Hello guys! Welcome back to Not Just Mecha, it s Marco here, and this video is about gratitude,
awareness, fear and enlightenment and how even the small, apparently frivolous reality
of miniature painting often runs on these huge concepts that permeate art history,
because art is art, no matter the size! And don t worry, it s also about actual painting!
But, let s start from the beginning and the more concrete, material stuff!
This model is from the Italian Mindwork Games, and since out of the box the cast was absolutely
perfect, with a bit of epoxy putty around the few major joints I can immediately move to the fun
part!
Ok, not this one THIS ONE!
I always put a lot emphasis on the underpainting and its technical versatility, but to sustain and
prove a few important ideas, for this project I want to deliver a very specific learning
and painting experience based on conceptual and procedural simplicity, so in this case the white
is here only to infuse the brush work and all the next layers with a playful, diffused luminosity,
and the colours with a powerful vibrancy, so, even if less passively modulated,
you can obtain pretty similar results simply painting directly over a white primer!
And while the paint job basically develops itself in the simple flow
of layering the basic blocks of the scheme I can go a bit deeper about why I felt the
need to make this mini series and this first episode in particular.
Mindwork Games is an integral part of this project and not a sponsorship partner!
You know from my videos that I don t like sponsorships, especially for silly stuff
non related to the miniature world like cereals or mobile games and even when I talk about about
paints and materials I buy my own stuff to have the freedom to say whatever I want,
so following the same logic I chose to showcase the production of the Mindwork team because they
are friends and we are actively pursuing the exact same goal of turning this strange thing we do more
and more into an established form of art, through an high quality output and cultivating an open,
healthy and proactively helpful and positive environment for all the painters out there.
And their latest project perfectly shows this ethic! The Mermaid will be released around the
Kontrast Festival that will take place the first weekend of June in Warsaw, Poland and all the
profits from the sale will be donated to this relatively new event to help its future growth
and all the amazing work its staff is doing locally to promote and diffuse this culture.
As a side note, I ll be there too and for the exact same reasons giving free painting
demonstrations, so come to say hi and stay for the amazing models at the show!
Mindwork is also releasing new incredible sculpts one after another with an unrelentless pace;
these are only the releases for April! Crazy pieces based on the paintings of
equally crazy fantasy artists. Seeing a Frazetta piece rendered in 3D is always
mind blowing a concept that you know I adore, but for this round I went with the humble
and realistic Pizza Boy for very specific teaching reasons that will soon be clear.
Of course you can find all the links in the description with a juicy discount code!
For purely symbolic reasons, this is the video I would have loved to publish at
the very beginning of year, you know, the new beginning trope and the new good intentions,
but at the time I didn t have all the pieces of the puzzle that came to me only after the
last couple of workshops, and my first big public events, WarhammerFest and AdeptiCon in particular
and YOU, you guys have been the source of the enlightenment I was looking for!
I better understood the strange dynamic of the bizarre relationship we are sharing here,
because now I see it, this is a relationship! And I ve seen how the videos represent something
different for each of us; for me they started as a creative outlet and a way to share my
work in the spirit of if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it,
does it make a sound? and now they are something new, but seen through your eyes they become a
multitude of extremely different things, because you live them and use them in different ways.
So, talking with you left me with a new awareness of what I want the channel
and this amazing community to be and of course a huge sense of gratitude for all
the people that made this possible, simply watching the videos or directly supporting
my work on Patreon or buying my pieces! Honestly, I consider myself the luckiest man on
the planet and gratitude has become the fuel of my work and my days as much as creativity itself and
the basic, visceral need to share this passion and bring more people into the hobby, so, in a simpler
and more explicit way, THANK YOU! And I ll keep working with this in mind trying to keep thanking
you with useful and I hope entertaining stuff. But this is not just a convoluted way to thank
the community! This is the first step of what I would like to focus on from now on
In the extreme subjectivity of your living the videos and I believe the hobby in general
there is a dark constant which I started to actively keep track of and that in words and
conversations takes the form of I m afraid of : fill the blank with your personal nemesis .
Fear of a medium, fear of a model, fear of a colour or a scheme, fear of a technique,
fear of competitions you name it! From my privileged point of view on the community
I ve seen every possible version, or combination! And the irony of this kind of fear is that you are
all well aware that you can adjust or cover any mistake with a few brushstrokes or a new layer of
paint or in the worst case scenario, stripping the model without any consequence in the grand scheme
of your life and the universe, but still, this self-inflicted, irrational fear is always there.
And here s where the choice of the Pizza Boy and this workflow come from! The guys at Mindwork told
me that even if they have 3D models of Patrick Jones and Frazetta paintings in their range a
guy in a hoodie is perceived by the public as their most fearfully difficult piece!!!
I cannot accept this! Have you seen something scary in this process?
This first stage is so simple that I can just run it in the background and talk about other stuff!
See what I've done? And I want to keep you in this state of mind in every subsequent episode
and stage of the work where I ll try to make this a display slash competition piece without
triggering your fight or flight response! Ok, let s go back to the practical stuff!
This is cool! On the quote unquote white parts of the hoodie I want to render the
feel of acetate with its intrinsic natural shimmer, so I mix a bit of a high value
silver with subtle and very transparent contrast tones. The Scale75 super fine
metallic pigments uniformly disperse into the mix and in a single pass I get the foundation
for this slightly metallic, reflective effect on which I build up new information later!
And I use oil paint to establish the skin tone. I get a ton of requests for recipes
for dark skin tones and I can honestly tell that you are overthinking the subject!
In the same way as orange and white can give you a good starting point for a simple pinkish-salmon
healthy caucasian skin, using an out of the tube lively reddish brown is a perfectly viable option
to establish the midtones of a dark skin. I use oils with their satin vibe to introduce
a subtle difference between the finishes of the clothes, usually mat because of how
finely interwoven fibres absorb light, and natural oily human skin! And I use the combo of a thick,
staining imprimatura and the physical removal of paint from the light areas
to create a rough tonal underpainting with the colour left in the shadows!
A couple of passes deliver a nice basic tone modulated by the interaction with the sketch,
and a great base to work later with more interesting lights and shadows.
I close this initial phase with a light, quick pass of matt varnish to simply uniform the finish
of the different products I ve used, obviously avoiding the skin in oils and the shiny sleeves!
I know it s strange to close a video without a peek of the final piece, but I want to create
a bit of suspense and expectation around the next steps so if this is your first video,
trust me, I know what I m doing and stay tuned for the next step by step!
For the veterans, I want to work more often on this kind of longer and more articulate projects
for their immense teaching and learning value, but the single video format cannot properly contain
all the stuff I usually want to say about a forty or fifty hours project, so I hope
you ll enjoy this experimental ride that will probably take this month of content to develop!
After a lot of resistance I m also seriously considering
Twitch for this kind of subjects So let's see what happens!