Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha, it s Marco here and today we paint an old
school model with old school techniques but a very modern mindset!
Tracking, collecting, and painting Oldhammer models is my hobby inside the hobby, and I
decided to use my all-time favourite kit from the Warhammer Fantasy range to recap in a
single video my painting philosophy. Thanks to your support the channel has grown
a lot in the last few months, and I recently moved to a bi-weekly schedule to deliver bigger,
more complex, and ambitious projects so I want to celebrate this second phase of the
channel s life showing you in a more cohesive way how tools and techniques are always secondary
and dependant on a solid vision and theoretical understanding of the work.
I chose to use something similar to the original colour scheme, but to avoid being influenced
too much and being locked in another artist s vision I used only my memories of the model
to recreate it, without studying the old pictures. The sculpture itself it s very illustrational,
almost impressionistic in its rough rendering of shapes and anatomy so an illustrative approach
really suits its style without the need of stretching too much imagination and techniques.
To push on the vibe of old school Warhammer, I used Karl Kopinski s illustrations as main
reference material for my mood board from which I stole the key idea of a hyper rendered
style full of super fine textural information! 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! As we all clearly remember, Citadel Finecast
resin models are far from being fine I m not exaggerating:
literally every single undercut was fused to a little triangle of resin making the cleaning
stage something like carving a block of wood. Even without the sprues I ended up with a
whole model worth of resin chips lol My first idea was to create a little diorama,
but the skeleton knight has too many main interesting angles and details everywhere
and it s almost impossible to lock it in a single position without losing a cool major
view so I prepared a display base that will go on a plinth, made of plasticard and flexible
metal where I can change the pose of the magnetised models whenever I want like re-posing an action
figure to tell a different story every day! I like to work with fully assembled models
to avoid losing sight of the coherence of my work and the general flow of lights and
shadows but in this case, I don t glue the knight on its base to have an easy access
to the difficult deep lower angles. I imagined the warrior pilgrims on a dusty
country road in the middle of a warm day of late spring, moving south to join a holy crusade
in exotic lands. The central element of this paintjob is the bold colourful heraldry, and
this setting puts me in the condition of making it luminous, bright, and vibrant without becoming
too cartoony and unrealistic. It also works like a charm with the technical needs of my
movable scene! So, to deliver the old school vibe and to make the models work with every
possible angle and composition I apply a proper sharp zenithal light perpendicular to the
ground using white ink straight from the bottle. I often see using the zenithal light just
as a preparatory greyish layer able to reveal details and ease the work on an unforgiving
black primer, but for me even the simplest and most straight forward zenithal comes from
the story I want to tell so it s not only a technical trick but the proper rendering
of the midday, powerful light I imagined for the final cinematic shot.
And to remain faithful to the old school theme the next steps will be based on the classic
workflow made by base tones, shading and lights but with a more modern and conscious take
in every stage. In the first step of the colour blocking over
the value sketch I use a fluid highly opaque light silver to quickly fix the true metallic
elements of the scheme. I don t care if the single details will be rendered as iron, steel,
gold, or bronze, I ll apply those specific tones later, now I just want to fix and roughly
define the nature of the different materials as metallic or non-metallic.
I like to work with transparent paints adding a ton of chromatic reflections on my metals
coming from the objects and the lights they have around, so it makes a lot of sense to
set the solid metallic shine from the very beginning and let it absorb new colours in
the next steps. I start setting the main elements of the scheme
using light, bright tones from the Scale75 Instant Colour range. These paints come from
the same general concept of GW Contrast of being a more manageable and user-friendly
version of pure inks, but the final product is quite different. On a single application
the potions deliver a more transparent layer closer to a heavy glaze or a consistent wash
than to a solid base tone like Contrast, so I like them more for this kind of foundational
stages where I want to maintain most of the light and volumetric information of the sketch
keeping at the same time a tight control on the increasing opacity, saturation, and vibrancy
of every new layer. Again, in this case and honestly most of the
time my main objective when using these paints is to quickly set the rough proportions of
the scheme and I don t really need them to create complex shadows and colour modulation
with a single pass so a softer and more transparent layer fits better this role.
Working on complex heraldries and schemes heavily based on the repetition of powerful
tones I like to set first the main strong hues and see if and how they work together
and only later fill the gaps with the secondary, more neutral tones.
As always, I don t care too much about the quality of my base layer that will naturally
disappear in the flow of lights and shadows; the extra care that I m investing in this
stage is mainly based on my need of visualising the complex pattern and its permutations on
the single models! I ve started the work thinking this scheme
like an Analogous Harmony where the colours are closely connected and coming from the
same slice on the colour wheel, but this mindset would have rendered the scene extremely warm
like the desert goblin of the last video, so I balanced the scheme making it more a
Split complementary with the introduction of a bluish, greenish black.
Checking the box art at the end of the work I realised that GW arrived at a similar conclusion
using a grey, neutral green as balancing element but I think that a darker value creates a
better separation between the two light and bright main tones still delivering the same
kind of chromatic information while enhancing the contrast.
Then I move to Contrast Guilliman flesh to quickly set the few patches of skin.
And Aggaros Dunes to turn silver into gold! Here I need a good punch of instant colour
on small elements where I don t care too much about a soft controlled behaviour, so pure
Contrast are great for the job. With this rough sketchy base in place, I can
move to shading. I love this ideal macro step and the many strategies we can use to obtain
the same general effect but with meaningful subtle nuances of the final visual output.
