 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about painting with oils. So this is going to be really exciting. This is very fun. We're going to split this video up into a couple parts and we're going to paint this scaven here. I've converted a scaven to use my soulbound character and we're going to talk about how to paint him up in oil paints. We're actually going to mix acrylics into it some too. We'll talk about the strengths, weaknesses of oils, all that kind of stuff. Where we're going to use them, where we're not. So I'll just talk about how I prepped the model. That's going to be part one. You'll want to do the same. Then we're going to talk about tools and the things you need to use with oil paints. They're not quite as user friendly as we might have with acrylics, but they are worth it. And then we're going to actually paint the fig. So step one, preparation. So what I did here is I zenithal primed the model and then I ran some contrast paints over the main areas. So that would be the armor, the cloak, and the skin, as well as using a Reiklin flesh shade. And so the pictures of that are right here on the side of the screen. And then after that, I just went over him with a nice light dry brush of a very light ice yellow just to get kind of everything the edges picked out. And then I shot him from below with a little bit of a deep purple color, like a super deep purple. Just add some shadow. Now why did I do all that if I'm going to paint this thing with oils? That whole thing took maybe 10 minutes, by the way, because it was literally just glop on a contrast paint exactly in the way that they say you're supposed to do it with a one coat thing. It takes minutes. And the dry brush is obviously super fast in using the airbrush underneath as fast. Why? Well, because when I'm working with oils, it's often beneficial to have some kind of hint of the color you're going to be using underneath, rather than going over a standard zenithal. You certainly can. There's nothing wrong with going over it. Many oil paintings are obviously done over blank white canvases, so it's not like there's a problem. It just makes it a little easier to work with, especially so you can keep your oils more thin so your tones will be in the right shades and stuff like that. When putting on the acrylics is so fast, it only takes a few seconds on a mini, it's often worth it. You can also prep it with an airbrush, so if you're doing this with like something like a space marine where they're largely one color, and I were going to do ultramarines, I would just shoot the whole thing blue and then call it a day. I generally will leave it thin, doesn't matter, because we're going to seal it. So after you've put down some base kind of color, and you almost just not everywhere, like I didn't put anything over the pick head or over the blade on his forehead, or you know, there's some other parts here that don't really have any color to them. Again, you don't need it. It can just be helpful, especially with these big areas. So once that was done, I went ahead and varnished him. Now you don't necessarily have to varnish before you use oil paints on top of acrylics. You will hear a lot of people say that you must or the white spirits will just dissolve your paint instantly. That's not generally true, okay? But for safety's sake, and just for ease of use, and because I used contrast and contrast is really, really thin, and if you're using thin glazes of inks or contrast or something to set your initial tone, those really do have very low durability, so giving a nice coat of varnish is helpful. So this is a 50-50 mix of satin and AK interactive ultramarine varnish that I put over the top of it just to make sure he's nice and sealed in. And with that, he's ready to be painted with oils, okay? So there you go. Now let's talk about what we need. If we're going to paint with oils, we start, we have to have some kind of oil paint. Now mine are all these, which are the Winton Oil Colors. The series will vary, but it's, you know, you get a lot of this in a tube. These will vary in price when you order them, because they are artist grade oils, and they use the real pigments, and the pigments have varied costs, so hence it's not like a miniature paint where, you know, there's no difference in colors. It's only sort of a difference in maybe the type of paint. So you will pay more money for certain colors than for others, but you do get quite a bit. This obviously says 37 milliliters, compare that to, say, our 12 or 17 milliliter pots. However, the key is you're not using just this. You're also going to be using, instead of water, we don't thin oil paints with water, they're oil paints, instead we use paint thinner. Now specifically, I like either the Mona Lisa odorless paint thinner, which is what I've got right here. Or if you can't get that, the Gamblin, Gamsol, this Artist Oil Colors is also really good. Both of these are as close to odorless, truly odorless, as you will get. All white spirits have some kind of scent to them, but these are very minimal. I don't really even notice them, unless I'm working for hours. White spirits will dry very quickly. White spirits are very powerful, they are toxic, they are flammable, all that kind of stuff. Do be super careful with this. This is not the water-based nature of your normal paints, where they are very safe. Don't work near any kind of open flames, I hope this stuff would be obvious, but it's important to say that this is a more dangerous medium than if you're working with just water-based acrylics. That being said, Artist have used this kind of white spirit, this kind of mineral spirit, for quite literally centuries safely, and you can too. We could take this and put it onto a palette, and then this. That's often how you'll see canvas artists work, they'll use some of this, maybe they get a little bit of white spirits in their brush or something like that, maybe they thin a little bit of this out here and there, but for the most part, they tend to work pretty thick. When you're working on a canvas that's three by four, or two by two, or whatever size canvas you happen to be working on or bigger, it's fine, you can have a nice thick paint. We're painting miniatures. What I did, I took that color and I actually made my own miniature paints out of it. You can hear there's an agitator in there. What I did to do