Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha, it s Marco here and today we continue painting
clean illustrational models using brush as an airbrush!
You know that I love airbrushing, but all that the airbrush can do, you can do it with
the brush and not the other way around and I m not talking about some crazy workflow
with oil paints but of simple classic acrylics! When you deeply understand the paints and
tools you are using you become able to recreate a style in infinite, really personal ways
and this video that s a love letter to artistic exploration continues and expands the topics
of the previous one so consider them as a single entity that you can watch in any order!
To prove my point, I used not only a similar clean illustrational approach but also the
same major colours and general scheme, with a completely different practical workflow
that will make the joy of hardcore brush painter. This incredible model is from Terrible Kids
Stuff and their line of crazy little goblins of the Greenskull Castle project that s live
on Kickstarter in this precise moment! I went for the strong warm sensations of a
desert theme to push on the contrast and irony of a goblin impersonating a dwarf and a finish
full of textures and crazy cross hatching inspired by the comic covers of the 90 to
give the idea of the dry environment and the hard life of this little guy.
The result is a totally different story created with the same building blocks .
Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE and hit the bell button to always know what happens on the
channel and if you want to support my work, like, comment, share watch another video and
maybe check my Patreon page where you can find the real time footage of my videos with
every single little line and brushstroke! Thanks a million guys!
I always recommend to beginners and intermediate painters to think about light and values,
and colours as two separate entities. They obviously work together, and in the final
model they arrive to your eyes at the same time, but it s much easier to work them in
separate stages to better understand their relative weight and contribute to the different
stories and sensations you want to deliver. We usually work with a balanced use of both
but there are situations where colour is everything and stories where values and volumes are all
you need to explain your point. Studying these extremes is easy to understand how powerful
and complex they are, even in their pure form and that s why most of the times I show you
a complete separation of the two things setting first the general sketch in black and white
and then applying colours on top of it. But in this case the story I want to tell
and the image I have in mind are extremely unbalanced towards warm tones and sensations
so I feel the need to fix a foundational warmth from the very beginning using a warmer version
of the usual white primer. This is just a simple, general flat coat of
primer and I m using the airbrush only to speed up this step and because I don t have
a spray can of this kind of colour, so don t worry, from now on you ll see only brushwork.
By the way prepare to be blown away by the next step!
Two years of channel and more than one hundred videos and this is the first time you see
me using premade GW washes and this is a faithful representation of how and how often I use
them in my everyday work. I add also to the palette a good amount of medium that I ll
use in every new step to ease my mixes and their flow on the model. You can use any kind
of medium; in this case I m using JoSonja Magic Mix because it has inside a bit of matte
varnish that helps obtaining a solid matte finish in every layer but you can easily obtain
the same adding a drop of varnish inside your medium.
As miniature painters when we think about zenithal lights and quick value sketches we
think about airbrush and spray cans but these ideas were a thing way before the advent of
sprayed effects, even in miniature painting and this is a trick to obtain a similar result
with a similarly quick and easy application using only the brush.
I prepare my first general wash adding a good amount of medium and few drops of water to
a little pool of seraphim sepia. This colour has a powerful yellow note, perfect to boost
from the beginning the tone of the warm light of a cartoony desert. And I apply it on the
whole model in a uniform way pushing paint inside the details and trying to avoid pools
and smudges. The idea is to start defining the largest elements and shapes with a first
delicate value modulation mostly created by the sculpt and I don t use the original opacity
and covering power of this colour because even if in a simplified way I want to keep
full control on the evolution of this sketch. And here is the result of this first application!
It s all about controlling the opacity of the paint and the second layer is still Seraphim
Sepia but a bit more concentrated, with less medium and water, and I use the mix in a more
conscious and controlled way hitting only deeper details and the lower and the most
hidden parts of each volume. I repeat this same application a couple of
times quickly fixing each fluid layer with the blow dryer and I end up with something
like this where details are defined by different dynamic intensities and opacities, and volumes
start getting a higher contrast and a more three dimensional feel.
I apply the same idea, dilution and process to the darker tone of Agrax reducing every
time the area of application to better define the deepest details and shadows.
And this is the result of a couple of passes of the darker tone. In few minutes of work,
I get a zenithal rendering of volumes that has nothing to envy to the sprayed version
and a very precise dark definition of every single little element, honestly better than
anything that I can create with an airbrush. I move to contrast paints to set the main
blocks of the scheme. I applied the washes before the basic colours
because, changing the order of addends in this case really changes the sum! The bright
colours keep all their power and vibrancy because they don t get new desaturated pigments
on top filtering and toning down their information; they still merge with the previous values
in transparency, but they remain the clean, saturated top layer!
Like in the previous video I really don t care about solid base tones or mid tones and
even in this initial stage I m aiming to a modulated version of the basic scheme using
transparent paints made even more fluid and translucent through dilution.
You can argue that using contrast paints I don t need the sketch because they are made
to create a similar kind of modulation inside details but even if I like these paints they
are not incredible as advertised. Even in the deepest recesses and the maximum concentration
of paint possible they still deliver only a slightly darker version of themselves so
if you want to use their full potential you must push on their transparency and their
ability to fuse information from different layers in this case, the value sketch. In
addition, increasing and working with their fluidity and transparency I can use different
tones wet on wet to create a quick chromatic and extra value modulation that again has
nothing to envy to the finest and most precise airbrushing.