In the last two videos we explored shading with oils to filter the base tones and fix
the finish of sprayed layers and pre-shading with brush and coloured washes to set a strong
environmental mood and today I want to show you some advanced airbrushing applied on top
of the base to push the shadow/light contrasts, yes plural, to extreme levels.
The idea here is to create a full modulation and a powerful contrast both of values and
temperatures using only these three tones: the yellowish brown of Burnt Umber, pure Magenta,
and the final cold twist of Turquoise. Magenta is a great ambiguous colour that lives
on the border between the warm and cold halves of the colour wheel making a perfect turning
point for changes of temperature but if I apply magenta over yellow and red I obtain
powerful deep reds in their optical mix, the kind of reds you get maybe standing next to
a pool of lava so I use the relatively neutral tone of brown and its natural affinity with
both yellow and red to create an initial shade, a barrier between base tones and the next
colours and a good chromatic foundation for magenta that will overlap to this complex
neutral hue evolving into more subtle and natural versions of itself.
I also use the brown overspray to smooth out the first rough layer and to bring its colours
to more realistic, less saturated tones. In this workflow light and shadows come all
from the environment and not from the models and the intrinsic tones of their outfit becoming
something like a new colour scheme inside the original colour scheme, or better on top
of it! In the real world you can wear the same clothes in infinite environments and
light conditions, from a warm summer morning to a cold winter night or under any kind of
strange artificial light and those same clothes will appear completely different because of
the visual interference from the specific environment.
And now that magenta has opened the gates of the cold side of the wheel, I can close
this stage with a localised and precise application of turquoise in the deepest areas. Its presence
will be extremely subtle but still it is there creating new information.
I love to use inks for this kind of shadows because they have enough transparency to fuse
their information with the base in a soft, smooth way but they can easily build up opacity
in multiple applications, and they have a combination of powerful saturation and satin
glossy finish that makes shadows incredibly interesting and deep. I use turquoise also
to add reflections from the blue sky on the silver parts facing up.
To boost this effect even more, before moving to the lights I spray with a strict zenithal
angle a bit of matt varnish on the top parts of the models. This isolates even more this
behaviour in shadows and recesses increasing their depth in the contrast of the finishes.
For the same reasons for the lights, I like to use matt opaque tones and a solid matt
medium to handle their dilution and transparency. Now the models are heavily influenced by the
smooth finish created by the airbrush, and I know that a lot of you have problems jumping
from the perfect modulation of sprayed colours to brushstrokes and dense paints from the
palette so here s one of my favourite tactics to fill this gap.
The perception of the non-matching layers is not really coming from their finish, that
s honestly a good thing creating a ton of extra internal contrast, but it s created
mostly by a wrong overlapping of tones that are too different both for value and hue so
I don t jump immediately on the high values and the desaturated tones of the lights but
I start my new progression with a colour close to my mid tone applying the first brushstrokes
where my original base tones come out from the shadows and I expand my application from
there! With this simple trick 90% of the process
of merging layers created with different tools is done. I consider the remaining 10% as the
actual information about the finish that I can freely choose to mimic or change depending
on the needs of the specific area. On clothes and fabric, I want to show layers
and layers of fine textures and give the idea of old, rough, and dirty dusty cloth so I
use thick paint on a dense pattern of fine lines using just the tip of the brush, and
this from the very the first layer of the re-established mid tones
But to sell the different, smoother consistency of skin and flesh I apply this colour matching,
glazing transparent tones on the edge between shadows and mid tones.
Again, the key element is the value and then the tone, and with this in mind you can easily
jump back and forth using different tools on the same areas.
I invest some extra care into softly reconnecting the details of the faces. These old handmade
sculptures have incredibly deep recesses even on the delicate parts like faces so I need
to soften the strong value jumps created by the fluid paints of the first layer with a
stronger presence on intermediate tones. From this point I just use lighter and lighter
tones of the various colours using the classic concept of layering as a progression of overlapped
opaque levels of paint to walk the road towards the final highlights. The huge difference
is that every single layer of this progression is a new level of pure fine textures without
any real blending outside the high density of the brushstrokes that can totally simulate
a continuous layer full of movement even at close distance!
I use random lines and cross etchings on the clothes of the pilgrims and a more uniform
pattern of thin, clean lines on the knight and its heraldry to deliver the idea of the
different quality and thickness. And a dense fine dotting for shields and equipment.
All my tones are warm and desaturated to simulate the warm spring light and the dust from the
country road getting everywhere! When I have all the other tones where I want
them, I go back to the skin tones to set an extra light based on the relation with all
the other major lights; again, faces are always a great focal point but here skin tones are
way less important than the other bright colours. So, I leave the dominant role to the bright
heraldry! And here s the final result! Despite all the
analysis and the advanced reasoning behind every little choice the actual practical general
process is really nothing more than the most basic base tones, shading and lights. It works
because in those simple steps there s everything a model needs; striking colours organised
in harmonious schemes and interesting contrasts creating realistic volumes and eye-catching
modulations. You can simplify the process to the extreme
finding yourself inside the GW battle ready style or fully go into meta painting territory
and deconstruct every step in its ancient basic components that come from the Renaissance
masters. In the end my point is that there isn t a right or a wrong approach, it all
depends on your needs as a gamer or storyteller, but you are definitely painting in the wrong
way if you ignore how and why this stuff works.