I have not read this yet, but what I assume you’re talking about is shadowing and highlighting base coats by lightening and darkening the original colors to add depth, dimension, and aging to the paint scheme. I use this approach from time to time, as I don’t think it always work on every single project, and I do a lot of very off the wall schemes from time to time. The best and basic way is to do your base coat(s) over the subject, lighten the base color, and focus on the center of the larger areas, avoiding panel outlines, and coming back with a darkened version of the base coat, and doing essentially a post shade around the panel lines. This does add depth and dimension to your paint scheme, but there’s another way that I’ve seen and tried it that works equally as well.
Before you shoot your base coat, go ahead and lighten the color right off the bat, and shoot your entire project in the lightened version of your base coat. Once that’s cured, use the paint as it is right out of the bottle, and come back around the panel areas at a big of a distance to darken the general areas around the outsides of the panels, and panel lines. Essentially just following the general direction of the panel lines. Once that’s finished, darken the base color, and get closer for finer, more accurate lines, and do the post shade as you would any other time. This is essentially still doing the same thing, you’re just starting off with the lightened color, and slowly darkening as you go, until you zoom into the dark post shade project. I personally think this method is a little bit better, because you don’t have to be so careful or neat by trying to color in the panels with the lighter colors after shooting the plain base coat first. You’re essentially just doing a basic post shade, then a focused post shade, gradually darkening. The biggest factor to remember, no matter how you approach this method, is to make sure that your paints are really thin. Like, really thin!!! If not, the transitions don’t blend, and it’ll look splotchy in the areas that you focused on. You essentially want the colors thin enough to where they almost come out like filters to contrast the color that you’re darkening or highlighting. The true method is pulled off best when you can use thin paints, and control the amount that you’re laying down. Sometimes less is more when you’re pulling this off, and always remember not to focus too much in one general area, as paint has a tendency to go lighter or darker once dried. If you feel like it’s not doing anything, simply move onto another area, and come back to it in five minutes, and check again. Sometimes you’ll find that you did the right thing by not adding more paint, as it just needed time to cure. Here’s a project that I used it on with doing the IAF paint scheme, and I was satisfied with the results. I used the first method that I explained above for this one.
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As far as panel line washing. You can always use that if you desire the effect, as it doesn’t really take away from the paint effect. While the post shading does do it’s far share of work in showing off the panel lines, sometimes there’s a lot of really nice detail that post shading alone won’t pick up in smaller scales. That’s when it’s nice to have the actual wash help to bring those out. You’ll have some people swear that washing out panel lines is not ‘accurate’ or that it looks too stark, but I say that if you’re going to spend the money for all the detail of a really nice kit, then it’s usually better to show them off, as oppose to trying to keep them hidden for the sake of “realism”. I think just a really mild wash is all that’s warranted though. Sometimes people go too stark, and it does look a bit unnatural, but if you find a good balance for it, then you get the intended effect.