this was just take some of the paint, squeeze it down into the top. These are 30 milliliter dropper bottles I got in bulk cheap off of the web, and then I used a little pipette to pipette a bunch of white spirits inside, and then I pushed a couple agitators down in there. My agitators are cut up bits of old pewter figures, so this kind of stuff, figs I'm never going to paint. If you have the little clippies off the bottom, that can work, you know, whatever. Then I just shook the living bejesus out of it. I mean that's really it, and you do have to mix, mix, mix, mix, mix. If you've got a paint shaker, like something that'll actually vibrate your paint, something like this, I could not recommend this enough for putting together this kind of a thing. That'll make your life a lot easier. But if you don't have that, then you can use the old-fashioned manual trick of just shaking it a whole heck of a lot. Because you've got to get this very thick paint broken down into a more miniature paint consistency. The reason I like doing this is twofold. One, when you have this in a bottle like this, it's much easier to use. It's consistency is going to be much more familiar to you, and it's going to dry a lot faster. Okay, so that's number one, because you've replaced a bunch of the paint with white spirit, and white spirit evaporates rather quickly, the paint will tend to dry faster. The other things you're going to need are some brushes. Let's talk about brushes with oil paints. So your standard brushes are going to be that you want to use for this, are going to be synthetics. You don't generally want to use your sable brushes for oil paints. White spirits are going to be pretty damaging to the natural hair, and that's both your cleaner and your thinner, and so you want to be careful with stuff like that. So I'll generally use synthetics now, and you're going to want a couple of them, because we're going to have both a painting brush and a smoothing brush. We'll see that during the painting phase. Okay, you also tend to want a bigger, sorry, you also can tend to use a bigger brush. There's also going to be plenty of uses for small ones. That being said, I do have some sable brushes that I set aside specifically for this. Now these are some old work colors brushes from their Generation 1. They are sable brushes. I actually find having a few sable brushes to be very useful for things like really carefully smoothing things, and just doing very subtle applications, and precise applications of colors. So I keep a couple really, really small sable brushes for this purpose. What I will say, though, is once you go down this road with a set of sable brushes, that you're never going back. They don't go back to acrylics for the most part. You can reform them to some degree. If you get out like the brush soap and the brush conditioner and the brush shaper, you can get them back to functional. But my honest advice would be, if you're going to use sable brushes in the way you see me use here, grab yourself a sable brush or two and dedicate it to this purpose. Set it to the side, keep it in a different place. It's specifically now for your oil paints. Other tricks that are other little items that we are going to be useful to you is a palette. Obviously, we do not use a wet palette for oil paints. As one, they stay wet for days, so you don't need help. And two, they are not water-based. This is what I use. It's probably too big to fit in camera here. I'll see if I can pull it to the side or so you can see what it is. But if I flip it over, you'll know. It is a floor tile. This is a porcelain floor tile. I went to Home Depot and they have these obviously around. You can buy these tiles. They would normally be used for doing your walls or a bathroom or something like that floor. And you can buy the individual tiles for a couple of dollars because they're meant to be super cheap because you're meant to buy 100 of them, but I only needed two of them. So easy. For basically four dollars, you're going to get a really nice big solid palette. Nothing will absorb into this. So the paint itself doesn't seep down into the porcelain and you can scrape on it and all that kind of stuff. And it's a great surface for working with that. If you ever need to leech out some of the white spirits, which if you're using anything straight out of the tube, sorry not the white spirits, the oil that's in here, if you need to leech out some of that paint, then you can always use a piece of cardboard and let it sit there for about 20 minutes. If you go watch the skin video I did pretty recently, you'll see that's exactly what I did there, where I actually put these paints out onto cardboard and let the oil that's in here as the natural medium leak out. Final item that can be of some help is a liquid, a liquid impasto. There's a couple different brands of this. This is a Windsor Newton version. There are many different versions of this around. You can get the liquid original medium or you can use a liquid impasto. All of these, the liquid impasto comes in a big giant tube. What they do is they, the most important parts right there, I don't know if you can read it, speeds drying. It will also make some things a little more glossy because you're thinning it out with a fairly glossy medium, but that doesn't actually matter for our purposes because we'll be varnishing things regularly to keep them, to keep it matte. It's nice to have a little bit of this on your palette area. If you mix a tiny, teeny, teeny, itty bitty baby amount of this in, it will have a significant impact on your drying time. But my honest answer is you don't always need to use this unless you're going to work thicker because with the paints thinned down, like we have them here in this bottle, the reality is they're generally dry within a day or two tops. When you're using thick, straight oil paints, they can take a lot longer. They can take a week or so. So if they're the thicker your oil paint, the more you want to start thinking about like a liquid original or a liquid impasto or something like that to help it dry out. So that's what you need. It's relatively simple. I know that sounds like what I just explained isn't simple, but it's a lot of tools you probably already have and you know you need to get those white spirits. You probably already have some synthetic brushes around and you're good to go. But