Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha, it s Marco here and today we talk again about
advanced colour theory and how to tackle any project with the mindset of a true artist!
I must reveal a dark, terrible secret This channel was not created to help you become
better painters this channel was created to help me become a better painter the fact that
you are improving is just a side effect! I know it sounds like a joke for the introduction
but yeah it s more or less the truth! I am a firm supporter of the Feynman Technique,
a learning model based on the idea of conveying information using concise thoughts and simple
language where you explain the concept you are learning to an imaginary, or in this case
even better, a real audience, to find gaps in your knowledge, fill those gaps and internalise
the subject in the process. All my old videos about colour theory have
been made following this need to consciously explain and recap to myself the chaotic cloud
of knowledge I ve accumulated on the subject and after almost two years I think the whole
series needs a good update and reboot and of course new episodes! And not only because
I have overcome my crippling fear of the camera!!! The channel is the mirror of the linear evolution
of my painting and you know that every video is connected in some way to the others, because
I m literally building new stuff over the old stuff week by week and since from now
on I plan to tackle more and more advanced projects I feel the need of a new theoretical
milestone that I can use as base reference for the new videos.
What I m trying to say is that for this week I planned to show you how to paint a bust,
but in the middle of the work I realised that to make my choices understandable I needed
to touch so much theoretical stuff that this video sprouted from that one by itself.
All the ideas you can find in the playlist up here are still absolutely valid, extremely
solid and really useful if you are a beginner or new to the channel but I think they are
a bit too compartmentalised for where we are now and almost too mathematically tight, you
ll see what I mean! Don t forget to DROP A LIKE to boost the spread
of this video and check my Patreon Page because this is a great example of what I do behind
the scenes with my patrons and of course that s the best way to support my work in general!
Thanks a million guys! I used to plan my models starting from the
basic rules of colour schemes and colour harmonies basing all my choices on the safety net of
knowing for example that a split complementary colour scheme is always well balanced and
fairly striking, or that an analogous scheme delivers a tight look and a precisely defined
mood. These universal rules of composition objectively
deliver results and quick solutions to army painting problems but this mathematical system
that at the beginning helped me moving the first steps around the colour wheel soon became
like quicksand limiting my movements, choices and the more artistic aspirations.
Only at this point and after a serious amount of research into other media I ve realised
that proper painters, still having always in mind these ideas ( and note that I stopped
calling them rules!), use them as simple tools to perfect their vision and not as the final
product. So my new, more holistic take on the subjects
of colour theory and painting in general is less based on rules and technicalities and
more based on the idea that every model is the character of a story and when I paint
a model I m taking a snapshot of that story blocking it in a single dramatic shot.
Since we are working in a visual medium the best way to visualise this moment frozen in
time is the screenshot of a movie frame, the cover or a single panel of a comic book or
simply a cool illustration from an artbook, a battletome or just the internet!
Imagine this story like a character s background in a role play game; you need it to give depth
to his past and to his reasons to be an adventurer, to give weight to his choices and value to
his journey and growth. If you move this idea to painting you get
a similar kind of depth answering the classic questions needed by any kind of storytelling.
Who is the character? What is he doing? What is he thinking? Where is the scene taking
place? What time of day is it? What season? What about the weather? The more questions
you ask and answer the better! At a first glance this can seem trivial; a
self-contained intellectual exercise or a romantic dramatization of the simple process
of painting a little plastic toy but accepting this idea as foundation for every other step
is a total game changer for the practical work!
The idea of painting to tell a story is already well rooted in the mind of advanced painters
but in the optic of the real movements of hands and brush I mean almost the opposite;
use a story to know what to do and how to do it!
Stuffing the story with a ton of details you get a more and more precise mental image of
the final look of the model, your visual goals, and their needs, creating a very precise map
for every stage of the work that will answer all your questions and solve your doubts from
the very first brushstrokes! And all this without limiting your imagination.
Let s take this model for example: I ve imagined a tropical scene under the fiery summer light
of an equatorial sun. In the early afternoon a veteran, lonely shark pirate comes out from
the lush forest in the background and now he s standing on the shore contemplating the
sea and his next move. With just a few lines I m sure you have already
in mind a strong and defined image of how he will look like, and this happened even
if I didn t talk about the intrinsic colours of his skin and outfit!
The great thing is that these few lines are not only an ideal goal, but they tell me precisely
what to do in practice from the very beginning! The hour, in this case early afternoon, tells
me that the angle of my airbrush and spray will be the angle of the sun after the zenith
at noon, so something between seventy and forty-five degrees.
The fact that we are in a clear summer day tells me that the light will be direct and
powerful with a strong and sharp impact on the raised volumes, so more pushing and pulling
of the trigger and more and more opaque white paint in the central parts generating similar
strong sharp shadows in the opposite angles. And when I ll move to colours, it will inform
me of the tone of that light because summer light on a tropical island is incredibly different
from the winter light on a glacier, but we'll talk better about this later.
Again this is just a layer of white over the black primer but what I consider the most
important elements are already here, set in the first minutes of work.
