Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha it s Marco here and today we speed paint combining
the best features of acrylics and oils!
Dominion is almost upon us, and I can t wait to get my hands on the new orcs but before
jumping into the big commitment of my first personal AoS army I want to deal with a couple
of unfinished businesses and one of those is Cursed City.
I love every single model inside that box but I really can t stand Radukar in its human
form.
There s nothing wrong with the model itself and I plan to add it to a vampiric warband
for Frostgrave but It s objectively the most anticlimactic final boss ever for a game like
Cursed City.
Do you want to be remembered like the heroes who fought a fat guy with an ugly hat or a
proper huge bloodthirsty monster?
My answer is Radukar the Beast!
I trimmed Radukar s large scenic base fitting it, like the Vargskyr, on a fifty millimetres
base and I painted it with a variation of the scheme used for the little Vykros vampires.
I pushed more on the vertical contrast to enhance its size and volumes giving him a
strong imposing presence and I used more desaturated colours with a ton of textures everywhere
to make it look more ancient, feral, and unlike the younger vampires, less concerned about
a flashy appearance.
Since I really wanted to push on the bestial aspect of this bloodline I used as reference
artworks of ogres and beastmen but introducing a ton of greys and white to bring their palette
into the undead territory using on his mutated extremities the same colours used for the
wolf pelt to make them converge on the animalistic look.
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The plan is to use acrylics and oils in a more balanced, fifty-fifty process, using
acrylics to set the scene and oils to add complexity, refine and detail.
Even if Radukar is a hero and the final boss, for the sake of coherency I want for him the
same visual vibe I ve set for all the other enemies so I m going to play with similar
techniques but pushing them a bit further to give him the extra details and the impact
he deserves, but keeping the work extremely simple and efficient because again, even if
you see this as a standalone painting session it s still part of the general run aimed to
quickly put the whole box on the table.
Instead of using directly coloured primers like I did on the other vampires I start form
black because I want to maximise the value contrast and I can use a bit of extreme darkness
on the lower parts of the larger elements and the sharpest undercuts.
From here I can start playing with colours to set from the beginning a rich underpainting
full of tones and different sensations.
I use highly opaque paints so I can deliver everywhere the maximum chromatic intensity
of the colour I chose, without warrying about the desaturation coming from the optical mixing
with black and the potential numerous interactions with the all the other colours I m going to
use.
I start with green on the base to set an obvious natural sensation and I use it also on the
wolf s pelt to introduce the idea of something dead, old and probably a bit dirty and mouldy.
This also helps in breaking the monotony of the mass of pure white paint I ll need to
bring the fur to its final, extreme hue.
On the main body I start from the metallic silver of the armour.
Metallic paints in the airbrush are difficult to control with extreme precision because
a single metallic pigment in the wrong spot becomes visible from miles away and I can
assure you that you ll have a ton of those shiny flakes floating around your primary
target, so I prefer to paint metals at the beginning when there s nothing to ruin and
then define better their borders with the other opaque colours on top.
Their coloured overspray over the metallic paint can only enrich its tone giving the
sensation of natural reflections of nearby elements and if the overspray is a bit too
much or too covering, I can quickly fix the part with few brushstrokes of metallic paint
that s always super opaque.
Red is my main mid tone for the core of the body where the colours will be a bit more
in the humanoid spectrum.
Again, the high opacity of Molotow paints gives me a perfect vibrant red even if applied
directly on top of black without any loss of saturation.
I use the red base to start creating the modulation towards the cold, bluish extremities simply
using pure violet as bridge colour, and I use it also to shade the wolf s pelt keeping
the general scheme tight and simple.
I don t care too much about the smoothness of these transitions and the effect works
even if you overlap the tones with sharp, defined borders.
You can also see how every layer initially covers an aera larger than its final surface
and that s because the extra coverage gives me the freedom to modulate better the extension
of the next layer without warrying about a black line underneath or the need to go back
to the previous colours to fix the gap.
Blue is the last tone of the transition used to set the idea of livid flesh stretched and
mutated by the transformation in bestial form.
I use it also as undertone for hair and leather to create a basic chromatic contrast with
the warm skin and the general warmth of the core of the model and on the fur to set another
cold tone next to green to support and add depth to the main white tone.
Jumping from this to white is a bit too much both for the value and chromatic difference
so I close this step with a gentle, quite transparent zenithal coat of grey that will
unify all these colours in the lights but keeping all these sensations inside the details
and in all the shadows.
Similar logic applying the unifying colour for the skin.
I use a semi opaque ink because it has all the properties I need straight form the bottle,
but you can create the same translucency simply diluting any kind of standard acrylic.
The new layer incorporates all the previous colours crating complex optical mixes where
its transparency is higher, like on the lower parts of the legs where the skin tone and
the blue base create a greenish sensation between blue and violet, progressively creating
new mid tones and lights becoming more and more opaque in the central spots of application.
The last airbrushed layer is applied with white ink, mainly as zenithal light over the
fur but used also to add few little extreme lights on the skin.
Before moving to oils I use the black and grey potions from Scale75 to darken and add
depth to Radukar s hair and to the few patches of dark leather.
I find the potions easier to control on flat open areas and in general more subtle than
contrast paints so a better choice for this kind of applications where I don t need a
strong definitive colour or an extreme value jump between recesses and raised parts.
And Contrast Aggaros Dunes to turn few silver details into an old, yellowish bronze.
With these little touches the acrylic stage is officially over.
Here are the colours I m going to use for the whole oil stage, both for the initial
priming wash and the proper painting.
I have the obligatory black and white, two versatile dark tones that I basically use
as cold and warm chromatic blacks, two green, blue, and red hues and two earth tones.