I promise you, if you're willing to walk down this road with me, it's very worth it, as I'll hopefully show you in this video. So I'm going to go ahead and stop here. We're going to reset everything so I can get everything ready to go to paint and then we're going to actually paint that guy. Okay, so here we are at the desk and we're going to get painting with the actual oils. I'm going to start with a flesh out on my palette as it were. I have lots of different colors prepared to work on that flesh. So I have some light flesh and sunny flesh from oil brushers. I have some Indian red. I have a little cadmium deep red hue. Some burnt sienna and a little bit of dark brown also from oil brushers. And I've got these all laid out and what you see me doing is largely just applying sort of the same tactics we would think of with value sketching. That's really the easiest way to describe what I'm on about here. I chose to show the arm and the hand because these volumes are really sort of simple to interpret and work with. We all, you know, it's well shaped muscles and things like that. So what you'll see me do throughout here is something very like a traditional value sketch where I started the highest high, that light flesh color. And now I'm just going in. I went to the sunny skin tone that I mixed in some of the Indian red. And I'm just kind of layering that into these areas. The trick is you can't paint with oil paints like you would your traditional layer paint. So a lot of people, when we, if you just, a lot of people when they first try to paint with oils, they just sort of paint with the oils. Like you would, like you would see me doing here where I'm kind of, you know, applying a bunch of different paint. The problem is, if you put on oil paints like this and just leave it on something the size of a miniature, one, it's not going to be very smooth unless you are sort of really sneaky with how you blend them together and do a lot of little steps. And two, it's still very thick paint, even with as much white spirits as I'm adding here. So hence why it's really important to, one, never, ever, ever, ever put your brush you're using into white spirits while you're still applying paint. So that's what I just did right there. I went through all six of those paints or whatever and did not put my brush in white spirits. I just wipey-wipeyed it on a paper towel every time. Okay. Then I'm going to grab what I call my smoothing brush. Now your smoothing brush is a separate brush you keep that does not touch white spirits until the end of your session and can be synthetic or sable or whatever. I'll talk about the brushes later. But the key with it is it has to be a soft bone dry brush. And what you'll see me do is just subtract a lot of the paint. I'm going to zoom in here so I really give you a nice close-up of what happened there in just that short amount of time. Look at how wonderful that transition is on that skin and that took just nothing, just no time, right? And I was able to add a ton of colors and get a perfectly smooth blend. And I did that by applying those strong colors and then bringing them together with the smoothing brush. Now you can keep going back to the well. So now I went back to my application brush, applied a little more of a bright color I wanted, then went back to my smoothing brush. Now I'm going to go back into a slightly different skin tone that I want to add some more pinkiness to it. We're going to apply that in there wherever I want it. And then I'll go back to my smoothing brush. Every time I'm making sure my smoothing brush is always wiped clean, it never goes directly in paint. It only touches the miniature and the paper towel. And in doing so, I'm able to constantly, one, make sure my blends are super smooth. And two, make sure that all the paint layers that are there, stay there, right? So what you can see me doing now is just really reinforcing all of the colors. And I'm doing that because since this is all extreme wet on wet blending, that's what working with oil paints is, right? Because that's happening, everything is going to quite naturally get pulled toward the middle. By that, what I mean is like whatever your sort of mid-tone is, is where the colors will tend to pull toward. Because they're all getting mixed up in each other's businesses. So the brightest and the darkest tend to get pulled toward the middle. To retain contrast, we always want to make sure that we go back in and we really pop that contrast. And I'll talk a little bit about that later on as well, as to how we maintain that full contrast. There, I wasn't happy with the amount of light on that part of the volume. So we just grab some quick paint, set it aside, grab a little smoothing brush, smooth, smooth, smooth. And we call, we summon up our inner Rob Thomas. And boom, we're good to go. So again, we were able to achieve that, in my mind, really fast for that kind of contrast. If I was going to do that with the subtle glazes and things like that, it would take on with an acrylic paint. That would have been, that would have been a long process, right? But here, I can get to a place where I'm happy, look at it, say, okay, do I like where I'm at? Maybe, maybe not. And then I go and I grabbed, I grabbed a little burnt sienna, put that on a little more thinly. And then what I'm going to do is just still use the smoothing brush in the same way. So we can still think in the same terms of adding filters and adding glaze colors, just like we do with acrylics. The trick is we're always going back and forth with those brushes and we're always extending the contrast. Right? We're just infusing it with more and more color. So happy with the skin. We're now going to go on to the other dominant feature of this. There's three dominant features of this miniature, flesh, the robe, and the armor. And so now we're going on to the robe. We'll do the armor in just a moment. And the working with the red cloak is really fun because I didn't want to use any black in this or anything like that. So instead you see I grabbed some Viridian Hue, which is a nice, very bright green color. And I mixed that into my red to make my shadows. And I will say one of the challenges of oil painting is that you are going to have to become more familiar, more friendly, and more ready to mix colors. There are quite a lot of different colored oil paints in the