Hello everyone! Sorry for being late with this post, as my blog decided to explode overnight. You probably didn't notice, but all of my images broke, again. This has been the third time. So I tried hosting all of the images to blogger (again), and all of them worked... except one. Whatever. Good enough for me. Anyhizzle Anyways, onto the real post.

What you will need:
Chainmail
Mithril Silver
An old brush for drybrushing
A highlight brush

I'll go over the idea of drybrushing first. The concept is quite simple. You have a brush which is very dry of paint, meaning you have only chalky paint left on the brush, and then you lightly brush over the model on the desired areas, so that the edges barely catch the blade and take on the new paint. At first, when gently brushing your model, you might not see anything. If you look very closely or brush over the same area multiple times, you will finally notice a large difference. Before you touch the model with the brush, though, make sure you have taken enough off. I usually rub the brush on a napkin until I see near nothing and then test it on my thumb. If I barely see it or it looks like it immediately has dried, that is good. Here you can see my napkin just after I brush off some chainmail.

Generally, you want to stroke the brush over the model in one direction, often from the top to the bottom. You won't be going from the models head to foot, but small areas at a time. I'll draw a small picture.

Now, grab your brush, dip it in some chainmail, brush off majority of the paint, and swipe at your model. Try not to go up and down over the same area, instead go down, move the brush back and then back to the top and back down, if that makes sense. That way, your brush is hitting the same points each way and has a "zenith" lighting.  Zenith generally means from the highest point going straight down. So the light would only catch the higher areas that aren't shadowed by others, something drybrushing often achieves. So you want to go over all of the silver areas with this drybrushing method, not worrying all too much about the iconography and black sections between armor sections, we can always paint over these later

After giving your Knight a nice glint of the brighter chainmail, he should start having some basic shading to him. It will be darker in the recesses due to the Badab black and lighter on the edges due to chainmail. In between is a slightly darkened Boltgun metal. If you feel your shades aren't dark enough, you can apply Badab black exclusively to these areas or water down Chaos Black. I've done a 1:7 Chaos Black:Water ratio to achieve a darker recess that reflects less light, doing many layers in the darkest regions and less in the others. This is probably a bit much for a newer painter, so you can simply apply Badab black to the areas that should be darkest. It shouldn't be too tough to tell where this is, but I often do it on the lowest portion of the ceramite collar and off to the sides of the armor, where the arms overlap and where the purity seals generally are located.

After drybrushing, my Knight looked like this (I apologize for the poor photo, it was tough to not flood the mini with light in my current setup and still have it be bright enough to see the highlights)


Now, I'm no John Madden with scribbling, so please, don't mock me. Here is my best effort to pick up some "bright spots" on Grey Knights.

Before you start painting, you need a nice thing brush.
That is mine, an Army Painter Wargamer: Detail brush. Ignore the painted shoulder pad and purity seal wax, I took this picture much later in painting.

Now that you have your brush, you need to know where to put it. When I do highlights, I often use Mithril Silver on three main places. First, I highlight the head. Just below the eyes, where the two eyes and the "jaw" looking part of the power armor meet, and just above the eyes. Next I move onto the chest. I do just around the book iconography and curve up to just below the runic part of the armor and up on the tip of the collar. I occasionally also do below the usual area on the opposite side of the runes, like in the picture above with the red markings. Lastly, I do small highlights on the legs. On the lower leg, I put thin lines along the edge of the top and on the leg which is facing front (if you put your Grey Knight in its most natural looking pose, generally where the Storm Bolter or face points, the closer of the two legs I paint. If they are both about equal, I will do this on both of them) I lightly draw out a triangle like shape from the top edge and bring it down the leg a bit, just like in the picture in red. I usually don't go down quite that far, but this is all personal preference.

In order to paint these areas, I dip my brush in Mithril Silver so that the very tip and the edges are the only parts with paint. When painting the areas just above the eyes or on top of the leg, I generally use the side, as the "hard-edge" is easy to follow and gives a nice looking highlight. When the surface is more smooth and near areas I don't want to highlight, I will usually use the tip as I need a bit more precision. It is a bit confusing to describe, but use the "flat part" of the brush on the edge when you can but otherwise use the tip. Oh, and be sure to wipe a bit of paint from the brush before painting, you don't want this to go on as thick. I will usually draw a line on my thumbnail, and if it seems alright I'll move to painting the model (instead of making myself look like a pretty girl). After covering the areas I wanted to, my model looked like this: