Hello guys, welcome back to Not Just Mecha,
it s Marco here and today we work using the magical properties of oil paints!
Most of the time a title like this is just an effective click bait, but
what if this time it s actually true! My very first video on YouTube is about
oil paints and since the beginning I used them almost constantly for weathering and to create
quick definition and extra shades in speed painting but I made only one video where I paint a
model from start to finish with oils and that was almost one year ago well, this madness ends here!
I painted this Shaman in about 3 hours with brushes and oil paints using only a very simple
and beginner friendly approach that in terms of complexity I'm not afraid to compare to the basic,
base tone, wash, edge highlight of acrylics, but I think the result speaks for himself
about the difference in efficiency of the two processes. I m not trying to sell you anything,
you know that I like to combine the two techniques and I m deeply conscious of
the merits and limits of both kinds of paint but oils have been out of the spotlight for too long
and I really want to help their recent comeback to mainstream miniature painting because as
always is a matter of having more options and as you ll see oils are a great option.
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
If you want to try oil paints you don t need any particular precaution in the preparation stage
and you can prime your models like you always do, without changing a thing.
I prime with the same black you have seen me using dozens of times and I do my usual
zenithal light with white ink like you have seen me doing dozens of times, nothing chances here!
You can easily start painting over a simple full white primer but I think
that a zenithal light is a more beginner friendly starting point
because you get a clear map of the volumes that you have to create later anyway
and in general underpainting techniques are an integral part of oil painting.
Another beginner friendly, but absolutely non mandatory step is to fix a couple of
base tones with acrylics and, the tool you choose for this step doesn t really matter.
The objective is only to have few colours on the surface to limit a bit the volume of oil paint
you ll need later to obtain the opacity we are used to and we naturally look for,
so you can use standard acrylics or inks, contrast paints and similar products,
just choose the paint you are most comfortable with to get a quick,
simple, light base tone on the parts where you feel the need of a more opaque starting point.
As you can see, nothing fancy or complicated here even in terms of visual output.
Before moving to oils I want to reveal the two key, foundational ideas that you
have to keep in mind throughout this video and all your future work with oil paints!
First revelation: in almost every aspect oils are acrylics in reverse. This is obviously an
oversimplification but when in doubt this loose concept can save you a lot of trouble:
they dry slowly, light colours are more opaque than dark colours, thick paint is better for
large blendings and diluted paint is better for sharp details and so on.
Second revelation: this is a powerful mental image for oil paints behaviour
because more or less everything revolves precisely around this, the direct application of thick
paint and its spreading and even the actual movements with the brush are quite similar!
I want to jump into the real work and I don t want to talk too much about materials here so
if you need to know more about what you need on the table to start painting in this way and how
this medium and its tools work in general start from this super comprehensive video up here! ---
The only updates I made to my setup since that video are moving from a glass palette to cheap,
paper disposable palettes that make cleaning much easier and upgrade my palette cup to a
version with lids, a little thing that makes a lot of sense considering the long life of
the palette itself so I can keep the same tools and materials on the table for days
without moving or cleaning anything. In the first stage my palette is entirely
made by deep dark colours and I m going to use them to set my deeper shadows and all
my dark definition from the very beginning. They came on palette directly from the tubes
without any extra preparation and I use just a teeny-tiny bit of white spirit to thin them
down where I feel that the consistency is a bit too dense but it s not so uncommon
for me to use the softer ones straight from tubes, especially in the advanced stages.
The true objective of this step is to envelop the model in a general coat of oily medium
that will improve the grab of the next layers of paint like a sort of wet primer
making every part of the model an active and reactive surface where the colours can move
with a proper wet on wet behaviour and the brush can slide on the oily medium like a skater on ice.