market. You're not going to want for choices, certainly amongst, it's not like you're going to be like, oh, there's no, there's no blue. No, there's plenty of different shades of blue. But it's not the same as say, you know, some AK interactive third generation acrylics, 236 colors or some Vallejo 500 colors or, you know, whatever. Oftentimes you will need to be mixing your own, your own shades, your own hues, to get them exactly where you want. And that's what you see me doing here. Just as I did with the skin, I'm going to over highlight and overshadow this. So you notice I went way up into this sort of bright pink hue, which isn't actually what the final color is going to be. But I did that because once I get out the smoothing brush and start working this all together, everything is going to fall towards the mid-tone. And again, red is very dominant, right? One of the things you have to learn, and you'll see this very much when we do the armor here in a few minutes, is you have to figure out how dominant your individual colors are and understand how that's going to impact your final, your final blending. So now I'm just working the smoothing brush around. You saw me go kind of go over everything, pull off a lot of the excess paint, bring it all together. And you notice in between, every time I was always going to that paper towel and really being aggressive, this is one of the reasons I say that synthetic brushes are often going to be a better bet for you for acrylics. Sorry, for oils, I apologize. Because you do have to kind of beat them up a little bit. And because you don't want to go in your white spirits regularly, it's only going to make a mess. As such, I tend to favor synthetics for the work, but I do have some sables that are dedicated to it. Some of the brushes I was using earlier were sables, the smoothing brushes, that is to say. And you'll see me apply some with the sable later on as well. If you get sables, and we'll have a deeper discussion of this, the key is you dedicate them. Now what I'm doing is going back, and this is how I tend to work with oils. So I start with a single pass and get a nice, get a nice sort of rough set of transitions in there, all smooth. And then after I do the smoothing brush the first time, I come back in and I push that contrast more, just in the areas I really wanted. That's exactly what I did here. And you can see once again, we've gone over everything with the smoothing brush quickly, and Bada Boom red cape done, nicely saturated. Now we're going to turn to the armor, and we're going to use this to talk about some non-metallic. I think non-metallic is one of those things that people have classically found challenging. And that's often because it does require not only an understanding of light, certainly, but it also requires a lot of very smooth blending, often to make it look good. Now there's lots of different techniques around non-metallic, but in general when you're doing transitions, that will often go from very light to very dark, because never in nowhere is contrast more important than with non-metallic. You know, you really are asking a lot, especially of maybe a painter who's not as familiar with blending, to blend out from something, basically running from white to black. And so here we're going to give this guy some gold armor, since this is a Skaven who worshiped Sigmar. Don't ask, it has to do with the soulbound RPG. You can watch the video on my channel where we played a game live, if you want to learn more about Skig here, the character in painting. But the key is I'm going from the light flesh, which is what I'm using for my highlight color. Same thing I used on the actual flesh tone. The same thing I'm going to use, by the way, across all of this. I used it on the red as well. And that's because I want to set one universal light color where this guy is in. And then I went through a yellow pale hue, into a yellow ochre, into burnt sienna, and then finally into the dark brown. Now, once I've applied all those colors, here's where we're going to start smoothing them together. Directionality matters here, exactly how I move my brush. You notice often I'm sort of stabbing at it, in this sort of stifling motion. And you notice I'm being very careful about where I pull from light to dark, and things like that. This is where I really want to have a deep discussion about the strength of individual hues. See the areas I haven't touched yet, how dominant that yellow is, because yellow is a very bright color, it's very dominant to the eye. Notice though, after I used my smoothing brush, how much weaker it becomes. And that's happening because just as our experience with acrylic paints would teach us, some of the oil paints have different strengths than others. They're not all meant to be completely opaque, or completely as powerful, just as if you've ever used acrylic paint, and notice that one color covers a lot better than another, or is a lot more dominant than another, you would expect the same thing to happen here. And that's all right, because that first smoothing brush that we put together, like all I did was value sketch it, and then swoop, smooth it out, took no time at all. But after that's done, what you have is the sort of fuzzy zoom background of your paint scheme. Right? We're all probably participating in various meetings and nonsense these days, where you'll meet with people and they'll turn on that thing where they fuzz out their background. You can still see the objects behind you, but it's all fuzzy, right? And that's effectively what your first application is generally going to be. You get it all smooth, you subtract out all the paint you don't need, and then what you do is you come in and you really establish your contrast in just those small areas, and then I smooth just those out, right? And that's what you see me doing here. So I came back in first with my light flesh and a little bit of yellow ochre, then I came back in with some burnt sienna and some dark brown, and I'm reestablishing my shadow. And you can see here what I'm constantly trying to do is just adjust those tones, push them around exactly how I want. It's experimental. There's no one step, two step, three step go here. It's experimental because I can be experimental because I can't actually make a mistake. Anything I do here, I can erase or I can mix in or I can subtract. There's