Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha, it s Marco here and today I ll show you my
way to paint clean, colourful models. I love to paint gritty anti-heroes often putting
the accent on the heavy weathering coming from a lifetime or a truly bad day on the
battlefield but there are figures that simply need to be neat and bright!
The guys of Signum Games sent me a batch of their new models for the game Legends of Signum
and I decided to fully embrace the clean, cartoony look of their concept art using powerful
colours, smooth blendings and an illustrational rendering of volumes, textures and materials.
I strongly believe that a good painter should be able to adapt his hand to any kind of style,
that s way I constantly jump between different models, techniques and materials, carefully
avoiding the subtle traps of the comfort zone. When I paint a model, my objective is always
to tell a story and different stories need a different rhythm, language, and vocabulary
so don t waste time and energy looking for THE unifying style and focus your effort in
creating the best version of the single specific stories you want to tell.
Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE and hit the bell button to always know what happens on the
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every single little line and brushstroke! Thanks a million guys!
With this paintjob I want also to prove that a style and the look of a model is totally
independent of the tools and paints you use, so in the next video I m going to paint an
equally clean, vibrant model but using a different approach, techniques, and materials to show
how little they really mean in the final picture. All this stuff is a just a mean to an end
and people looking at your models don t care about the process or if you used acrylics,
oils or spray cans, the result is the only thing that really matters because that s the
only thing they are able see! Keeping this in mind I always start my models
only when I know precisely how I want them to look like and all the details of the story
I want to tell. I want to create a bright scene for a character inspired by Disney s
Robin Hood set in the fresh shade of a lush forest with a warm sun filtered by the roof
of leaves; from here I mentally move backwards step by step understanding what I need to
obtain the result and only at this point deciding the physical ways that I ll use to fix that
sensation on the model. Here I start, knowing that I want luminous,
vibrant colours everywhere so I make this aspect a priority from the very beginning.
The best way to boost the internal luminosity of a colour is to layer it on top of a source
of high values able to provide that extra light so my starting point is a simple general
grey scale, but extremely unbalanced towards pure white. It s subtle but if you are a veteran
of the channel you can clearly see how this is very different from my usual sketching
that I tend to focus on setting the volumes of the model through the use of high and often
extreme contrasts; I consciously accept to lose a lot of information about shapes and
volumes in this softer and less dramatic flow of lights and shadows to boost the visual
output of the colours I ll add on top. I still apply this general high value with
its relative light greyscale, instead of working directly on a simple layer of white primer
because even if with a weaker contribute it still delivers a useful sense of the main
volumes that I can use as a map to apply dark saturated colours in the shadows.
The role and importance of base colours or if you want to be more technical mid tones
is extremely overrated. The first layer of colour, on any part of the model, is only
a stepping stone for the dynamic flow of shadows and lights and in a model with a good contrast
between deep shadows and extreme highlights the base colour is just a microscopic point
inside the progression of the final blend so I don t need it to be extremely precise
or uniform, saturated or opaque, I just need a bit of colour to start building a simple
backbone for the scheme. I use semi opaque paints in this stage to
be able to see the soft sketch in transparency letting the luminosity of my white to filter
through these layers; all the tones are extremely vibrant and saturated inside the bottle but
you can see that I m not looking for that kind of final saturation and opacity right
now because that will be a job for lights and shadows with their extra new tones.
I could do the same with inks, contrast paints, or any other kind of paint adjusting fluidity
and transparency with basic dilution and this is valid both for airbrushing and classic
brush work. Here I m using Golden High flow acrylics just because I have the perfect tones
for the scheme I have in mind, and they are ready to be used in the airbrush straight
from the bottle but it s just a matter of saving few minutes of work, and for sure,
not the kind of choice that makes the paintjob. This is what I consider a good base for the
more serious part of the work. I have a rough sensation of the scheme and its basic components,
but lights and shadows are still blank spaces ready to absorb new tones and values interacting
with a base that easily accepts and integrates new hues.
I shade the orange fur first with a deep, transparent red then with a warm and more
opaque magenta. Similar idea for the armour where I deepen
its tone first with a transparent dark grey then with a more opaque and cold turquoise
to fix stronger shadows following the map of the sketch.
Fur and armour are the only elements where I use two tones to create the first shadows;
this because of their large surfaces that need a wider and more progressive modulation
and part because of their prominent role in the sculpt and scheme that needs more visual
complexity and extra interesting details. And the green is shaded with a simple transparent
cold green. The scheme is starting to take a proper shape:
my base tones are all quite warm and all my shadows tend to cold hues to simulate the
refreshing shadows of a lush forest. What I need now is to introduce the warm sensation
of the yellow light of the sun and I do it imitating the natural behaviour of this kind
of light using a transparent filter of yellow ink on top of everything.
It can seem an oversimplification but that s more or less how a powerful chromatic light
works in real life. Every element of the scheme has its own native
colour coming from the material it s made of but the tones of lights and shadows depend
mostly by external factors interacting and bouncing on those materials and lights in
particular tend to absorb a lot of the tone of the environmental light.
Using a transparent application from above I m a able to influence all the existing tones
thanks to their optical mix, without creating an obvious yellow layer but making everything
more vibrant and saturates with environmental inputs and with a clear chromatic direction
towards yellow and warmer tones. Again, that s why I left the mid tone so light and undefined
so I can fill them with new information and sensations.