More old school painters tend do this step using a uniform colour almost identical in value and tone
to the one used for the acrylic base to start painting from the same mid tone but
with the oil s properties, but as you know I m obsessed with efficiency and I like to
obtain as much as I can from a single step. I want to be clear, I didn t invent anything here;
oil painting especially on display and competition models is a real thing around the world, in Italy
in particular and I ve been super lucky to learn about its use from true masters of this medium
but like every real wizard they are often a bit shy and sometimes secretive in their ways.
I was really surprised when I discovered the work of James Wappel and how much we
streamlined some steps in a very similar way especially when painting gaming models. James
is for sure the most active of us in teaching and spreading the oils way so check the links in the
description to find to a ton of extra, great super informative content about this topic.
Again I want to keep this video very beginner friendly so I don t want to stress you with too
much with colour theory and the crazy interactions you can trigger with this step,
we ll get there don t worry, so here I simply use a dark green for the green skin
(in reality I couldn t resist adding a bit of violet around fingers, knees and elbows) a
dark blue for the bluish cape and dark browns for wood and bones. And since I want a colourful flow
of tones on the magic smoke I put in sequence red, magenta, violet, blue and green on top!
I know this seems a total mess now but watch this!
Like I usually do with oil washes I use make-up sponges and q-tips to remove the excess of paint
from every open surface but leaving a ton of wet, active paint inside the details.
As a bonus, thanks to the thick consistency of the colours and their heavy load of pigments
over a mat, porous and receptive acrylic surface everything remains stained by a
nice transparent base tone perfect for that area.
Even if you remove most of the paint everything is still covered by a thin oily layer because you can
t really take off that kind of substance simply rubbing without a solvent chemically acting on it.
Anyway, like working on washes, be gentle in this stage;
you are moving wet paint that doesn t really fight or resist you
and you have only a couple of acrylic layers enduring all this external physical stress.
Here you can see the small number of consumables I used and my bad management of the sponges surface.
Usually, I use just a couple of q-tips for the most hidden spots but here I needed a few more
because of the strong undercuts of this model. Let s be honest, this is already quite
interesting! All the preparation is done and we can move to the fun part!
I add to the palette my lighter tones, setting the entire pool of colours I ll use until the end
and I finally start painting in a more classic way!
I have a couple of pointy brushes for mixing and the application of paint
and few blending brushes in different sizes and shapes that will remain dead dry for the entire
process without ever touching the thinner! White spirit is a powerful solvent for oils,
much more powerful than water for acrylics so I ll use it only in minimal, microscopic
quantities to adjust a bit the consistency of the thicker colours on the palette and to
clean the application brushes when I need to jump between extremely different tones, that s all.
With experience and more general control you ll start using often the same brush both for
application and blending but if are a beginner start with a super strict two brushes technique;
this little thing will make your life incredibly easier and you can thank me later!
To clean the blending brushes I simply rub them on a piece of paper towel,
this is more than enough to remove the meaningful excess keeping them dry.
Remember, these are not acrylics and using paint with a good density and thickness
is the core of the technique. Despite all these recommendations
the actual workflow is the simplest and most straight forward you can think of:
you take the paint from the palette, you slap it without any crazy precision where needed and
you blend it on the surface or directly with the other colours of the gradient you want to create.
There s no need for multiple overlapped layers to fake a gentle progression
and you don t need to glaze dozens of thin transparent layers to obtain smoothness;
gradients and flowing colours come from gently spreading around that initial blob of paint.
Remember, always keep bread and butter in mind!
Thanks to the previous steps I ve already in place the darkest shadows that contain a ton of
interesting colours and the dark definition they create so here I basically need only to, quote
unquote, colour inside the borders and every time a new colour gets near those shadows it naturally
blends with the wet paint creating a gentle progression from light to mid tones and shadows!
The blending brush is your main weapon, the tool that makes all the real work. You can
gently dab it to blend the paint on the spot or use long brushstrokes to spread it
with a precise vector, but remember that to better control the blending process
the pressure you apply is a bit more important than shape and direction of the brushstrokes.
