What's up guys, welcome back.
We're taking another look at this ork today and we'll be going over how to do the Non
metallic metal on his face mask.
In order to get maximum contrast we'll begin with a solid, black base coat.
And for that I used some Valejo Model Colour black.
You want something that has a fairly matt finish but no so matt that it'll look grey.
I've found the valejo black to be one of the better ones, but feel free to experiment with
different brands to find one that suits your tastes.
For our first highlight we're going to use a fairly dark blue grey tone, this one here
is Scale Colour Graphene Grey, but feel free to use any similar blue grey.
You could also mix your own by adding a bright saturated blue into some black.
Just use whatever you feel more comfortable with.
If we look at the structure of the Mask, we can see that it's mostly formed with cylindrical
shapes, with a couple little flat areas here and there.
Try and view each plane as a seperate area and work out the basic shape of that surface.
Then you can apply simple rules to each one to work out where you want to place your highlights.
So on a cylinder you're painting your highlight along the length, directly below your light
source.
And on a flat area, place it towards the lower edge, angled away from your light.
You don't have to follow these rules exactly, instead try to use them to get a general starting
point so that you don't feel lost.
If you're new to this idea, check my video on it, it'll give you a solid overview on
all the concepts involved.
Alright, so once you worked out where the highlights go, you can map them out with some
of your paint.
Just blocking in the spots where you want the light to be hitting the surface.
We know the front of the mark is a roughly cylindrical shape so we'll place the highlight
around the middle area.
This little bit on the side is a more obvious cylinder so we'll do the same sort of thing,
placing the highlight to it runs along the length of the cylinder.
I like to make these a little offset from centre, so you get a sense that the light
is coming down at a bit of an angle, that tends to give you a bit more of an interesting
effect than if you have it slapped right on the top.
This bit on the bottom is a flat area so we'll highlight towards the lower edge.
Same on the front here on those little teeth like elements.
And again on this larger part, we know it's flat, so we'll highlight towards the lower
edge.
So you can see that, if you treat every surface as it's own little seperate entity it becomes
quite straight forward as to where you want to place your highlights, It's more of a challenge
when you have quite a large surface that doesn't have much variation in shape, on those you
need to be a bit more creative so fill out the space, but for these sort of mechanical
elements where there's a bunch of stuff essentially thrown together, it's a lot easier to lay
out a workable highlight pattern.
Now that wwe've laid in our general highlights we can blend them out by mixing some water
into the highlight to get a heavy glaze consistency.
Ideally I want it to be transparent, but thick enough that it'll only take about 4 applications
before of the glaze before we get a decent coverage.
If you want it thinner, that's fine too, you'll just need to do more layers to get the same
effect.
Once that's mixed, we'll load some on our brush and then gently press the bristles against
a paper towel to get rid of most of the glaze.
The less you have on the brush, the more control you'll have of it.
You don't want it sloshing about all over the place when you're applying it to the model.
The idea is to gently pull the glaze over the join between your base and highlight,
always moving the brush towards your highlight.
Try not to press down with the bristles when you do this.
The harder you press down, the more the glaze is going to flow onto the surface, and you
want to minimize that, so try to be quite light with the brush.
If the glaze pools on the surface it's going to leave a stain after it dries, that's why
you want to first reduce the amount of glaze on the brush and then use a light touch so
that what's on there, doesn't come out on to the model too quickly.
One more thing to keep in mind when you're doing this, is that you need to make sure
you allow the glaze time to dry before applying another layer.
This is really important.
If you don't do that, and you apply another ayer while the previous one is still drying.
That layer will rip, leaving you with a weird little mark, and over time, those little marks
build up and you end up with a horrible patchy surface that can be difficult to correct.
To avoid that.
Simply work your way around the various surfaces, try not to glaze away on one little area.
Instead, apply the glaze, then move to another highlight, apply the glaze, and move on to
the next one.
And so on, Eventually you'll come back round to the spot you started with. And by that
point it's probably dried, so you're fine to add another layer.
If there's only one or two highlights that you're trying to blend out, then you can use
a hairdryer to speed up the drying time that way you're not going be be sitting there like
a potato waiting for each layer to dry.
(cut to potato sitting in seat)
Alright, so after you've blended that out, mix a little scale colour white sands into
the highlight, lightening it up to a medium grey tone.
And we'll apply that in all the same spots as before but this time we'll cover an area
about half the size as the first highlights.
