stage is a single lighter line along the chosen edges. Fast, effective, and entirely adequate for rank-and-file models. Most armies never need more.
Two stage adds a second, lighter and narrower line on top of the first, confined to the most prominent parts of each edge. The first line reads as the lit edge, the second as the brightest point on it. This is the standard for characters and anything you want to look considered.
Spot or extreme highlights are tiny dots or very short strokes of a near-maximum brightness, placed only at corners and the sharpest points where light would catch hardest. Used sparingly, perhaps four or five places on an entire model, they create a real sense of gloss and hardness. Used liberally, they look like glitter.
Choosing the highlight colour
The instinct is to add white. Resist it.
Adding white to a colour raises its value but also desaturates it and shifts it cooler, which is why white-mixed highlights often look chalky and washed out. What you actually want is a colour of higher value that still belongs to the same family.
Better approaches:
- Mix in a lighter colour from the same hue family. A lighter blue into a dark blue, rather than white into a dark blue.
- Mix in a warm pale colour such as bone or ivory, which raises value with less loss of saturation than pure white.
- Shift the hue slightly as you go lighter. Highlighting a red towards orange, or a blue towards a paler blue-green, often reads more naturally than simply lightening.
- Reserve pure white for the final spot highlight only, if at all.
The principle is that a highlight should look like the same material catching light, not like a different, paler material. Our guide to choosing a colour scheme covers value structure across a whole army.
Highlighting curved surfaces
Curves have no hard edge for the brush to follow, so the side-of-brush technique does not apply cleanly. Two options work.
The first is to treat the curve's brightest line as an edge and paint a soft stroke along it, then soften both sides with a thin glaze of the midtone so the transition is not abrupt. The second is to use a series of very light passes building up gradually, which is closer to layering than highlighting.
On strongly curved surfaces, drybrushing is often the better tool, because it produces a naturally diffuse gradient. Our guide to drybrushing covers where each technique wins.
Fixing wobbly highlights
Every highlight goes wrong sometimes and the repair is simple: repaint the midtone base colour back along the sides of the line, tidying it into shape.
This is genuinely how experienced painters produce clean lines. The highlight is not painted perfectly in one pass; it is painted approximately and then trimmed with the surrounding colour. Thin your midtone, run it along either side of the highlight, and the line sharpens up.
If the highlight is badly off, cover it entirely with the midtone, let it dry, and try again. Our guide to fixing painting mistakes covers related repairs.
Edge highlight versus drybrush
| Edge highlight | Drybrush | |
|---|---|---|
| Finish | Crisp, defined, deliberate | Soft, diffuse, slightly textured |
| Best on | Smooth armour, hard panel edges | Texture, fur, stone, chainmail, bases |
| Speed | Slow | Very fast |
| Control | Exactly where you place it | Wherever the brush touches |
| Use for | Characters, focal areas, display models | Whole armies, bases, terrain |
Most well-painted models use both: drybrush the textured areas and the base, edge highlight the armour.
Why your highlights look too bright
Four usual causes, in rough order of likelihood:
- Too big a value jump. The gap between midtone and highlight is too wide, so the line reads as a separate colour rather than lit armour. Add an intermediate step.
- The line is too thick. A wide highlight looks bright simply because there is more of it. Narrow it by trimming with the midtone.
- Too much white in the mix. Desaturated pale colours look chalky and stand out unnaturally.
- Too many edges highlighted. Cumulative brightness. Remove highlights from downward-facing and secondary edges.
Whichever it is, a thin glaze of the base colour over the whole area pulls everything back together and is usually the fastest fix.
Frequently asked questions
What brush should I use?
One with a genuinely good point. Size matters less than point quality; a size 1 with a sharp tip beats a size 0 that has splayed. Keep a brush specifically for highlighting and never use it for drybrushing.
Should I edge highlight before or after shading?
After. Shade first to establish the recesses, then highlight to bring the edges back up. Highlighting then washing over it flattens the work.
How long does edge highlighting take?
For a one-stage highlight on standard infantry, roughly ten to twenty minutes per model once you are practised. Two-stage on a character can take an hour or more. This is why most people highlight rank and file simply and save the detailed work for characters.
Do I need to highlight if I have drybrushed?
Not necessarily, but combining them works well. Drybrush for a general lightening, then place two or three sharp edge highlights on the most prominent edges. You get most of the crispness for a fraction of the time.
How does this differ on black or white armour?
Considerably, because both extremes limit where you can go. Our guides to painting black armour and painting white armour cover the specific problems each creates, and painting metallics covers surfaces that highlight themselves.
New to painting? Start with our beginner guide before adding this technique.
Independent guide published by Blubbercove Ltd/WarSplay. This article is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, authorised by or licensed by Games Workshop Limited. Warhammer 40,000 is a trade mark of Games Workshop Limited.