I use Aggaros Dunes to base the non-metallic bronze with a darker tone and this is the
only spot where I use it directly from the pot simply because I find non-metal easier
to work starting from a dark mid tone or the first shadows.
If you compare the result with the airbrushed version of the previous video before lights
and highlights with oils you can clearly see that the visual output is almost identical,
and, you have to trust me on this, even the relative time needed to arrive to this point
is almost the same. I have a saturated but blurred rendering of the scheme unbalanced
towards the first darker lights, mid tones, and every level of shadow ready for the final
stage of lights and highlights that will bring back all the balance of values creating the
definitive high contrast and all the missing light definition and details!
I mentioned this idea in the previous video, but thanks to this more linear process and
the use of acrylics and brush for the whole paintjob I think the concept is a bit easier
to understand here: all my steps and layers are based on increasing
levels of opacity, a flow starting with the first super translucent wash that culminates
in the totally opaque extreme light of pure titanium white from the tube on the non-metallic
metal. In this stage I just came from the transparency
of diluted contrast so even if I m using aggressively opaque paints what I m really bringing to
the model now is something like this and that powerful opacity will become useful little
by little in the next stages. It doesn t matter what kind of medium or process
you are using, when you start painting lighter mid-tones, lights and highlights every little
movement of the brush becomes extremely important because that s what really delivers the finish
of your painting. You can hide almost every crime in the dark
tones and working in 3D, in the hidden surfaces of the shadows even actively using the lack
of brushstrokes and definition to create the illusion of darker values swallowing the information,
but lights reveal details, textures and even the consistency of the materials that s why
this is the stage where I always invest most of my time both in speed painting and the
classic work. Here I m painting a wrinkly old goblin that lives and fight in the desert
and I really don t need smoothness for this kind of picture, so everything is painted
with the tip of the brush, little semi-transparent dots, and short sharp lines on the wrinkles.
As promised, to make the new lighter applications more and more visible and relevant I increase
their opacity reducing the level of dilution to something like this. It s not a classic
layering and for sure it s not a glazing by dotting because of this high opacity, but
something in between meant to quickly build a dense visible texture without becoming too
obvious. All my colours are bright, saturated, and
warm to maintain the coherency of the desert theme and its light. And as I explained in
the previous video, I keep my mixing to a minimum to keep every bit of the original
saturation of my paints. Even my selection of tones for the blue skirt moves into a greenish
turquoise and even in the mid stages I add a bit of green or yellow inside everything
to maintain the sensations of the warm environment and its oppressive heat.
Thanks to the well-planned preparatory work the only real challenge in this stage is the
non-metallic metal but that s always a challenge in probably every situation, lol.
I start from the small areas of bracers and trophies to find a good balance of contrasts
that later I can transfer and increase on the axes. Scale75 Peanut Butter is one of
my favourite colours for non-metallic bronze and gold; I like firmer consistencies for
this kind of applications but, like the old Snakebite Leather, it has a great balance
of yellow, orange, and brown with a medium saturation that s easily modulated adding
white or black and browns to create strong lights and shadows.
In the context of the non-metallic elements, I want to keep the focus on the weapons and
more in general on beard, hair and skin so instead of a super shiny yellow gold I m looking
for a dull bronze kind of look where I can use a lower contrast and more desaturated
tones that will keep these small elements in their secondary place without stealing
the stage from the focal points. These are the only mixes where I added a good
quantity of pure white to tone down their saturation and even the highlights on the
wrapping on the axes handles contain less pure white.
The use of white in general is extremely contained here because I don t want to introduce too
many cold tones or even cold sensations that can easily spoil the effect of the fiery environment.
For the same reason I didn t use pure black but only dark browns and their overlapped
opacity. My brushstrokes and application style have
been heavily focused on thick paint and textures in the whole paintjob, even working on the
small elements of the non-metallic gold, but on the large flat open areas of the blades
I have to switch to a subtle use of more transparent mixes and to a sketch and refine flow that
lets me quickly fix big blocks of lights but with soft edges easy to blend and fix later.
I also really like the visual effect of the sketch that create the sensation of extra
random reflections and the natural movements of the light.
With the general light in place it s just a matter of working inside the shapes making
the light of every block lighter and lighter and every shadow darker and darker to create
the final contrast. I close the work with the whitest white ever
created to paint the highest and sharpest edges and to add the extreme sparks of reflected
lights that will make you hear a bling in your head when you see the model.
Again white and this white in particular is used only here to bring contrast and value
jumps to the maximum and since there isn t this kind of light anywhere else the coherency
of the light s progression is maintained and its effect is multiplied by the contrast of
quantity and quality! And here s the final result! A fun twist on
old school techniques updated to the modern era and to the most common tools of miniature
painters and a little provocation for all those modelers convinced that airbrushing
unlocks secret powers and exclusive unfair techniques.
The brush is the ultimate painting tool still more or less the same as when it was invented
and everything inside the infinite realm of painting originates from or can easily be
reduced to the humble brush, you just need to creative with it. If you have your goal
clear in mind and a good grasp of the properties of paints and tools you like to use, it doesn
t matter what they are if you have fun using them, well you can always find a way to create
what you want, plus, if you are not a content creator making painting videos, nobody cares
how you obtain the result, so have fun and don t stress too much.