no point of no return here really until I decide to varnish this out. So what I'm doing at this point is just pushing that contrast up, maybe add a little tone here or there, see how I like it. So at this point, what I'm doing is just again popping those highlights out. When you're working non-metallics with oils and you need to take the contrast way, way, way up, you can oftentimes need to do maybe two to three sort of individual applications. And here I want to keep a slightly damp brush to really fade that edge. Sometimes you want a little bit of white spirits in there. That's what you saw me just do. So I wipey, wipey, wipey the brush like crazy on my paper towel, but that's not enough. If you do that with your brush and then touch it to the back of your gloved hand, what you're going to notice is that you've still got white spirits on that brush. White spirits really are really, really powerful and it takes about none of them to erase this paint, especially when it's fresh. So be very careful if you're using that particular method you just saw me smooth with. It's perfectly fine. It's perfectly doable. You just want to make sure that you're being careful. I thought here I'd just add one more final section where I'm hitting the warpstone real quick. This is just filling out that green and the reason I wanted to show you this is because for things like gems or those kinds of colors where you want to do fun infusions, for example my shadow colors here, I'm using deep brown as with the dark color, which works great for a shadow color in my green. It's the same shadow color I used as the deepest shadow on the red and on the flesh, so all my shadows are in line and my lights are in line. What you saw me do there is take a little of the yellow pale hue and I grabbed a little bit of light flesh. Again, my highest highlight color will be on everything, will be the light flesh and it just works that kind of thing. And for stuff that has a glow effect, it's so much fun and so easy to do things like glowing warpstone, glowing eyes, OSL, oil paints are a dream with that kind of stuff because you can just do these very soft faded color transitions. It's so easy. So at this point, I'm liking basically where he's going. When I flipped him around in the oil paint set, I noticed that I had kind of desaturated the red just a little too much. So I'm taking some of that cadmium red deep hue and just adding that back on there, smoothing it in. So at this point, we're going to take you back over to the table and I'm going to try to really summarize and drill on some of the brush control techniques and lessons you saw here and show them in a little deeper practice. All right, so you just watched a section of me actually applying the paints. I wanted to show you how I use them and now I want to actually talk for a moment and really get into and distill the key lessons and the key tricks for working with oil paints. Okay, so the first thing is that you saw me change brushes a lot and that's because in general, you're going to want to have a brush that you apply with. So like in this case, you saw me using a brush like this a lot that I was applying with and then you want to have a brush to smooth with. Those brushes stay dry. Okay, and make sure that they're, they don't get in white spirits. They don't get in other paint and you're always just using them to slightly push the paint, smooth it out. Oil painting is largely a subtractive process. You're often removing paint to get the effect. Brush movement and control is really important as is understanding how exactly your paint is going to react to the brush. It's something you've got to get a feel for as you work with this medium. So the primary ways you can attack something, like we'll just take this little logo on his back. The primary ways you can attack something, just to distill it down quickly, is we're used to maybe like layering or glazing or those kinds of things. This combines all of it at once and you're painting more on the miniature. So if I wanted this area to be light and then I want to create light down the bottom of the comet or something, maybe I'll just give a color like that base for me to work with. So maybe we still have a base coat step. Maybe not. You don't always have to. We don't go into the white spirits between. The one way you can work with them is to start kind of laying down that item, that color you want in that space. You'll notice as I'm doing it, it's just naturally wet blending. If you've ever had challenges with wet blending, work with oil paints, you won't have those challenges. I can then wipe this a little bit off like I'm just wiping our paper towel off camera and then I just slowly draw the edge of that together. Okay. Like you, the second lesson is when you use this kind of a tactic, you want to go farther than you would be used to with your acrylics. So like with acrylic paint, you probably wouldn't put something that dark right on there right away because it would be kind of too strong and overwhelming. But with oils, because that underlying paint is still wet and it's going to chew up some of what that color is, we can then take our soft dry smoothing brush and we can pull at the edge of it. And then every so often we wipe this, pull at the edge of that, and it's always going to pull back toward whatever your dominant mid-tone is. The directionality with which you move the brush matters. If I pull the yellow into the brown, I'm going to kill the brown very quickly. If I pull the brown down into the yellow, then it will tend to win. Okay. So you need to be very present when you're moving your brush around as to exactly how you're actually moving it against the miniature. You'll notice I'm also often moving with a slight stippling motion. That's another thing. You probably are used to more trying to be smooth with an acrylic paint like a layer brush. Whereas often here, you're going to want to use a little bit more of a stippling item. The other thing I'll say is you don't have to get it all in one go. Oil paints are really easy to work with because you can do these big giant blends, like on his shoulder there, on the brocade trim of his shoulder, or up on his helm, or there on the center of his armor. I can do these sorts of non-metallic blends, and I can have them be really strong and really potent and just hyper smooth. You don't have to do