Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha it s Marco here and today we speed paint a
clean sci-fi model with oils! It s been a while since the last episode dedicated
to Infinity but I never stopped painting in the background my O-12 army so I ve accumulated
models and footage that I can finally release thanks to the recent reboot of the oil painting
series. After all the fantasy and very organic models
of the last few weeks I want to use Infinity s clean sci-fi to show you another interesting
general approach to oils and how you can use their finer properties on small, flat surfaces
painting a complex armour in a super quick and effective non-metallic metal.
So quick and effective that for the first time I was worried about not having enough
footage for a video! To understand the complex relations of the
scheme on my first explorative model I used as main reference its simplified concept art
but my colour scheme has quickly evolved into something a bit less saturated and cartoony
and more inspired to the moody box art where the armours are often rendered in a shinier
non-metallic metal still full of grit and battle damages, especially on heavily armoured
soldiers like this Omega unit. With a couple of test models I defined this process that
I can quickly set in motion every time I have a bit of spare time and that can give me a
finished model in a little more than one hour. 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! In the last few videos you saw me using an
acrylic base tone for some of the main elements of the models but in this case the only steps
made in acrylics are priming and zenithal light. As you saw on Radukar the beast, working
on top of acrylics can save you time on large, beefy models and a lot of trouble in your
first experiments because you have to handle smaller and more localised blends and in general,
a contained mass of active paint of which you don t know well the behaviour but this
is the next stage of your training as oil painters and where oils show their true potential.
These are all the colours I need for the entire work and after painting this model I just
kept the palette on my table for the rest of the week using these same little pools
of colours to paint two extra models in the spare time between other works.
It doesn t matter what I m painting, black and white are always on the palette next to
my fetish colours Payne s grey and Payne s grey violet. As you can see on the palette
black is not the only colour that can bring you in the bottom part of the value scale
and I use these two tones everywhere I need that kind of darkness but without giving up
the chromatic information and sensations that black doesn t carry. The original Payne s
grey gives me a cold bluish sensation and its violet version covers the warm spectrum;
It s of course an oversimplification but it s more than enough to add extra depth and
complexity here. Since the whole scheme is based on blue and
yellow, I didn t save on the selection of tubes for their progression; four colours
for the non-metallic yellow gold, starting with warm earth tones and moving to colder
and colder proper yellows and a selection of lighter and lighter blues that in reality
starts from a dark violet to boost the final contrast between lights and shadows with a
clear twist of temperatures. I played I bit more with transparency and opacity of these
colours here, but I ll explain better this aspect later.
You can argue that I can simply add white to the dark blues but the result of using
a lighter pure pigment or a mix of original pigment plus white is not the same, and this
is true even for acrylics or any other kind of paint. Adding white you are actively diluting
the original concentration of pigment adding also it s physical properties like a bit of
its natural chalkiness for example, so try to use white in limited quantities for small
value jumps in the extreme lights for example and not for your main tones and basic blends.
I start the work with the usual quick oil priming. Using acrylics as point of view I
use oils with a reverse flow in which I start with an extreme and super precise dark definition
pushing and collecting dense paint inside every detail, panel line and junction.
I start with the brown tones because they are the most transparent and the weakest in
terms of staining the surface so I try to maintain their chromatic information leaving
them a bit more on the model. Then, I apply a generous coat of black and
Payne s grey on the rifle and the under armour, this time simply giving priority to the its
depth on the model. I thin down the paint just a bit because my black and Payne s grey
in particular are super dense and difficult to move with the brush straight from the tubes
but in general I try to keep the paint as thick as I can because dense paint fills the
details with more precision and it remains in place without easily move outside the target.
And I close this step mainly using Indigo, the darkest blue in my collection, to prime
the rest of the armour, but using also few touches of violet in the lowest and most hidden
parts to keep the idea of a simple environmental light where all my shadows tend to warm tones
and my lights to cold hues that will passively boost the general cold tone of the blue and
the metallic sensation of the techno gold. I move to cleaning as soon as I place the
last brushstroke wiping off the excess of paint that didn t find something to grab firmly.
The more complicated the sculpture, the better because thanks to the physical limits of the
big make up sponge on the shapes of the model, with all the deep details you get also a good
sketch of all the shadows and even dark mid tones especially if you are working on top
of a simple value sketch in acrylics that suddenly becomes something like a grisaille.
And all this without considering that those shadows are made by wet, active paint that
will blend with every new colour you ll put next to them!
And since this is always a common question in the comments, this is all the stuff I used
to clean the model! So here s the big difference from the oil
painting approach I showed you so far. Instead of jumping directly to the application of
the extreme values of the scale creating lights and shadows and generating the mid tones from
their fusion in the middle I start applying a base coat of cerulean blue on all the blue
parts of the armour. I know this doesn t seem a big deal seeing this from the perspective
of acrylics where this is how we usually start painting but this choice has a lot of implications
using oils. First, this is not a true base coat! As I
mentioned before all the shadows are filled with the dark hues of Indigo and violet and
all that paint starts mixing with cerulean blue as soon the brush touches the surface.
Paying just a bit of attention to the vectors of my brushstrokes I get a first gentle modulation
into the shadows and less obvious even with the lights!