I fix the white that I want extremely clean and pure and the general, coloured sketch
on top of the value sketch is done! I uniform all the various finishes under a
thin layer of mat varnish. Some of the transparent paints I used are quite glossy and since the
next stages will have a super coherent finish that will be the final finish of the model,
is better to fix this issue now. I close this stage priming the non-metallic
gold trims with contrast Aggaros dunes and fixing the white overspray on the muzzle
with contrast Gryph-Hound orange; again, all the different paints are totally interchangeable.
And I move to oil paints for the rest of the work. Again, this is a choice more based on
my mood of the moment and a personal preference for a medium that I m simply enjoying a lot
in this period, instead of some kind of proper technical or practical need. I use a small
set of cold, transparent tones to create light filters for the major elements of the sculpt;
the bluish Payne s grey for the armour, the dark green of Perylene black for the outfit,
magenta for the fur and a mix of black and Burnt Umber for gold and wood because I don
t have a proper dark brown in my collection. This is not an oil priming because I don t
need that kind of receptive surface to work only on the small blends of light mid tones
and extreme lights and it s not even the kind of wash, I usually use to catch geometric
details and panel lines because this model doesn t have that kind of sharp elements easy
to catch. I use these tones as proper filters mostly to kill every residue and visual artifact
of the airbrushed layer. You can see from the extreme transparency of this application
that I m not looking for a meaningful chromatic impact on the surface; my main objective is
to smooth out the finish of the fast and furious airbrushing of the first stage with few unifying
tones. And I remove visible brushstrokes, pools, and excesses of paint with a gentle
pass of a make-up sponge. This is absolutely not a speed painting video,
and I really took my time in the second upcoming part but I m really proud to say that the
work until this point took less than two hours. Speed is never the point but If I can save
time during the boring foundational steps and invest more attention, physical and creative
energy on the more artistic and meaningful steps, well, why not!
Here I have to work on lights, textures and details so the palette is made only by vibrant,
saturated and opaque tones able to create solid layers on top of the sketch and I use
two colours for every major element of the scheme choosing a colder and a warmer version
of the same hue to be able to work around the mid tones both in the colder spectrum
of the shadows and the warmer range of the lights; again the base colours are not important
and all my thinking goes to how they develop on the volumes of the sculpt. But as I ll
explain better later, there s even more involved in this choice of tones.
I always suggest you to mix your colours and train your mixing skills and at this point
you are used to my messy palettes so what I ll tell you now can be a bit shocking or
counterintuitive, but here s the final secret to create, bright, vibrant models: you have
to keep mixing to a minimum or even not mixing anything at all. Every time you mix something
into an original colour you are physically and chemically reducing its original concentration
of pigments weakening it s vibrancy and visual impact.
For this reason, I have on the palette only powerful saturated tones, and I use them pure
or with just a pinch of the tone next to them that being the same colour with just a little
difference in temperature doesn t mess too much with the saturation. The high opacity
of these colours is another key aspect because it prevents optical mixes with the previous
layers so I m sure that the colour I fix on the surface, even if stretched and blended
to an extreme still maintains most of its impact.
I use the exact same mindset working with acrylics and actually I m even more careful
with them because even the most opaque acrylic can easily become transparent with simple
dilution so in the context of a work like this one I would have used heavy body acrylics
like Scale75 artist or Kimera with just a tiny bit of water inside to control better
the brushstrokes but keeping all their strong opacity and covering power.
If you followed my deep dive into oil paints of the last couple of months you know that
the work from this point becomes really, straight forward. Thanks to the acrylic sketch my major,
large volumetric blends are all in place, so I need to use only microscopic quantitates
of paint for small, contained blends easy to set and control with the basic flow of
application of thick, almost undiluted paint and its blend with a clean, dry soft brush!
The technical part of the workflow is all made by these two simple steps repeated over
and over so the most interesting aspect of this stage of the work is what I have and
happens on the palette and the different kinds of brushstrokes that I use to bring paint
to the model. Because of this opacity and the high definition
that this layer is meant to create the brushstrokes I use are all extremely meaningful even where
I end up blending them more aggressively. On the tails I use large, fluid brushstrokes
to give the idea of the flowing undefined mass of hair and the kinetic energy of this
jump. And similar but more concentrated and less
blended brushstrokes on the fur of the muzzle to give the idea of finer hair and smaller
strands and to focus your attention on a more defined area.
Short lines and dots on the green outfit to create the texture of the fabric.
And heavily blended large blocks of lights on the non-metallic gold to create the illusion
of a shiny, polished material. Every brushstroke has a meaning and a function, and it s defined
and controlled both by how it s applied and how heavily it s blended.
Working with the high coverage, heavy body and long drying time of oil paints, edge highlights
and small details become the easiest part of the whole paintjob!
And since I m sure a lot of you will ask about the orange flowers on the base here s a super
quick tutorial inside the tutorial. The mix is the exact same I use to make snow effects
and you can check the recipe in the link to a very old video up here. I simply add a good
amount of acrylic paint in the mix, and I use the tangent movement of a big brush to
apply it on the tips of the grass tufts. The surface tension of PVA glue creates by itself
the globular formations on the tip of the single strands; the mix dries in few minutes
and then you can even apply lights and shadows to make the flowers more interesting and better
integrated with the model and its lights! And here s the final result! I hope you liked
this change of style and the implications of me using a workflow that I used for several
darker models, but in the context of clean, illustrational painting.
I constantly receive questions from painters that try to replicate recipes and workflows
down to the single brushstroke thinking that s the only way to obtain a certain result
but there's always more than one way to skin a cat and your ability to adapt to new styles
doesn t come from tools, paints and steps but from your knowledge of their properties
and behaviours and I m going to prove it even more in the next video so stay tuned and in
the meantime start testing your skills on a new visual style
and see how it goes!