From the brushstroke at the forge to the first die roll.
The ultimate color companion app for tabletop gamers and hobby painters alike.
Explore a universe of color, forge and manage your painter's hoard.
Highlights & Shadows
Heed the words of the ancient masters: a flat coat of paint is but cold, unworked steel. It is in the interplay of absolute darkness and searing light that a model's soul is truly forged. Proper highlights and shadows are the hammer blows that shape a masterpiece. This tool is your anvil and bellows, a place to command the elements and bend them to your will.
Choose your base color and watch as the Forge generates a cascade of molten highlights and abyssal shades. Ascend beyond the simple path of adding black and white; here, you can practice true color alchemy. Heed the sacred words—two thin coats—as you test your creation upon the spectral warrior and witness your scheme's power before committing it to your unpainted legions.
How to use the Highlights & Shadows Generator
Select any paint from the database as your base colour, or enter a custom hex code, and the generator calculates a full range of highlights and shadows using colour-theory principles. Crucially, it applies hue shifting — warm highlights, cool shadows, or vice versa — not just lightening and darkening, giving results that match the approach studio painters use to make a model look lit rather than simply lighter and darker.
Use the sliders to control the number of highlight and shadow steps, target lightness values, saturation adjustment, and colour-temperature shift, so you can replicate realistic lighting without experimenting on a real miniature first. The base paint's estimated colour temperature — Warm, Cool, or Neutral — is shown as a chip, and you can shift the highlight and shadow temperatures independently to simulate directional lighting. Every generated swatch is matched back to a real paint from your collection or the full database, so each result is a buyable colour rather than a theoretical hex value. Click any swatch to see its closest paint matches, and use the H1, H2, S1, S2 buttons on each swatch to assign it to a specific slot in the preview palette. Preview the full scheme on the sample figure before committing it to your models. A single Reset button restores all sliders to their defaults.
What's the difference between this and just adding black and white?
Adding black or white only changes value and tends to look flat or chalky. This tool also shifts hue and saturation to mimic how light temperature affects real surfaces, for a more lifelike result.
Are the suggested highlights real paints?
Yes. Each step is matched to the closest real paint from the database or your own collection, so every swatch is something you can buy or already own.
Can I control how many highlight and shadow steps I get?
Yes. Sliders set the number of steps plus target lightness, saturation, and colour temperature, so you can match any painting style.
Can I preview the scheme before painting?
Yes. The generated palette previews on a sample figure so you can judge the full range before committing it to a miniature.