To understand better this point, we need to make a little step back to my selection of
blue tones. On every tube of oil paint, but this is true also for any other artist paint,
it s clearly shown how transparent or opaque the paint is and knowing this information
as a codified and reliable fact I chose a semi opaque colour able to cover and tint
with a good layer the area of application but still able to become semi-transparent
when I stretch it towards lights and shadows. In the lights the colour meets cleaner surfaces
and the high values of the zenithal and in the shadows the dark values of the zenithal
boosted by the staining power of the dark wash plus a bit of wet paint for a real and
active mix. I get all this whit a single step where I
have to apply only a minimal amount of control. Underpainting techniques and opacity tricks
are the real soul of oil painting, and we ll explore a tone of this stuff in the next
future! But the best part is yet to come! I clean the brush extremely well using two
pools of white spirit so I m sure there are no residues of blue paint, and I can move
to yellow. Let s take another look to the tubes! The
dark tones of the yellow spectrum are transparent colours. During the initial wash, the details
become opaque anyway because of the sheer quantity of paint they catch but on the open
areas I needed only a light staining and more important the oily priming. Knowing that my
general starting point would have been quite dark I chose powerful opaque tones able to
cover in bright yellow even the darkest values with a couple of brushstrokes. You ll never
find an acrylic yellow able to set a uniform base like this one in a single light pass,
without losing anything of its vibrancy and saturation!
I know, it s a lot of information to digest and at this stage you are probably terrified
by the extra level of complexity coming from native opacity and transparency and everything
in between but remember that this stuff works in a very similar way in acrylics with the
extra difficulties, at least in hobby paints, of not knowing how a colour behaves when you
buy it or equally common, having access only to super opaque paints like GW colours for
example. The good news is that all this stuff is in
the realm of planning the steps to make them more efficient and effective but as you can
see the actual work of hands and brush on the model is basic like applying a basecoat!
Form here the process and probably the rest of the video is quite anticlimactic. Thanks
to all the tuning of the preparatory work the only thing I need to do is to sketch a
couple of lights and few extreme shadows on top of the active surface and almost automatically
blend them into a smooth non-metallic metal. The whole process goes back to the basic application
and blend that I showed you on the orc shaman with the huge difference that I m not painting
wet on slightly humid but with a real wet on wet technique able to make everything even
smoother than usual because I have two equal masses of active paint mixing on the surface,
so perfect for this kind of clean non-metallic metal!
The process is basically the same of sketching and smoothing with acrylics, or in the correct
perspective this is where sketching and smoothing come from, but with oils the two steps are
extremely close to the point of becoming a single fluid step when you understand how
to use small quantities of paint to apply and at the same time blend new colours on
the surface with a single brush and a single motion. I move towards the extreme lights
in just a couple of jumps adding small quantities of white into cerulean blue and moving to
bismuth yellow and then pure white for the gold.
In general I m quite satisfied with my shadows but to boost the sensation of a reflective
metal I add little shapes with Prussian blue and violet in few strategic points next to
the lights to create a strong contrast. I want the blue to be the main protagonist
so I keep the gold parts less reflective simply using less powerful contrasts and value jumps.
Always keep in mind that your real main tool is the blending brush. Don t worry too much
about smoothness or even precision in the application stage because that should be only
a sketch and a quick colour blocking and not the final product. With the different shapes
and sizes of the blending brushes you guide the paint where you need, refining the sketch
and quickly creating a glazed effect with few brushstrokes. As a bonus of the spreading
process, you get a smooth and clean finish because the blending brush erases lines and
brush marks stretching that same volume of paint on a larger area.
In the last videos I said that we don t use layering with oils but it s not technically
true. It s not a layering aimed to create the illusion of transitions, but you can always
overlap layers of paint if you need more or new lights, shadows or reflections, or even
free hands! A high contrast is always the key of non-metallic
effects. Usually what is perceived as the difficult part of the non-metal finish is
the softening and glazing of the main blocks of lights and shadows, so I wanted to give
priority to show how simple this step becomes with oils.
Don t worry, soon I ll make a proper video on my take on the topic of non-metallic metal.
Moving towards the extreme lights the reflections become stronger, less blurred, and easier
to read as lines and geometric shapes. Setting more precise and localised lights
and shadows the general definition becomes sharper and more and more evident and the
next natural step is to set edge highlights, extreme glares and reflections and scratches
and battle damages that are visible precisely because the virtual light hits their sharp
edges. As always the palette is the reflection of
the work on the model and you can see how little I worked the colours after the priming
wash and how most or the real work happened in the lights.
And here s the final result! Even if the actual process is extremely simple and you saw the
same two practical steps in all the last videos, I think this is one of the most efficient
in terms of speed painting where you can see what paint in general can do for you when
you understand and use to your advantage all its properties. This was also interesting
from the point of view of planning a process and choosing the best tools for the job; after
my first test model I immediately moved to oils because of the relaxed way in which I
m collecting and painting Infinity one model at a time in my spare time, still keeping
a speed painting mindset because I know myself and I know that if I don t finish a model
like this in a single session, well, I ll never finish it!