 Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to talk about how to speed paint complicated models, but do it fast and make them look good. Let's get into it. Lots of new models, like these few sliers in the cities of Sigmar Range, can feel a bit intimidating when you first look at them. It feels almost like they're very detailed, there's a lot to do, and it can seem like painting the army will take you forever. Today I'm going to share some tips and tricks with you that will show you how you navigate these more complicated figures and how we can do it quick and easy and still have a good-looking army we're proud to put on the table. So let's head over to the desk, let's get painting. Right out of the gate, with tip number one, simple and bright colors. Keep your palette for your speed paint simple, and keep some of your main colors being very bright, very poppy, in this case this blue is going to be our main color for like his robes, then we're going to use that nice bright silver. You'll see how that plays out as we go. Tip number two, under shading. Now we don't have to go full on slap chop with this or anything like that. I have a very soft makeup brush, I've worked nearly all the paint off this, and I'm only dry brushing the areas that are going to be matte paint. Anything that's metallic, I'm not going to worry about too much. Try to get his face, but that's just hopeless in that stupid helmet. And I'm focusing a lot of light on two things like the shield and the upper part of his body. So this is a very quick dry brushing step, took me maybe a minute total, but I can bring out a lot of that texture and if I really work hard I make sure that like especially the top areas, the sticky outty bits, all those things that are going to get highlighted, that's where we're going to focus our energy and get that lighter color which will make our later layers easier. Speaking of later layers, this is how much I'm going to thin my paint down. So I'm going for a very thin layer here. And importantly when I work with paint that's been thinned this much, I touch the brush to the paint, touch it to the paper towel, wick off the excess liquid so I still have control. And this is where we come to tip number three, bright main colors. Now even complicated figs will tend to have some main element. In this case it's his jacket. Now there's lots of other stuff going on in this figure, but we've got his jacket and we've got a shield. And I'm going to make those the same color because the two of those things together form the majority of what you see on this miniature. By going bright with this sort of ocean blue and applying it thin over the top of our under shade, we get a real nice effect, where we have plenty of depth and stuff like that. When it dries it'll dry much darker as you can see there. My next tip is the order of operations matters. So after laying down that blue base coat, I go ahead and I move to dry brushing the metallics. And the reason I'm doing that here is because I want to, I don't need to be too careful with most of these metallics. But I don't want them to the dry brush to hit any of my later work. If I hit any of the blue, it's okay because I'm going to put some more over top of it. So only a little bit of the metallic has to be done like this in the classic form where I'm actually painting it as a layer. And even then I still try to treat it pretty quick. With this dry brush, I'm using a lot of the black and a lot of the color that's already there to remain. And I'm only leaving a little bit of the metal scratchy on the high parts. And the advantage there is, is that it feels more realistic. We have a more beaten worn textured metallic and a lot of speed painting, but making it look good is about using the texture, the brush strokes, things like that to your advantage rather than your disadvantage. So here where even I'm taking a smaller brush, you'll notice I'm still basically using a dry brush like motion. And then when I finally get to the silver, it's the same thing. Very light touches, very rough. I want it to feel like there's some texture, there's some patterning, there's some wear, there's some tear on this metal. So a little bit of texture will actually make it feel more realistic. Those brush strokes can work to our advantage. Once all this metallic is done, I'm done with the metals. So then I go back to my actual coat and now we're going to focus in on those really, really bright colors. And what we've got to do here is really, really pop it up. Just, you know, get those high highlights going. Focus your high highlights and that's what you need to worry about. So the top, the focal points of the fig, spend your time on the areas that people are actually going to look at, his cloak, his shield, the armor. That's 90 percent of this figure. So we don't have to really, this brush is really dying, by the way. I should have got a new brush, but I was bound and determined to keep going on this little crappy brush. That's why I'm actually taking time here. My tip is number six is focus on these main elements. Don't sleep on these parts. Do sleep on everything else we'll cover here. What I mean is the bag or the belts or the little doodads and things like that. Those don't need to be amazing. Those can just be, but I take a little bit more time doing a couple more half steps and layers to get a little bit more smoothness to the jacket. It's still going to be rough. They're still going to be very much a lack of a smooth blend there. But I don't care. The goal here is speed and I want it to look good. And when we focus on still building in contrast, okay, into the figure, uh, that's what makes it still visually appealing. So a smooth, easy, but flat base coat on this figure of just like the ocean blue and one soft highlight that took forever would be much worse than a slightly rough highlight here. As I'm doing with the now moving into the bright ivory inclusion in these highlights, it makes it stand out much more. It makes the figure much more readable and it makes it much more visually appealing from many feet away, which is how our figures are going to be viewed most of the time in an army. You know, if this were something for display or competition, we'd obviously take a completely different tack, but we're not, we got to paint 30 of these guys or 50 of these guys, or I don't