Ciamar a tha sibh
Welcome back!
In this installment we'll have a go at painting the gun
on our little figure. I hope you find it useful.
We'll start by blocking in the gun with black.
Then for our initial layer we'll mix some of this Scale Colour
Caribbean Blue into the black, until we get a nice grey tone.
And we'll paint that over all the metal parts of the gun.
But we'll leave the black showing in the recesses
that will give us definition between the various parts of the gun structure.
And you're going to want to do this over a couple of layers to ensure you get a nice even coverage.
I'll leave the muzzle part black just to give it some variation.
I'm not sure what this part at the back is called, maybe a shoulder rest, I donno.
I'm sure all the Americans watching and shaking their heads right now.
We're not even allowed assault teaspoons here, never mind assault rifles.
Anyway, whatever this bit is called, we'll paint that as well,
leaving the underside black to help create a shadow there.
Once we have that all blocked in.
We'll add a bit of Scale Colour White Sands into the mix to lighten it to a medium grey tone,
about the same level of brightness as GW Dawnstone.
Now I don't want to make this overly complicated so I'm going to
opt for a single highlight on this large section.
And we'll paint it on so that when the model is standing level,
the highlight will be parallel with the ground.
And I'll continue that on the next section just continuing that
angle so that the highlight will be parallel with the ground.
Here on the back edge we'll pull the highlight down to the lower
corner so that the highlight is going to be hard against the shadow on that adjoining front side.
Here on these skinny bits we'll put the highlight around the middle.
And the same here on this part on the top of the gun.
When you're dealing with relatively large flat sections like this
you can't go far wrong by placing your highlight in the middle.
By placing it here we're still going to have a decent amount of
contrast with the front side as the highlights aren't going to lined up.
Here on the magazine we'll pull the highlight down to the lower edge.
With scale colour I'm especially careful about not
painting the layers on too thick as you can easily create physical textures on the surface.
You can actually get a raised edhe at the side of your highlight and then it becomes very difficult
to blend out as that ridge catches any paint you add on top and it just gets worse over time so,
it's better to keep your paint on the thin side so you don't run into any of those issues.
You can get away with quite a lot when you're doing Non Metallic Metal, try not to dwell too
much on what's correct as long as you build up enough contrast it's going to look OK.
Unless you're going for a hyper realistic effect,
then it becomes a lot more important where your highlights are going.
You just want to avoid those
fundamental errors like having your highlights line up when two planes change angles.
You always want them to be opposing each other. So you want the highlight to stop on one side
where the shadow begins on the next one.And that way you're going to be able to maximise contrast.
Now that we have those mapped out.
We can start to blend them out.
To do that we'll dilute the highlight down with a little water to a glaze consistency.
How thin you make this is up to you.
Remember a thinner glaze willl take more layers but
might be easier to work with than a thicker glaze.
And that's because you're not going to be able to ruin a transition with a single application
of a thin glaze as it takes multiple layers before you see a noticeable effect.
But a heavier glaze will give you almost an immediate effect so it's easier to make a mistake.
When you're doing this try to vary the length of your brush stroke
so you're not always starting in the exact same spot.
If you always start at the same place paint will build up there and you'll end up with
a visible edge which defeats the purpose of what you're trying to do.
The idea is to fade out the edge that's there, not create a new one.
I can recommend using a hairdryer to speed up the drying time between layers.
In addition to doing the normal glazing you can also use the same consistency
to paint on thin lines over the edges of the highlight.
This is the same sort of idea as stippling but using you're using lines instead of dots.
Combing both the lines and the normal glaze
tends to speed things up and lets you develop a slightly more interesting effect.
You can do this with thicker paint as well if you like.
You can see the edge is still visible after a few
layers but you can tell it's starting to fade out and become less obvious.
It's just a case of continuing to apply more layers until you can't see the join.
To help smooth things out you can take some of your original dark grey
and thin it down to a glaze consistency.
Then just use that to glaze in the opposite direction, moving it away from the highlight.
This helps to correct any errors you might have, for example
it's a little rough here near the top, so we'll push the glaze over that to help fade it back.
To continue we'll mix some more White Sands into the highlight to get
a fairly large jump in brightness.
And I'll paint this on with a single line, right in the middle of the previous layer.
And we'll use this as a guide mark to help us develop the highlight.
So this line will represent our brightest spot.
Once you have that in place we'll start to paint on lines
either side of that mark painting them on so that they're parallel to each other.
And when I'm doing this I try to ease up on the brush
as I get further away from the line so that I leave less and less paint on the surface.
That way I have some control over the transparency of the lines
so that they get progressively faded the more we stray from that initial highlight.
Now, you're going to build this up over a few layers.
Allowing the lines to overlap in order to build up a textured transition into the highlight.
Actually I think we'll make that guide mark slightly thicker, we're still going to be adding
brighter highlights over the top so I want to give them a bit more space in order to add them in.
