What's your style?
My style?
You can call it the art of blending, without blending.
The art of blending, without blending? Show me some of it.
Alright.
What's up, guys welcome back.
In miniature painting there's a lot of focus on blending and
getting colour transitions as smooth as possible.
You can get some great results going down that road but in many instances you can
create a more compelling effect by embracing a rough approach.
In this video we'll be looking at how you can use layers of texture to build up a rich,
engaging finish that will give your figures depth and life.
To illustrate this we'll take a look at how
I painted the claws on this Kingdom Death witch model.
I've already based the fingers with a
dark Majenta that I made by adding black into some Kimera Majenta.
For our initial highlight we're going to first create a light desaturated
brown tone by mixing a bit of Scale Colour Pale Skin into some Secret Weapon Old Mud.
The Old Mud is a little bit too dark on it's own to use
as a highlight so we add the pale skin to it to make it a bit brighter.
Now that we have that, we'll mix a bit directly into our dark majenta to lighten it.
Giving us this nice desaturated violet tone.
And we'll paint that onto all the raised details on the fingers,
leaving the darker colour showing in the recesses.
Don't worry about blending this out at all, just hit the top parts of all the most obvious
elements, like the knuckles, the flat parts of the fingers. etc.
The idea here is we're going to build up a number of textured layers
each a little more refined than the last and it's the texture that will create out blends for us.
On the palms here I'm going to hit the upper parts of the fleshy part of the hand.
Using these verticle stripes to simulate wrinkles.
And I'll do a similar sort of thing on the thumb,
painting directly over that blue so we create a bit of a transition between the two colours.
Usually the approach people use here is to try and create a smooth gradient using wet blending or
glazing but you can get a good result by simply painting a rough texture directly over the top.
Leaving some of the original colour showing through underneath.
It's actually the texture that will create the blend for you,
simply by stacking multiple overlapping layers.
Add a bit more of your highlight colour into the mix to lighten it.
And we'll go back and start to pick out some of the details.
So here on the knuckles And the top of the finger there.
Notice the way I let the brush bounce slightly on the surface
so that I'm painting a broken line in order to give the impression of some sort of texture.
When you're doing this you always want to think in terms of surface texture.
It's the texture that's going to create your blends but always give the model life.
All the little brush strokes and dots and lines are eventually going to come
together into a cohesive whole so it looks more than the sum of it's parts.
Because the surface isn't smooth your eyes have a lot more information to take in and
they're going to fill in the gaps on their own.
Ultimately resulting in a transition from one colour
to the next. I find when you're focus is on smoothness, it can be quite stressful
because you're in a constant battle with yourself trying to get things perfect.
You can see on the palm I'm trying to bring out the wrinkles we painted earlier,
hitting the upper parts of those fleshy hand sections.
Just painting on lines that roughly follow the ones that are there already.
Try and use the texture from previous layers to guide your brushstrokes, look for patterns on the
surface or little motifs or shapes that interest you and pick those out with your new layers.
Maybe add a highlight or two so that they're more noticable, or
use what's there to give you a better idea.
For example here on the knuckle I quite like the round highlights on top
so I can accentuate that by painting on little circular lines below it to look like wrinkles.
And we can build on that as we add more highlight layers.
Maybe I can add a few blobs of paint here to help connect the
transition between the blue and violet.
That'll help it stop looking so abrupt.
Add a bit more of your highlight into the mix to
lighten it and we'll go back and apply another round of texture.
Here I'm just picking out the top of the knuckles with a little dot
and then we'll paint in some more details on the fingers.
Using both the sculpt and out previous layers to help
guide where our brush strokes are going to go.
At this stage you don't want to make too many solid brushstrokes,
Try and leave a lot of small gaps so that your earlier layers show through underneath.
It's OK to paint over details if you feel like it,
you will lose some of your work with each layer but you still want to retain a healthy
amount of it so that you get that nice depth to your texture, remember your eyes aren't
seeing it as lots of layers stacked on top of each other, they just see the whole thing.
So notice there I didn't paint a solid line,
It was more like a series of small dots to give the illusion of texture.
Just keep thinking about texture as your painting forget about blending.
I find when you're focus is on smoothness, it can be quite stressful because you're in
a constant battle with yourself trying to get things perfect.
By shifting the spotlight onto texture you really
free yourself up as you're no longer that invested in the intricacies of whatever
technique you're using, you have a more direct connection to what you're doing.
You can already see it's starting to look pretty cool,
and that's just with a few layers of unstudied lines and dots.
Add some more of your highlight into the mix to lighten and we'll go back for another layer.
Notice I'm making fairly bit jumps in terms of brightness,
that's so that your eyes can actually see a difference between each layer.
If you're too subtle about it you're not really going to be able to see that much of a change
and you'll lose that impression of texture.
Just try and make each layer you apply be smaller than the previous one.
So you will have to slow down slightly as your highlights get more intense.
That's going to let you put more thought into what you're doing.
Your initial couple of layers are usually quite random but as you add more highlights
you start to see more obvious patterns and details and you can have a lot of fun
refining them with carefully placed brush strokes or a well intentioned dot or two.
If ever you feel you've added too much paint,
you can grab a second brush and just draw the excess paint off the surface before it dries.
You can see on the side of the finger there just how much depth we're starting to get
from the all the various layers of texture stacked on top of each other.
It's a really interesting effect and actually not that hard to do.
So think about where you would find texture on the hand,
have a look at your own and notice how many wrinkles and creases you have on things like
your knuckles or the areas where the fingers bend, try and duplicate that on the model,
in a more exaggerated way, adding texture around those spots.
Maybe I'll add some dots there just to break up the surface.
These two spots are a little disconnected they look quite isolated as if they are
seperate elements but they're all part of the same thing so we can bridge the gap
by simply painting a line or two to connect them.
Alright, so that was quite a simple change but you can see the difference it's made.
Add some more of your highlight colour into the mix and we'll keep building on the texture.
Keep working on building up the highlights, using the texture that's already there to
guide you, but also look out for any opportunities to include new textures.
Maybe there's a spot that looks a bit empty or boring,
you can attack those areas with some dots or lines to boost the detail.
I'm trying to slow down at this stage and study the surfaces a lot more.
You'll find that the textures almost develop by themselves,
that's because you're essentially building on what was actually quite a random starting point, all
you're doing is bringing out the more interesting details from those chaotic early stages.
And you do that by making each new layer smaller and more refined as the colour gets more intense.
Add some Pale Skin into your highlight colour this time,
making it brighter and we'll use that to continue building on the textures.
The colour is quite bright at this point so you need to be
more careful about what you're doing so that you don't lose too much of your previous work,
but also you're highlights need to be quite small or they simply wont make much sense.
These are meant to represent little creases and wrinkles on the skin so if you were just
to have a random giant really white line on there it would look totally out of place.
You're essentially trying to highlight your highlights at this stage.
So you can see we're hitting lines that are already there
and just boosting the brightness slightly.
Adding a small highlight or two to make the detail stand out.
So here on the knuckle I'll add a tiny dot on the top
then a few small semi circles around the edge in order to make those wrinkles more obvious.
And the same idea on the palm,
just adding little highlights along those wrinkle lines to boost the contrast.
It's starting to look pretty sick at this stage. I really like the way it's turning out.
Again we're going to target the lines that are already there and try to highlight them
near the top where they would catch the most light.
You can see this helps to bring out the details and gives them a more realistic effect.
Alright troops, so that is how you can achieve a fairly rich
and detailed effect without employing any overly technical blending techniques.
Let me know what you think n the comments down below,
Subscribe if you're new and I'll see you all in the next video.
Thanks again. Bye for now.