A secondary but not less important work that the blending brush does for you with its movement
is to fix the texture and the finish of the paint.
I m using thick paint that easily catches the shape of bristles and brushstrokes
and while blending I can easily erase those marks plus using the dabbing motion I create in
a microscopy level the texture of mat paint, that s why even on screen you can see that
the model is never really shiny or glossy and thanks to this, everything will dry quite mat.
Usually I talk more about the colours I m using and their relation
but as you can see I m working with basic hues and simple mixes because
the real complex interactions happen directly on the model.
I believe that in this case the most important part to deliver is in the brushstrokes,
the flow of the work and its stages. I must be honest with you, if you are
a beginner miniature painter in general, you ll not face huge problems adapting to this workflow,
but if are coming from years and years of acrylics and traditional wargaming techniques,
well your first experiments are going to be tough because again all your world will go upside down.
The good thing is that thanks to your experience with brush and paints in general
your learning curve will be extremely steep and you ll find yourself giggling at the table asking:
why the hell I don't I always paint like this? this is happing to me right now.
I want you also to be aware that everything you see here is just an atom,
not even a molecule of the tip of the huge iceberg that is oil painting and of course
there s a lot of my personal way of understanding and using the medium;
oils have been around for literally one thousand years, even today they are still one
of the most used artist s mediums and they are still made almost in the same way and
I think this gives you a good idea of why they are considered the pinnacle of what paint can do.
If you think about it in modern, advanced miniature painting the trend is to imitate
their behaviour with acrylics; zenithal lights and all the underpainting techniques,
the wet on wet method, the sketch and blend approach, a lot of things we do with the airbrush
or even our basic tools like mediums, flow improvers and even the wet palette, all the needs
that these tools and techniques try to satisfy are easily covered by the basic properties of oils!
Again, we come from a strange perspective where acrylics are the centre of the universe,
but they have been invented only 70 years ago and even if they are functional for what we do,
if we want to be called painters, I think we should know better what s around us.
I put a lot of emphasis on large, smooth blends because that is what is perceived as the difficult
part of brush painting in acrylics but oils can also easily cover textures and sharp details.
We ll talk better about this in future videos, but painting textures with oils is quite easy
because thanks to the natural thickness of the paint you can quickly set the rough pattern of
the texture on the model and then blend its impact and visibility as you need;
you can make it more subtle and transparent with more passes of the blending brush
or sharper and easily visible with just a couple of super light touches and obviously you can
combine both in multiple steps to create a deeper and even more realistic effect.
Painting sharp lines and edge highlights I simply add
much more thinner to my paint reaching the consistency of a fluid acrylic,
something in between a well shaken dropper bottle and contrast paint.
The flow of the brush loaded with diluted oil paint over the active surface is incredibly smooth
and precise and the lines get a natural gradient mixing a bit with the tones and values you have
already on the surface making the edge highlights more harmonious with the area of application.
As final note, I know you are worried about the drying time but really, don t! Oils dry slowly,
that s true but the idea that this takes weeks or months is true only for canvases where it s
often used a crazy mass of paint like entire tubes sometimes. With an application like the
one I used here the model will be completely dry in no more than a couple of days and if
you follow the link up here you can discover how the process works and how you can speed it up!
And here s the final result! This took me about three hours, and I can t stress enough how easy
has been to arrive here. I want also to point out that I always use the time I needed to
complete a project not to brag about my speed or because I value speed in a particular way
but because I consider obtaining a good looking model in a short time, synonymous of a conscious
efficiency and an easy, effective process. Again, the more I paint the more I feel the
need of this kind of properties to create what I have in mind and sometimes instead of doing
a million tricks with acrylics to obtain that I feel it s easier to just change the medium.
I hope you enjoyed this updated version of my gateway to oil painting and I can t wait
to go more and more in depth into the topic because there s still sooooo much to say!!!