And this is the second pillar of my revised take on painting coming from a better study
of 2D illustration and comics. Contrast, values and using these tools to model the volumes
creating a better illusion of scale and dramatic presence become my first and main concern
and colours move to kind of a secondary place. Does it really matter if this Batman will
be coloured in the classic grey and blue scheme or the cinematic full black? That s for sure
a new level of information and storytelling but the core information is still in pencils
and inking. The illusion of volume and depth is already here in the modelling of shapes
and values and the use of positive and negative space making this, Batman.
I find this even easier to understand in the work of someone like Mike Mignola: he s a
master of colours, using simple, well studied, striking tones to move and focus your attention
in the right spots and add powerful symbolic meanings to every little element of a panel
but it s the work in black and white to make the heavy lifting and even in the finished
product black is the main tone on the page. This is still a strong Hellboy even without
the iconic red! In a similar way this non-metallic metal is
already quite believable even without colours and the simple shapes in this arm take direct
and bouncing lights and projects shadows like a much bigger block of cylinders and spheres,
like a more realistic arm! Working on the value scale in a stage totally
removed from colours I can better focus my attention and energy on contrast and volumes
without the misdirection and the optical illusions created by colours.
It's easy to believe that you have a lot of contrast because maybe you are opposing two
striking complementary tones but if you turn them in black and white, they are almost identical
with basically no value contrast at all. This obviously doesn t happen working in black
and white! Now! Now we can start talking about colours
but of course, not in the way we usually do it!
In miniatures we are obsessed with colour schemes but most of the time we simplify and
trivialise this aspect into what is just the outfit of the model.
That is the less interesting part!!! The problem of colour schemes is easy to crack;
take the model of an established colour harmony and you have all your answers.
Here s a classic equidistant triad based on the traditional primaries, Blue red and yellow.
Take blue as your primary and most diffused tone, yellow as the secondary hue and use
red as localised accent and you have one of the most iconic schemes of Warhammer 40k.
Or for what it matters, Superman, simply switching in the equation the roles and proportions
of yellow and red Move again the ratio of the same three basic
flat choices and you get Iron Man, or a Blood Angel! This is simple visual math on the colour
wheel, and you can do it with almost infinite permutations simply spinning this pinwheel
and adjusting the ratios Boooooring! This is boring!
But this, oh this is exciting! Same simple outfit with the same classic internal scheme,
but different environmental lights make the scheme completely different in every artwork.
Highlights, shadows, mid tones and mood are interesting and completely different not because
of the scheme, but because of the environmental light!
And this is where the story that you create for the model becomes again the key because
to properly set this Ultramarine in the middle of an exploding battlefield, or in the snow,
or in a creepy Necron tomb planet every single colour of your palette must be different and
influenced but the specific environmental light of your choice and you need to know
this stuff from the very beginning to create something coherent and again exciting!
These examples are of course striking extreme situations but still this idea is not something
only for advanced or more artistic pieces, this is something you should incorporate even
in your gaming models and you can already see a ton of examples of this in my recent
videos! How many times have you found yourself asking,
and you sure ask me very often in the comments, what colour can I use for the lights? What
colours can I use in the shadows? The answer is that it can be any colour! This
totally depends on your story, your setting or to oversimplify the concept for a gaming
point of view, on your bases! If your Ultramarine is standing in a desert,
the lights will probably tend to warm, yellow and orangey tones and your shadows should
look colder because of the relative absence of that direct warm contribution.
In the same way here everything is filtered by a soft peach light making the deeper shadows
a more solid cold blue. But to make it even easier to understand:
check these lights here. The blue is not simply a lighter blue, but it moves into green, then
yellow and pale warm white because of its optical mixing with the tone and intensity
of the yellow sun. And the red exposed to a cold bouncing light coming from sky and
clouds becomes desaturated, then a proper light blue in the highlights for sure not
the kind of highlights we usually use for red! And to simplify this idea and shock the
system even more, here s the same white wall under different lights! In this optic the
base tones of the scheme lose a lot of importance becoming mostly a steppingstone for the evolution
into thematic lights and shadows. The environmental light obviously works in
conjunction with the base tones of the scheme because they are the base! But you can clearly
see who the real protagonist is, and source of visual interest, real chromatic contrast
and drama! This awareness makes you jump from the mindset
of a kid saying that sky is blue, and grass is green to the one of an artist that sees
the mind blowing complexity of hues running through a single blade of grass.
This seems like a lot of stuff to digest and for sure every major point has a ton of sub
chapters that I m still exploring and I want to expand with you in future videos, but to
recap the key main steps of my present approach on painting are just four:
story, never been more important: value sketch or fully finished grisaille, a speed painting
trick evolved into my main source of value, contrast, volumetric information and scale.
A quick deviation on base colours. And then a deep dive into environmental light and mood.
With this introduction and ideal road map in place I hope to make every new video a
bit easier to follow and understand having at the same time more space and time to better
investigate the sub chapters and the specific challenges of every new model without having
to explain the base lines and the basic reasons of my process every time.
Of course don t count on the fact that I will not change my mind and point of view in a
few months, this is colour THEORY, so open to a variety of interpretations and at the
end that s the beauty of the artistic process!