We'll also add a highlight towards the bottom of the magazine.
To help speed up the blend you can dilute the highlight down to a glaze consistency
and use a few layers of normal glazing,
drawing the side of the brush across the highlight, to help further blur things out.
And the same down on the magazine, just pulling the glaze down over the edge of
the highlight with the goal being to blur out the hard line between the two colours.
I'll add a touch more paint to that glaze making it more of a light layer consistency and I'll use
that to blend out the edges of this small highlight on this thin part of the gun.
Just pulling it up over the edge on both sides to blur out that join.
Once you're happy with how it's looking, add some more White Sands into your mix,
making it quite bright this time, still keeping it to that light layer consistency
and we'll use that to add another layer.
Again start off by painting on a guideline in the middle of your main highlight.
And you'll need to paint this on over a few layers to get any coverage.
Here on the small section we'll just use the transparency of the paint and pull the brush
into the middle point from either side in order to create a little transition into the highlight.
It's quite a small element so we're not really worried
about trying to build up texture there just yet.
Next I'll add a broken edge highlight along the top side of the element,
using the side of the brush, near the tip and just drawing it lightly against the edge,
lifting it here and there so we don't leave a solid line.
And we'll try to make the highlight more intense just around the middle of that guide mark.
Adding some variation to these edge highlights helps to give you a more metallic feel.
You end up with a much more interesting effect than when painting a solid line.
I first got this idea from watching Ben Komets
but you'll find quite a lot of painters use the same trick once you know what to look for.
To continue I'll take some of that mix and thin it down with a bit of water to a glaze consistency.
And we'll use that to blend out our highlights.
With very little on the brush I'll lightly draw the side of the brush up to the guideline.
Working from either side of the line.
And as always our aim here is to create a fade effect, obscuring the obvious edge of
the line so you get the appearance of one colour blending into the next with no obvious join point.
You'll need to build this up over a number of layers until you get the desired effect.
But be careful not to overwork the surface,
always allowing your layers to dry before applying a new one.
I think that's starting to look OK now so I'll grab some White Sands on it's own
and start to add some small intense dot highlights on that upper edge.
That'll help to increase the contrast and also add some more variation
along that edge highlight giving us a more metallic feel.
I'll build up some of the other highlights on this side now,
just cycling through those different grey mixes.
Gradually increasing the intensity of the highlight over a number of layers.
Again you don't need to worry too much about getting these looking particularly realistic,
just focus on building up enough contrast to give you a shiny effect
You can see on the magazine clip I'm increasing the brightness towards that lower edge
just by layering on the brighter greys.
Then I come back in, adding some edge highlights along the top side,
where the light would be catching. Adding a little variation by making a few spots brighter.
Yeah I think that looks OK.
I'll do the same sort of thing for the little piece just below the hand.
Building up the intensity of the highlight towards the bottom, until it's quite bright.
Then coming back in
with the white sands at the end to apply a few small dots just to finish it of.
You can see you can get quite a good effect pretty quickly on those smaller areas
It's a bit trickier on larger parts because your blends are more exposed
but the principle is the same.
I'll do the rest of that side in the same way.
To finish off that larger section I'll also add a highlight along the lower edge.
Using our brightest grey with a fairly thin consistency.
Using a thinner consistency when you're painting edges
means you can vary the intensity just by applying more layers.
It allows you to build up a gradient into your
highlight without bothering to switch between different paints.
You can see that first layer gives us a fairly dull grey, even though the paint is really bright.
Then any little dots we apply over the top become progressively brighter,
so we can build up the whole edge, variations and all just with a single colour.
I wont show me developing the highlights on the other
half as it would just be a repeat of the same thing
but we'll take a closer look at the edges so you can get a better idea of how that works.
To do them we'll actually use that same principle of
layering up with a single colour but this time we'll use White Sands on it's own.
And we'll thin that down with some water to get it a little transparent.
Now you're going to want to hold the brush at a bit of an
angle and lighly draw the side of the brush, near the tip along that edge.
So you're painting close to the tip but not actually with the tip.
You're just using the side of the brush to drag it along the edge to leave a very thin line.
Then we can apply a few little extra dots to give the illusion of small glints of light.
You can see the way we exploit the transparency of the paint.
A single pass will look like a medium grey tone as that darker grey will be visible underneath.
Then as we add more layers we can build the intensity up to that bright white sands.
It's quite a neat trick and saves you from going
back and forth to the palette picking up different colours.
You don't have to reserve this to edge highlights this is
more of a general principle that you can apply to any situation and any colour.
In the next video we'll be looking at how to paint her socks
and we'll do that with a pretty interesting method.
Thanks again
Bye for now.
Lets try a bit of the Sean Connery.
In Ah...
In this installment.
What was that?
I can't even do Sean Connery, floop sake.
Scottish man, can't do Scottish accent. News at 11.
OK.