On these smaller cylindrical areas I'm also going to add some texture lines to get a more
interesting effect.
Adding texture to your Non metallics is a really good way to bump them up a notch or
two.
I'll also pick out some of the little edges at this stage.
It's really important to make the edges between planes pop when you're doing this.
Just try to keep those highlights nice and small so that you're just hitting the very
edge.
If you make them too wide you'll need to go back in with either your base or highlight
colour to clean them up a bit.
Make sure your highlights are opaque by applying another layer or 2.
If they're dull, you wont be able to get that nice shiney effect.
So it's worth taking the time to apply another layer just to make sure.
You can see I'm doing those little lines again on these two elements.
It just helps to give the surface more of a shimmery look, you
don't have to take it to Lan like extrememes, to get a nice effect, a little bit of texture
goes a long way.
If you're intimidated by the texture you can paint these highlights in normally without
the texture and then just blend them out in the same way as the previous step.
You'll still end up with a nice metallic effect it just wont be quite a detailed looking.
But if you've tried Non metallics before and you're looking to push them a bit further,
try adding in these texture lines and see how you get on.
If it doesn't work out you can always paint over it and try again.
It's the same idea on the top of the helmet.
I first paint a strong line along the middle of the highlight.
Running along the length of the cylinder.
Then I turn the model around and paint a series of lines so that they're perpendicular to
that initial guide line.
And I try to make the lines slightly longer the closer they get to the edge of the surface.
If you make the lines all the same length it doesn't really look as good. It ends up
being a bit too uniform.
There's not a lot of surface area on the front of the mask to add much texture so I just
blend that highlight out with some glazes.
And that's done In the same way we did the initial highlight just using the lighter grey
colour.
To continue we'll mix some more of the white sands into the highlight, this time making
it more of a bright grey.
And again we'll place them in the same spots, but covering up a much smaller surface area
than the last step.
This time, we wont paint the guide line all the way across the highlight, instead we'll
try and paint them on for about half the length, so that it gets brighter towards the edges.
That's going to give us a nice light flare effect as if the light is glinting off the
edge of the surface.
We'll still do the little lines over the top, again making them slightly longer towards
each edge of the element.
You can see we're starting to get a nice effect coming through now. It doesn't quite have
that shiny quality we're going for, but we're definitely getting closer.
And we'll do the same sort of thing on the other side.
There's a lot less surface area on this side so we'll forget about painting on only half
of the width, you could still do that if you wanted but I decided it would be a bit too
fiddly to bother with.
You can add a few dots here and there on your edge highlight just to give a little more
detail.
And the same sort of thing on the top section, just using those little texture lines to build
up the highlight.
The highlights on the front can be blended out using glazes.
Gently pushing the glaze up and over the edges of each highlight until that hard edge blurs
out.
Add some more white sands into your mix, making it into a very bright grey, almost an off
white.
And we'll use this to add some of our higher level highlights.
These are mostly going to focus on the edges of each element, to help give those edges
more definition, and also to boost the contrast a bit more.
Try to cover quite a small area when you're doing these, think of these highlights are
as little dots.
I made a bit of a mess of those ones there, but that's ok I can fix that later.
Just needs a bit of clean up.
Alright, the last step is to apply very bright, final highlights with some of the white sands,
on it's own.
Try not to thin this down much so that you can get a sharp opaque highlight without having
to do lots of layers.
You want to add very small dots at the brightest points of each highlight, then go back and
add a few dots here and there into the darker areas of your edges.
I place these fairly randomly, and just try to get an interesting effect.
Careful not to overdo this, or you'll end up covering up a lot of your work.
You need that contrast between the very bright and dark, but you also need those midtone
highlights in there as well.
When you lost those you tend to lose the effect as well, so you need to be careful that you
retain that as you apply these final little dots.
Alright, I think that's the metal parts of the visor pretty much done.
I'll go back later and clean it up a bit, some of the blending on the front part is
slightly rough but that's not a big issue.
I wasn't really all that happy with the lenses on the mask so I'll redo them and put them
on another video, just so you can see the whole process.
I try to show different ways to do things so you get a bigger bank of useful info to
draw from.
Anyway, I hope you give it a try let me know how you get on if you do.
Alright, I think that's everything, thanks a lot for your support and I'll see you all
in the next video.
Thanks again.
Bye for now...