them all at once. When you're initially working with the paint, it's going to be very wet. And oil paints take a good day to dry. You can still mess around with them for quite a while. But when you're working with very diluted oil paints like this, something that has a lot of white spirits in it, after 20 or 30 minutes, it will start to set just a little. Some of the white spirit will have evaporated, and it won't be as liquid. You can then come back in and do additional work on top of it. As long as you're careful, and as long as your brush doesn't have an overwhelming amount of white spirits in it. So eventually what we're going to do in a little future step is we're going to varnish this all out and seal it in. And then we can put more oil paints on top and more acrylics on top or whatever, but we have to let it dry first. Until that time, we have to be careful, because if I take a brush that even after you wipe it off a bunch on your paper towel, if I don't know if this will show on camera or not, but when I put it over my hand, I don't know if you can see that reflection or not. That's not really, maybe a little, but it's still wet. White spirits will stick in your brush quite a while, and like as I'm moving it around my hand, I just see it, this is all white spirits. Like it's just making my glove shiny all the way down. Probably not visible on camera. My point is, is that if you, if I then touched this to here, it would just be an eraser. I would literally be taking an eraser to this work. But, if I go and get some paint in there, like let's go grab some more of that highlight color, which by the way, my highlight that I'm using here for all the gold is the pale flesh or bright flesh from oil brushers, which is really nice actually for non-metallic gold. You notice then I can get a nice solid additional application of it, and then we grab our dry smoothing brush, and I just fade those edges, and just like that, boom. I have a perfect transition, no effort, no fuss, no muss. The key is you never want to just apply the oil paints and then leave them. You're always going to do the subtractive smoothing step in some way. Now, how aggressive you get with that, how much you need to do it, depends largely on your individual style. There's a couple different ways you can do it. Some people will use their oil paints, they'll make a big spread of all the colors on their palette, and then they'll just slowly increase that amount and start making little transitions with a nice small brush. Then you're kind of smoothing less than you would be if you were, than you would need to if you're making big jumps. Okay, like you saw me there using like yellow, and near white, and brown, so the smoothing steps are really important for me. You also want to be very aware of the amount of paint you're applying, because this will, even when you thin it down with the white spirits, it's still going to be thicker than many of the acrylic miniature paints you're used to. It'll feel a lot more like, if you've ever used something with a gel medium, it'll feel more like that. So if you want the color to get really potent, if you want to really have it beyond there, then you need to get a good size dab of it in place. Okay, and again, you'll notice I'm always changing brushes here, lots and lots and lots of back and forth, and my smoothing brush, I'm often taking this kind of action with the tip, or running it along my hand, or even wiping it on the paper towel, and so on, because that yellow paint is still going to be there, it's still wet, it might not be shiny, it might not super look like it, but it's still there, it's still wet. And when I start touching it with that dry smoothing brush, you notice how much of that I end up pulling off of there. The beautiful part is, you can just keep pushing it around, right? I'm going way into detail on this tiny area, you probably wouldn't need to do this, and this guy has a lot of little detail, but if you're working on something like a space marine, if you've ever seen a space marine online, or something where they have these beautiful blends that make the space marine look shiny, you can do that with acrylic paint. Most of those artists are doing that with acrylic paint, and it takes a while, it requires a lot of time and effort and careful blending and glazing and things like that. Or you could do it with oil paints and it would take about 30 minutes. So, you know, it's up to you, I guess. So, you can see there how I just, you know, sort of pushed the color back in, integrated it, we need to smooth that a little more. So, constantly I'm wiping the brush, notice how I'm just kind of stippling, dabbing around there, and just smoothing it out. Now, the other thing that you'll want to be aware of when you're working with oil paints is that they are often shiny. Like, they're pretty shiny as paints, and so you can see as I move this around, see how it catches all that light down in the darker spots, right? You can look at his chest plate right there and see how it's catching all that light. So, it's important, we're used to working under a normally like very bright painting light, it's important to move your miniature somewhere else and look at it under quite normal or dimmer lighting. It'll give you a better concept of where your color actually is, and what it's going to look like when you actually matte varnish this all out. So, the keys. When you initially apply, you can always smooth with your dry smoothing brush. You can let it sit for 20 or 30 minutes or whatever, and then enhance the color. Once they've started to set, it becomes easier to not have that color get chewed up by whatever your base tone is. So, you can come back in and integrate more color, and as a matter of fact, on his shoulder here, that's what I did. I let it dry for a little while, and then I came back in with a bright white, and I just laid down a spot of it in two places, and then just feathered that out. Same on the shield there, where you can see the bright white spots. So, sometimes to reinforce that, because again, oils are naturally going to pull everything to the middle. This will be how you can go back in and you can infuse that color, and it's a really quick, simple, easy step. The tail here has been sitting for quite a while. So, if I wanted to work in a darker color, I could take, say, a nice dark Indian red. Maybe