Here are a few Black Templars. These were matched to the official artwork - where it was nice to see the armor had been highlighted into a turquoise.
Right from when we started 17 years ago, I have been annoyed at the use of grey to highlight black. It works; but I find it so boring. I have always pushed for blue tones to highlight black, instead.
I'm not alone in thinking this; in fact, I suspect the idea is ancient. Consider this Hindu temple art:
The reason these characters are painted blue is because that's how ancient artists in the Sub Continent learned to portray characters with dark skin.
The immediate question here is why dark dark-skinned people blue and not just dark brown? Any photographer shooting someone with dark skin can tell you. Dark skin is hard to accurately photograph - though apps and iPhones have pretty much fixed this, these days.
What I suspect is that ancient artists also preferred to work with blues to highlight dark skin - and from there, artistic license just took over.
Increasingly over the years, Games Workshop's artists are making the same decision.
These were painted to Exhibition Quality.
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Paintedfigs is a miniature painting service. You can send us your figurines to paint, and we also have painted miniatures for sale. We paint mainly Games Workshop (Warhammer 40k, Warhammer Fantasy, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, Space Hulk, Bloodbowl, and so on), Star Wars, Warmachine and Hordes, and pretty much every Kickstarter and board game under the sun.
And we do so at the lowest rates on Earth (we’ve checked).