The logic of these choices, based on my general colour scheme and strongly related to oils
behaviour and workflow, is to work with a simple palette almost made only by primary
colours but able to cover every possibility thanks to its mixing potential and the access
to two different temperatures for every colour.
I give for granted that you already know the general flow of my oil painting process from
the recap in the recent videos but if you are new to channel, check the playlist up
here to have the full picture.
In this case the oil wash is not the final stage like the way I use it in the rest of
the Cursed City series but it s the starting point of my oil painting workflow like the
one you saw on the Orc shaman and the warband of Ossiarch Bonereapers.
I use only the darkest colours for this step because one the main objectives is to quickly
create a solid definition filling every detail with a ton of wet paint.
On the raised parts the wash tends to be more transparent because it s simply stretched
over a larger area but even if with a weaker presence it s still able to deliver a ton
of the super fine pigments that literally fill the microscopic gaps left by the micro
dotting of the airbrushed layers.
The washes smooth the dusty finish of the airbrush connecting those dots in a soft continuous
layer adding also extra new tones, depth, and general complexity to the mix.
And I immediately take away the excess leaving on the model only the paint I need where I
need it.
This cleaning is a bit more aggressive than the super gentle one I use on full oil painting;
I don t need to have the model fully covered in oily medium because I m not painting over
a blank canvas and I ll use oils only to enhance lights, shadow and transitions but all the
foundational work and probably a bit more than that is already done.
For the same reasons, the cleaning is not complete and precise like the one I do for
a final wash over an almost finished piece because I still need a bit of that oil to
ease the next step.
So, something in between.
The wolf pelt is an important part of the model, and it will have the highest value,
so I want to set it form the beginning because I ll regulate the values of all the other
tones based on this extreme.
I use dense paint and big, flat brushes to apply and blend the colour in a single step
using slow movements over the well defined details to easily catch their shapes and I
put a lot of attention to the vector of these movements because the spot where the brush
touches the model is where more, pure paint is applied and when I move the brush away
from that initial area the paint is spread on the surface creating a soft transition,
remember bread and butter.
Thanks to the quick but chromatically complex underpainting and the fact the main dark definition
is already in place, I can complete something this complex in just few minutes of super
relaxed brush painting.
In the spots where I applied more pressure or I encountered more friction I can see marks
appearing, like the ones left by a rough drybrush but with the gentle pass of a soft and dry
blending brush I can easily make them disappear into a super gentle glaze like blend.
Again I have only to worry about lights and textures and the idea is to create both at
the same time using the almost automatic blending properties of oils.
Thanks to thickness of the paint the pressure and shape of every brush and brushstroke create
an infinite variety of potential effects.
Stippling in oils I can easily regulate the intensity of the little random lines directly
hitting the folds I want to highlight and blending their borders into the shadows fixing
at the same time the marks I don t like.
On the skin I use more precise and controlled applications, using sharp brushstrokes with
just a tiny bit of paint to set the pale light I need on wrinkles and sculpted textures.
I use a big value jump between the paint on the palette and what I have on the model because
thanks to the richness of the underpainting and the possibility to stretch the paint as
much as I want, I don t need intermediate stages so being made essentially by one or
two steps the work becomes incredibly fast.
The blending stage is where the real work happens and where the hand has to get used
to movements very different from the ones needed by acrylics so you ll need for sure
a bit of practice to control the smaller blends like on the little muscles and wrinkles of
a face but since you really have to worry only about this aspect the learning curve
is always incredibly steep.
Metallic oil paints work exactly like everything else and I can use the large, gentle brushstrokes
I used on the fur to easily catch and highlight the sharp edges of the armour.
And since this is the equipment of an old feral vampire, I don t have to worry about
clean and shine surfaces and I can incorporate non-metallic colours to create dull and opaque
shadows able to create at the same time a better definition, a more interesting flow
of the light and the sensation of dirt and grime collected into the recesses!
And like working with acrylics I can use the natural transparency of colours like alizarin
crimson to create the effect of shiny red metal using the red like contrast paint over
the metallic undertone.
One of the great features of oils is the possibility to correct something erasing part or all of
it.
Here I m painting the bloody tattoos on Radukar s head but my brushstrokes are a bit too stocky
and rectangular so I come back with a clean brush with just a bit of white spirit and
I make the end of the line thinner and pointy actively erasing its lateral parts.
You must be super delicate and use only a microscopic quantity of solvent to spare the
previous oil layers, but you can always correct mistakes in this way.
Details and blends naturally become smaller and smaller converging on the highest lights,
details and edge highlights creating more and more definition.
One of the last details I apply is the illusion of a soft mass of hairs on the larger and
flatter areas of Radukar s bestial fur and on the wolf s pelt.
This breaks the solidity of blocky strands and empty areas adding a lot of realism and
I can still do it even if this is 100% speed painting because I can quickly make these
lines super soft even if I m applying them as last stage, without the need of filters
or glazes on top.
And here s the final result!
Less than three hours of work for what can easily be the cool centre piece of an army
or in my case a deadly final boss.
I love this kind of fifty-fifty acrylic and oil process because I think it s able to fuse
the best and most efficient parts of the two worlds.
Acrylics can do miracles in the initial stages and combined with airbrushing they can set
stable and highly modulated bases in a matter of minutes, and you can prime, base, shade
and highlight an army in few hours of work.
On top of this base oils give you rich, super quick and easy blends able to add complexity
and extreme contrast with the simple flow of direct application and blending, with a
finish totally compatible with the smoothness of airbrushing but easy to use also for sharp
and precise details and edge highlights in the latest stages.
So I encourage you to avoid taking definite sides building a versatile toolbox through
the use of all the materials you have access to and their best features!