What's up guys, welcome back!
Today we're going to be starting a little series on this elf I painted.
I tried to apply some interesting colour tricks throughout so that you'll have some cool new
ideas to try out.
As usual we'll be starting off on the face.
For the base coat I've used some GW Cadian Flesh tone and to that I applied a very small
amount of black.
This is Valejo Model colour black but the brand you use wont have that much effect on
the outcome so you can use whatever you have, without an issue.
Then we'll slap that onto the face. You can see it covers a lot better than the Fantasy
& Games paint that I usually use.
The reason I add to black to the base coat is because I want to desaturate the paint
slighty, or dull it down.
That's going to make the colour that we add later on, seem more intense which will allow
us to get more definition in the details.
Alright so the next thing we'll do is apply some initial shadows.
For that we'll use some GW Doombull Brown and we'll mix some of that into our base colour.
It gives us this nice reddy brown tone.
We'll paint that into the eye sockets.
Now this is a female face so we don't want our shadows to be too dark.
Women have softer features than men so they tend to have less harsh shadows.
I'll put a bit of that shadow under the nose.
And up here into the recesses of the ears.
So at this stage we're just mapping out where our shadows are going to be, don't worry so
much about getting this all perfectly blended.
I'll also add a shadow under the chin and on the neck. And that's about it
for the shadows for now.
For the highlights we're going to use some Fantasy & Games Moonray Flesh and mix it into
the base colour.
I'm not sure if there's an exact match in the GW line but if you add some white to kislev
flesh you'll get pretty close.
You want the consistency to be fairly thin, with a bit of elasticity to it, it should
react similar to the way it does here on my palette.
We'll push the highlight into position, drawing it up over the forehead towards the top of
the hairline.
Don't worry about hitting the hair, you can clean it up when you paint that section later
on.
Then we'll do the same sort of thing under the eyes just picking out the top of the cheekbones.
On the other side there's actually a strand of hair that overlaps onto the face.
If you're ever painting something like this and there's a detail from another part of
the model covering it, don't try and paint around the detail, just paint over as if it
wasn't there.
I'll also do the top lip, pull the paint into the centre.
So you can see the general process I'm using it pretty similar to what I did on the twilight
detective.
But we're going to end up with quite a different look, once we get to some of the later steps.
I did the ears by pulling the paint up to the tips of the ears like this.
I wont bother showing the whole process on the ears because it's essentially the same
as the face, just building up the highlight towards the tips.
I don't want to bore you too much.
Mix a little bit more Moonray Flesh into your highlight. And we'll go back to push the highlights
a bit more.
And you can see I'm hitting the same areas, towards the top of the head, the top of the
cheek bones, and the middle of the face, so the tip of the nose and the middle of the
upper lip.
Just ignore the jaw line and the chin for now.
Add a bit more Moonray Flesh into your mix and continue the process of building up those
highlights.
So the reason I'm using the Fantasy And Games paint here in the highlight is that it has
a really transparent quality to it, more so that in GW or Valejo paints.
so I find getting those smooth transitions on such a small area much easier.
You can start to see the details on the face getting more defined now.
For the last highlight we'll use Moonray Flesh on its own.
I try to be pretty careful for this last step so that I keep the highlights quite small.
If you find when you place the highlight that you've left with a bit of a hard edge on the
lower side of the highlight, you can quickly grab a second brush and gently tease the lower
edge of the paint away from the highlight just by moving the tip of the brush into the
paint, then drawing it backwards with a bit of a back and forth motion.
The face will start to look a bit pasty and pale at this stage but don't worry about that.
We'll add some colour soon and that will give a lot more life to it.
Alright so that's the highlights done, next we'll sort out the shadows.
To do that we'll add a bit of water to our shadow colour, thinning it down to a glaze
consistency.
Then with hardly any on the brush I'll pull it down over the jaw line to help blend out
the edge of the shadow under the chin.
I'll also put some of the glaze here under the check bone, pushing it towards the neck.
That'll help to give some more shape to the cheeks. I'm not going to spend a lot of time
on that because we'll be going back later with another colour.
I'll do the eyes now, we'll start with the whites and for that we're going to mix up
a light green colour by mixing some of that Moonray flesh into some P3 Underbelly Blue,
which is just a light blue colour, you could mix any random blue into some white and get
basically the same thing.
Notice I'm reusing one of the colours we've already used elsewhere on the face.
It's not so important to do it on such a tiny element as the eyes but reusing paints for
different parts of the model is a good habit to get into.
If you want your paintjobs to have a cohesive look to them.
The reason we're using a light green is because the rest of the paint on the face are quite
warm so I'm making the eyes cold to get decent contrast.