know how many fusilliers do you need these days, right? And so now we get to the other elements when it comes to these other elements, we're not going to try very hard on them. We're going to keep it simple. So for things like the wood and stuff like that, we're going to, you know, just get a nice base coat, maybe an edge highlight, call it a day. But my color palette, while simple, can still be impactful. Both of the browns I'm using are quite orange infused. And there's a reason for that. It's another sneaky bit of contrast. You can work in your contrast in subtle ways. It when you, when, you know, orange is contrast to brown, doesn't mean you use pure orange or sorry to blue. It doesn't mean you use pure orange and pure blue. You can sneak it in in these other ways. And in fact, tip number seven is contrast the elements. So when you can use neutral tones like browns that are infused with oranges to go against your blues or take grays and make them green infused to work against the reds or, or whatever, anything like that. That's how you can build in contrast. But we can also do what you see me doing here. I have a very bright cloak, so I'm going to do fairly dark belts and gloves. By using black leather, this very dark black will contrast more strongly and make the blue feel even brighter and stand out even more. If I had just gone onto autopilot and done this in brown, like if I had just done brown leather belts, it would look way worse and less interesting and less visually separated. Then I'll get out of the black part of the key here is admittedly that you have to accept that your blends won't be perfect, that everything won't be smooth and that in the end that doesn't matter. At some point in time, we all became obsessed with this kind of very smooth refinement. But this is army painting. It doesn't really matter. We want stuff that looks good, that looks cool, that looks awesome when there's a big mass of them on the table. And for that, we need visual interest, we need pop, we need color. Those are the elements that make us, that makes the model stand out, make your army look really cool. And so that's where we're going to focus our time and make sure this still gets done quickly. That brings us to our next tip, use texture. When you're working fast like this, you're going to have brush strokes. Let's use those brush strokes to our advantage. When it comes to things like leather and other similar types of elements, we can purposefully have brush strokes on here. So for example, I'm edge highlighting roughly in staccato and using these little lines that basically make it look like rough, beaten leather. So I don't need a perfectly smooth edge highlight. I can be a little rough with it. I can take chips and chunks and hashes and dashes and slices and dices. And in doing so, not only do I make it more visually compelling, but I also make it look more like leather. So the brush strokes work in our favor and end up being adding to the figure, not subtracting to it. The roughness is good. It's what we want. Our next tip is we're definitely going to cheat where we can. What I mean by that is take something like this where we've got the face. It's not really that important. And here's a fun tip. It really only for when you've got like a hidden face like this, like in these masks, but it's highly detailed. You really only need three tones. We start by laying down something like a cork, a base brown tone for the face. We highlight the very highlight sections with an ivory. And then we just slap heavy two heavy layers of Rykland flesh shade over the top of it. When Rykland flesh shade hits ivory and brown, it will bring the two colors together. It will tint the ivory to be something very natural. And you get a wonderful easy flesh tone with very little work. We're not going to go too far on the base. This is a speed paint. So I'm just going to stipple. I laid down some texture obviously here on the base. So this has some texture paste on it. And I'm just going to stipple on some warm brown kind of all over the texture. And then I'm going to very quickly dab in some red pigment, some red brown pigment just to give it some interesting life. When I'm doing that pigment, I'm going to bring that pigment up onto his boots, up onto the shield, up onto the elements that are closest to the ground, which leads me to my last and final tip. Tip number 10, hide your sins. We can hide our sins with some weathering. Now I'm going pretty light on this guy, but if you have areas in the metals or something that didn't turn out okay, we can do some brown washes, some quick chips, some scratches, some rust streaks, stuff like that. But we can just use this weathering step to not only quickly add visual interest, this is just me slapping some ultra thin rinoxide around the model toward the bottom of the coat where it would naturally get stained at the bottom of the metal, at the bottom of the shield. And these little tiny touches take seconds to do, but they can hide our previous bad blends or rough spots and make the figure look like it lives in the world. It occupies and add visual interest like crazy. So there you go, he's all done. Not too bad. All in all, this fig took about 40, 45 minutes of actual paint time. Now, of course, if I was batch painting that, I could have done quite a lot more pretty quickly. So realistically, I could have done the whole unit in just a couple hours because I would have saved time on each step just repeating it along. That's about the speed that I'm comfortable with if I'm really going for a speed paint project. And certainly one that would allow you to get an army on the table within a pretty reasonable amount of time. I'm pretty happy with how this guy came out. I think ultimately he still looks cool. And more importantly, he would still be eye grabbing and look perfectly fine when grouped up with his 10 or 20 or 30 best friends in a unit. And they're bright, they're eye catching. I think they're really going to stand out on the table. If you liked this video, hey, give it a like, subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. Don't forget we have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got any questions about speed painting or these new models, I'm happy to help. Just drop those down in the comments below. 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