simple technique.
We'll start off with a dark reddy brown colour by mixing a bit of Scale Colour red leather
into some Brown Leather.
And we'll thin that down with some water so it flows off the brush and doesn't obscure
any details.
Paint that onto the model over a couple of layers until you get a nice even coverage.
Instead of blocking highlights in, then blending them out with texturing, our strategy here
is going to involve building up our highlights using texturing and only texturing.
Which is actually a much faster process. And because it's less technical it tends be to
easier to execute.
So once you've got the base coat down.
The first highlight is made by mixing a bit of the original flesh colour into the brown,
and I used tallarn flesh for that but you can use whatever paint you used on the skin.
Now the idea is to paint this on using overlapping horizontal lines.
Just painting them onto all the areas where you want to build up a highlight.
I'll mostly show this on the back of the legs, but it's just the same thing on the front
really.
At this initial stage you want to cover up most of the surface with your lines, with
the idea being that you'll gradually refine them as you build up the colour of the highlights.
So like most things you start off with quite a broad almost ham fisted approach, then gradually
get smaller and more careful as your colour gets more intense.
Apply these over a couple of layers, especially if you're using scale colour.
Scale colour is highly transparent. Generally need to apply a few layers to get a decent
coverage.
If you've seen my pig bust video on leather this is a similar sort of idea, but much more
simple.
We're not painting leather here but the general idea of stacking layers of texture on top
of each other is basically the same.
So if you enjoy this approach and want to attempt a more fleshed out method to get a
more complex effect definitely check out that video.
For the next highlight we're going to add a bit more of the flesh colour into the mix
and we'll keep adding our lines.
This time focusing more on the areas where we want our highlights to be more pronounced.
So along the back of the thighs, the top of the calf muscles and the back of the ankles.
The tighter you make your lines, the more solid the colour will appear.
So make the lines tight where you want the strongest colour and then allow them to spread
out slightly and you move away from that point.
Careful not to make these lines too large or too thick because you'll spoil the effect,
so use a good brush with a fine tip, be gentle and don't apply pressure on the bristles.
That'll ensure you get nice clean, sharp brush strokes.
Being able to control the pressure you exert on the brush while you're painting is a fundamental
skill.
It's not often brought up in miniature painting tutorials but pressure is very important.
Easing up on the brush and being more gentle will allow you to leave less paint on the
surface.
Thus you can control the transparency somewhat by altering how much pressure you apply.
In short, more pressure means more paint.
Note here that you can paint the texture lines on with either fairly thick or thin paint.
Thin paint will require more layers to cover the surface and thus will take longer to do.
But it generally gives you more control and tends to be a bit easier to get a more refined
result.
As it's a lot easier to control the transparency of the lines.
On the other hand, thicker paint will allow you to create the effect a lot faster but
it'll be slightly harder to do as it requires a more nuanced brush control.
If using a thicker consistency, you'll need to take more care about the amount of pressure
you're using on the brush.
By adopting a lighter touch you'll be able to leave less paint on the surface and in
that way you have some control over the coverage.
Add a bit more Tallarn Flesh and we'll keep going with the texturing.
Here, I'm trying to make the lines a bit shorter than the previous layer so we create a transition.
If you make your lines all the same size you'll just cover up your last highlight and end
up with a single colour.
A nice way to approach this is to lay down a row of lines, leaving them all slightly
spaced out.
Then go back in for another pass and fill in some of the gaps in the areas where you
want to create the strongest highlight.
That's what I'm doing here, see the way I'm essentially painting over the texture on the
top of the calf, filling in some of the gaps.
That's because I want highlight at the top of the calf to be stronger, so I simply add
more of the paint in that area.
Notice we're starting to get quite a nice texturing effect coming through after only
a few layers of highlight.
You can spend as much time refining this as you like, doing it fairly quickly will still
get you a pretty decent effect for tabletop, it's really up to you how much effort you
want to put into it.
Mix some more Tallarn flesh into the highlight.
And we'll keep doing essentially the same thing, this time making our lines a bit more
refined that in the previous step.
Each time you add more of the flesh colour into the highlight you want to reduce the
size of your lines slightly so that you're covering a smaller surface area.
That way you create a layering effect where you can still see the texture from all the
previous highlights so you get a gradual increase in the intensity of the colour.
You can see that we're starting to build up quite a nice effect now, and that's all just
with lines, so there's been no fancy wet blending or fiddly glazing, we're just layering lines
on top of more lines.
When you're layering normally it's quite easy for your eye to see where one layer ends and
the next one begins, but when you're layering with texture like this it's much harder to
notice those steps between colours because your eyes have a lot more to look at.
I might look a bit rough zoomed in like this but remember that the model is actually pretty
small so when you're viewing it in context it'll look a lot more subtle than it actually
is.
If you're painting with any kind of magnification, don't forget to stop occasionally and look
at the model normally so you get an idea of what it actually looks like.
There's a tendency to get tunnel vision and really zone out when you're focusing on one
little area, so it's good to take a step back and assess how you're doing from time to time.
Here you can see on the front it's exactly the same process, just painting horizontal
lines where we want to build up the highlights.
For the last highlight we'll mix in a bit of the highlight colour we used on the flesh,
for that I used some Valejo Sunny skin tone mixing with some Valejo Ivory to get this
very light orangey yellow.
And I simply mixed a bit of that into the highlight colour to lighten it.
This was painted that on in exactly the same way, using our little horizontal lines.
You can see we're using really small controlled lines for this.
Especially when you compare them to the ones we used in our initial highlight.
This whole process is actually a good way to approach painting in general, you want
to start off with quite broad strokes, then gradually refine things as you build up the
colour and detail.
And we'll do the same on the back, painting on those small refined strokes onto the brightest
parts of our highlights.
I'm being quite gentle with the brush here to ensure that I'm using the very tip of the
bristles.
That way we keep our lines thin and controlled.
So make sure you're using a good brush for this.
If you're interested in the one that I'm using there's a link in the description below, if
you want to pick one up.
If you've never tried this sort of technique where you're layering texture on top of texture,
absolutely give it a go, it's a lot less fiddly than trying to get perfectly smooth blends,
you can obviously spend even more time on it and refine it further with more lines,
it just depends how much time you want to invest in it and that's totally up to you.
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Ok I'm going now, bye!