we want to have a little bit more shadow on the bottom of these things. Again, doing this kind of a thing with acrylic, that would be pretty crazy. That would look pretty horrible if you just suddenly drew some dark lines, because already in the amount of time I've talked here, that acrylic paint would have started drying. That oil paint, it doesn't even know what the word drying means just yet. So, I can come in, and I can then just feather that right down, and just get that nicely integrated in, and now we have a much nicer transition amongst the tail sections. Nice little pop infusion of color, easy, quick, simple. Key is apply with your brush, and then smooth with your smoothing brush. Okay, so I'm going to let this guy sit, because now he's got to sit here for quite a while, like he's going to sit overnight. And I'll let him sit for a day, I'll varnish him out, and then I'll come back and I'll talk about how we, what I'm going to do with acrylics, and why I choose certain things for acrylics, and how you can integrate more oil paints over the top. So, back in just a moment. All right, so we're back. A full day plus this past, it's actually probably been about 36 hours, something like that. And you can see everything is nice and dry, and what we did is we applied a coat of 50-50 satin varnish, and ultra matte varnish to matte everything down. So now you can see stuff like that shine is gone right down there in those parts, and now we have nice rich tones, the brights are still brights, but we're not getting any reflection from the dark parts. One of the things that'll happen when you matte everything out like that is your darks will seem darker, because they'll stop actually reflecting light, and you'll get a better sense of how dark they are. Now there are really two things I do from oil paints at this point. I want to talk about where I use acrylics from this point and where I use oils. So, once I've laid this down, and this was all relatively fast, like you saw me go through all this, it's pretty fast and easy. This is a pretty complex miniature too, I would point out. Like he's got a lot of bajangles and elements and things going on. If I was working on something more uniform, a single monster or a single character that's more one composite element that doesn't have like all these different jangles and bits, it would be a lot faster even than this. But once you've got that coat of varnish on, which you don't want to do until it's dry, so you want to give it, like I said, it depends on your time, a good 24, 36 hours. It depends on whether or not you're using the liquid impasto to make it dry faster. It depends on maybe if you're using the Optalung 502, I don't know if I'm saying those right, but there's actually gaming oil paints that are really nice, and they dry quicker. They're actually formulated with some of that in there, so they're meant to dry faster. If you're using one of those things, then it could be a little faster, it could be a little slower. Your mileage may vary. You'll get a sense of it as you work with it over time. The thing I'll generally come back and do with oil paints again is I'll do things like pop-up highlights if I need to, so if I have, when you're working primarily with oils because you're working a lot of wet on wet, your colors will tend to get brought together, and I mentioned this last time with the idea of, you know, letting something dry and then going back and popping it up. You can do that again here, though. So after you've got the varnish on and now everything's locked in, we can come back in and we can take a nice, so we're gonna take a nice sharp brush, we're gonna use a very small thin brush. We're gonna get some of our near white. Again, in this case, I'm using this ultra pale flesh color as my white color. It works well as your highlight on something like gold, and we can come in and we can just place a little of that down and that reflection looks white until you actually put something white on it, and then you see how much space you actually have there to still grow, so maybe we want that one to be a little more, a little brighter. So we come in, we do that, then we grab our completely dry smoothing brush, right, and we're gonna go ahead and just take that and just feather that out, just like that. A lot of bing, a lot of boom. No easy that is. No moss, no fuss, beautiful smooth blend right in there, and you can pop out all your gold like that in turn so we could work our way around the fig. Maybe we want a little bit of a more shine here on the shield. Maybe we want to hit these shoulder parts, we'll make that one a little brighter. Maybe we'll get a tiny touch up here on the top of this thing. Let's give him a little pop up here on this side of his head so we can just kind of find the places that we want to draw visual interest to that we want to pop up there. And then same thing, we can just come in with our smoothing brush. You see the motion I'm making, right? I'm just grabbing those edges, just smoothing it out. Easy peasy. If you've ever worked with paint that has a lot of, say, retarded in or something where it's drying, you can sometimes get at something like this effect. The problem is to get enough retardant into your acrylic paint, you often have to dilute it so much that it becomes rather difficult. There are ways around that, and maybe I'll talk in the future about ways you can achieve the same sorts of effects with acrylics, but in the end the oils just make it so much easier to do stuff like this. So you get the idea. So that's what I'll do. Sometimes, and by the way, you can do the same thing with shadows. So if I wanted to darken a shadow, again, because the oil paints are going to constantly pull everything toward the middle, it takes a few seconds at the end. You go back around and you pop that. Look at how much brighter that reflection is now in the middle of his head. It's pretty wonderful. And in fact, if we talk about shadows, if we want to make that scene even brighter, let's grab a little bit of our shadow color. Let's run that right up there. That way we get a nice deep shadow. Same thing. We grab our little smoothing brush, our dry brush. Heather that down. And now we're really popping that up. So the other thing you can do is you can reinforce colors. Now that you're not going to be pulling up the old layer of oils, the other thing