You could also use a light blue or purple.
Alright so we'll paint that colour onto the eyeballs.
And like I've said before, when I'm painting eyeballs I like to target the left side of
the eye and draw the brush to the right as if I was painting a small line.
Then I go back in and try to refine the shape of it.
The key thing is to make sure you leave a dark outline around the eyeball to frame it.
That way it'll stand out from a distance.
Alright now that the shape is ok.
I'll grab a pretty bright blue, this is Adriatic blue from the scale colour line.
I want her to have quite a suspicious shifty sort of a look so I'm going to target the
right side of the eyeball to make it seem like she's looking off to the side giving
someone the sly side eye.
So that's ok, but I want to be able to place a highlight on the pupil so I'll make it slightly
bigger than that.
Notice I have quite a lot of paint on the brush, that's so it doesn't dry out on the
tip while I'm trying to get the brush into position.
Here I try to do the other one but end up painting half the eyesocket blue.
When that happen, quickly grab a second damp brush and use it like an erasure.
Rubbing it over the surface, to pull the wet paint away so it doesn't have time to dry
in place.
I had to do this eyeball off cam so I could get the angle right but I thought I'd leave
this part in so you can see how to employ a bit of crisis management.
Alright so her forehead is looking a bit like those blokes off the old tefal adverts right
now.
So we're gonna fix that by taking some of the shadow glaze we used earlier and we'll
draw the down towards the eyes just at the base of the forehead.
Using a second brush to draw the edge of the glaze away.
So the goal here is to just add some colour to the lower half of the forehead to help
break up that massive expanse of smooth highlight.
Ok, so I'm liking how that's starting to look but the forehead is still looking quite barren
and massive so we'll take that same colour with a slightly thicker consistency and add
a few little dots on that right side of the face, to simulate freckles.
That should help to make it a bit less bruh, and a bit more awwwwwwhhhh awhhhhhhh.
Yep I think that looks pretty cool.
To continue we'll keep adding more colour to the face, this time a more obvious red
tone.
This here is Deep Red from Scale Colour and I'll add some water to it, thinning it to
a glaze consistency.
Now we're going to use that here on the underside of the checkbone, pushing it back towards
the ears.
That helps to make the face more interesting, as it adds an extra colour.
It also helps to better define the shape of the cheek.
To continue we'll introduce another colour to the face, this time a light Turquoise.
This is Carribbean Blue from scale colour and we'll again thin it down to a glaze consistency
with some water.
And with very little on the brush we'll draw the glaze down over the lower third of the
face, down towards the jaw line.
And we'll do this over a few layers until we like the look. Now, you have to be careful
here that you don't make this look like she has a beard.
What you're going for is a subtle colour shift and a bit of a shadow. It is going to look
slightly like a 5 o'clock shadow on the video but that's because you're going to be viewing
it in isolation.
Later on we're going to be blocking large sections of the model with that same turquoise
and that's going to make it fade back and the colours will make more sense.
So why does this happen? Well, lets say you have a light background colour like this,
quite similar to the skin tone we're painting.
And you add in a subtle but quite differrent colour on top, in our case a turquoise.
That colour stands out a mile because your eyes have nothing to compare it to other than
the colours that are already there.
But if you place some more of that colour in a more obvious in your face way.
Suddenly that subtle flash of torquoise is no longer as obvious.
Because your eyes have something to compare it to. However, even though it's not that
obvious, you would still notice if I took it away.
So if we have a look at the face on it's own, she looks like she's got a 5 o'clock shadow.
But as we begin to add the surrounding areas in using way more intense versions of that
colour, it seems to disappear.
Colours are not static, the way we perceive them can change based on the context of their
surroundings.
Let's look at another quick example of this sort of thing. Look at this green square,
nothing out of the ordinary.
Now look at this green square, again, nothing to report.
However when we view them both together, it's pretty obvious that the green square on the
left is darker than the one on the right.
But.. if I take the surrounding colours away, we can see, that they're actually exactly
the same.
This is because the way our eyes experience the green is relative to the context we are
viewing it.
A colour surrounded by lighter hues will appear darker.
And vice versa to it's when surrounded by darker colours.
We'll look at other ways to apply these kinds of ideas in future videos.
Alright guys so that is another approach to painting a face, I hope you give it a try.
Just a wee bit of colour theory shennanigans at the end there to keep you on your toes.
I quite like the idea of adding the odd bit of theory to the end of videos, we'll see
if I can keep that going.
In the next video we'll have a look at how to get that vibrant blue on the hair, then
we'll be going over how to achieve the coloured white shirt and the Turquoise dress.
Stay tuned in the mean time and thank you once again for all your generous support.
Take it easy.. Bye for now...