Help with shading and highlighting dark eldar.

Not a great painter myself, but dry brushing your chosen colour over black seems to work well, it really catches the edges. Once that is done then go around the edges of the armour in the solid colour you chose, seems to look good...

Codex Grey can go down to simple black colors , if you want fast shading then probably go for Badab Black wash. This is not exactly finesse method , but it get good results fast and easy.

Highlighting - here is a little tutorial for you Tutorial.

Main thing with it is - dont deviate that much from original color and keep line as thin as you can. You can do mistakes , thats ok , just fix them.

Oh, and whatevee you do , thin paint more

Here is aslo good web program to help you with rest of your color.
Kuler

I'm mainly a painter so i'll chime in on this one. I have some warriors are up in the aphotic gallery, and i'll be starting a full project log soon, which will have a lot more of the stuff i've done in the last 4 weeks or so. Also, go through that section of the forum there are some amazing DE painters that post here and none are afraid to let you know what and how they did something!


Tips:
1) Do not overload your brush with paint. If you have anymore than 40% of your brush covered in paint, you have too much on; it'll spill onto place you don't want it and you'll have that smear effect you want to avoid.
2) Although TG over uses this expression a lot; water down your paints. 50/50 paint/water - this is for a few reasons. Flow aid, so you don't end up with blobs of acrylic for that smooth finish, and it makes the colour more translucent so it 'blends' (all painters always looking for the perfect blend up, or highlight, so you will NEVER master it!)
3) don't be afraid to low light, so with codex grey, water down adeptus battle grey into almost a wash and use a fine detail brush to go around the armour contours. Alternativly use adeptus as the foundation, then pick out the plates with codex grey
4) Use fortress grey as the highlight, simply put, practice makes perfect. Don't give up trying for those nicely straight lines!

here are a few tutorial vids:

Obsidian Rose Kabalites

Last Hatred Kabal

Just take the techniques you think you can do, want to try and just give them a go! In 6 months time you'll look back at you're work and you WILL see progress.

My thoughts on this.

Codex grey as the base color. OK

What I would recomend if you are feeling a little adventurous is to use Necron Abyss ( or any other very dark blue color with a bit of chaos black as the shade. Thin it down and build up the shade as you like.

Then mix sunburst yellow with skull white till it looks like a soft creme color and add that mix to your base color and then keep building up the highlights till you get to just the creme color as an extreme highlight.

The mix of cold blue with warm yellow will make the model have a little more "Pop" instead of being different shades of grey. The idea will let your base color act as a neutral pallette and then your shade and highlights will make it stand out.

Or you could just add black and white as a shade and highlight.

My 2 pain tokens.