that's really nice to do is just to effectively glaze, really. I mean, that's what it's going to be. So we can take a little bit of, let's use our larger brush here. And like, if this red isn't too popping right now, it's a little, that's the noise that red is making, right? So we want to make sure that in the primary areas of red, it's quite saturated. Well, we can thin it down into a sort of glaze, same as we would with any paint, except instead of using water, we're going to use white spirits to thin it down. And then we can just come in along that edge. We're in those high spots. We can run a little bit of that thin red over it. You can also just take a little globby of it if you want and you could feather it the same way. So you can both filter. It's really easy to filter colors with this, with an oil paint, because they can get real thin, they flow really, really well. And now you can see how much now obviously that's wet. It'll look a little different when it's dry, but the concept remains the same. It'll still have a much better intensity because it's much more intensely pigmented. It's not desaturated by the other colors I had put on there. And once again, we could take something like just a nice big fat dry brush and we could smooth some of that down where we want. Okay. And that'll give us a more intense red. You can see even already it's starting to, the white spirits are starting to evaporate, but we still get a nice effect there. Okay. So that's what I do with oils. Now, what do I leave for acrylics? Well, you'll notice things like his fur and a lot of small details I didn't do. Okay. Like the, sorry, I didn't do the book and that's just me being, couldn't think of what I wanted to do with the book. So I kind of left it for the end because I'm not sure what I wanted to paint it. So I'd probably normally do the book, but little things like the chain and these pipes and these tubes, you know, little stuff like that, that you go back in with acrylics. And I can, you can do that now. You don't need to wait for this layer of oil to dry and go back in with acrylics afterwards. Since you're working on stuff that's completely separate, you can just go back in. In fact, that's what I'm going to do as soon as I turn off the camera is I'm just going to start working things like his little nails down here on his feet and his actual eyeballs, his horns, right, the, the half to the shield and the rest of the wood of the shield, the book, all these little tubes and sockets and gaskets on his backpack and stuff. That's the kind of thing that, that, that you can still touch with your acrylic paints. Now again, could you do these small ones with the little small details with oils? A hundred percent. Okay. But in the end, I'll be honest with you, I find it a lot easier from my perspective to do those kinds of tiny details with acrylics. Your mileage may vary. The other thing I will frequently do with, with my acrylics are your finishing steps like black lining, like oftentimes oil paints, since there are a lot of feathering and a lot of moving the brush around, they can tend to be a little messy and you don't get as much of a nice dark separation between elements. So I'll usually go back in and create those dark lines. Now, sometimes I'll do that with acrylics. You can do it with almost like an oil liner or a panel liner or something like that. It depends on the, the model and how deep it is. So that is to say, if I was doing a vehicle or something like that, where there's really, really deep in sized panel lines, then I like to do that with an oil paint. If it's something where it's more like this, the separation between the robes here or, you know, just elements that are kind of softer in their separation. My problem with using the oils is they actually will flow a little too well. So they'll kind of spread a little bit more than I want. So I'd rather just paint with an ink, a really sharp fine line. And they're using what I talk about in my how to paint sharp lines video. The other thing is, of course, your edge highlighting. So like all of this non-metallic will need edge highlights. I'll generally just do that at the end with acrylics. It's just a lot easier to pop that kind of stuff out with acrylic paint. So that's how I think about the model. So the next time you see him here in a few seconds, he'll be all done. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope this was helpful in thinking about your journey with oils. Again, I find it really fun to paint with this paint. The way that you paint with them becomes this sort of very Zen experience as you're moving around, switching brushes. The fact that so much of our life in miniature painting is often spent trying to get these really specific blends or to carefully, carefully glaze in these specific colors and have it not look like junk. And the fact that all of that is just automatic. It's so easy once you get your head around the basics of oil painting. It's just, it's not even a thing is what I find most exciting about this as a medium. So my best advice is yes, there's a higher barrier of entry. You got to go out, you know, those oil paints are expensive. They do cost a lot of money. And yes, they can be harder to get your hands on. And yes, if you're going to make them into your sort of miniature paint style, that means a lot of experimentation and work. And you will not get your mixture right the first time. Which, by the way, if you want to see an actual pretty exact example of this, I recommend you to go to James Wappel's channel. I will direct you to him in the description. So please do go visit him. He's a great inspiration to me in getting into oils. He is an incredible miniature painter, an amazing artist. And he paints with oils a lot. He has lots and lots of videos he's put up both on his YouTube channel and on Twitch, where he's painting with oils all the time. You can see it in action. And the effects he achieves are just gorgeous and so fast. So, at any rate, do check that out. But if you've got more questions about it, feel free to hit me up down in the comments. As always, I very much appreciate you watching this one. Give this a like if you enjoyed it. I know this has been a long time coming to do a deep dive like this, so I do hope it was worth the wait. But as always, I thank you very much for watching this one. And we'll see you next time.