 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about crimson fists. We're going to show how I paint the blue armor of crimson fists which is I suppose ironic that the group with crimson in the title is actually going to be focused on blue. We're actually going to do both their main colors so we're going to do the crimson armor and we'll do the, or sorry the blue armor and the crimson armor as well. But here I've got a little Primaris Captain, it's a great fig and he's all assembled and we're going to go ahead and make him blue and I'll show you how I get a nice high shine but still deep crimson armor. In this case I assembled him all the way, I really shouldn't have put him in smarter to leave his head off but since I didn't do that he's getting a little face cover here so we're just going to doop doop doop put a little something on his head and then he's ready to get into it so turn him into turn him into Mysterio from Spider-Man. What we're going to cover here and after this part we're going to jump into just me narrating over all my different steps is we're just going to cover basically how I tackle the armor itself and and then how we get it in multiple stages still being fast and efficient and getting up into a nice bright shiny blue and then how to work with a color like crimson in these small areas to make sure that they pop out and still reads is true while still having the same amount of light reflection so with that being said let's get directly into it so I'm going to cut away here and we'll be back and do this faster. Alright so first off we're going to start with actually even though this will be a largely oil paint job we're going to lay down some color so grab some Vallejo game ink blue just a nice little transparent blue to shoot over you know the bulk of the model here that's going to end up being blue one of the fun things about something like a space marine is that they are often but not always largely one color on a majority of their surfaces sometimes you get a split scheme or whatever but crimson fists are not when you're working with oil paints I find that it's often helpful to just establish a sort of base coat of some kind of color in this case like I said I'm using a nice thin transparent ink out of the airbrush but certainly you don't have to you could use anything actually contrast paints make a great first layer for this sort of thing over a zenithal you just thin them down a little bit maybe go 50-50 and there you go what I'm doing here is just reinforcing it you notice I started with a very thin glaze so this this ink is very very thin and I'm building it up even though it's naturally transparent I want to get the sort of mid tones to shadows deeper blue still leave some of that light in the upper areas so then we go ahead and give them a quick varnish this isn't really that much of a big deal I just wanted to make sure I included it so you can see all the steps that I'm doing so my normal varnish mix here is a 50-50 mix between satin varnish from Vallejo and AK interactive ultra matte varnish to kill all the shine once that's dry completely I took off all the little you know masking and now we're gonna do a little mix of the three oil paints you see in front of you which is some panes gray a more transparent dark color some phthalo blue which has already been pre-thinned and some light flesh from obtolung I have no idea how to say that 502 I've been messing around a lot more with those paints and really enjoying them so as usual with the oil paints you'll see what I'm doing here is I'm kind of just placing the lights where I want them to be the goal isn't to to actually paint the model it's a strange thing to say the best way I can describe the the way that I use oil paints on something like a space marine is a very rough value sketch so if you've watched my previous videos on value sketching you'll understand that like one of the elements of value sketching is that you go in and with pretty you know decent layer paint and without much of any concern for blending you just place all the highlights and the midtones and the shadows in a pretty rough way just to make sure that everything kind of fits and if you you know hold it away from your face and squint your eyes to where you're you know you can't really see it all clearly the blends will kind of just fade together and if it still looks right then it's in the right place so what I'm doing right now is just placing the highest sort of highlight so I'm working with a lot of that light flesh right and I did it down all one side of the marine this is about the distance and space I like to work with you don't need to place the entire model I want to leave and be smoothing out some of this paint when it's still a little bit wet with the white spirits and I'm still using a fairly dry brush so you know hence I kind of kept it to just those areas so now I'm doing is just placing some thinned phthalo blue in the middle again this is just be it's it's pre-thinned for a reason because I want it to act as a sort of weaker middle tone phthalo blue and your your strong hues in oil paints like your cadmium reds and your phthalo blues and that kind of stuff are all really powerful and they will tend to have an overwhelming effect on especially lighter colors right and so the fact that I used a thin one is gonna help me to make sure that I don't just erase all of the light color and keep it kind of you know where the light still shows through I guess is what I would say now I have a little mix of the phthalo and some light flesh and I'm just reinforcing secondary highlights kind of going in placing you know the some transitions between the two again not really worried about blending just worried about you know getting down those those rough transitions there he was the first time by the by that I actually cleaned my brush just so we all kind of understand what happened there everything else with had just been wiping the brush off on a paper towel you don't actually need to go into the white spirits very often with your oil paints you can you want to do it if you're gonna dramatically change colors but for the most part you can you can stay pretty just like you rely on a paper towel to wipe things and that's fine so now I'm going into a dark mix of the phthalo blue and the pains gray it's great camera work there where I managed to swing right off camera so a plus work from me as usual and now what I'm doing is I'm filling in all the dark parts of the value sketch placing the deepest shadows where I want them once that's all been done then I clean the brush off but now this is a completely dry brush that this is a size 6 and is bone dry like this has no this is not touched paint or white spirits it is bone dry and you'll notice what I'm doing is as usual with oil paints it's more of a subtractive blending you're bringing the colors together but you're also removing a lot of paint so every time you see my hand go off camera what I'm doing there is I've got a paper towel next to me and I'm wiping the excess paint that I'm pulling off onto that paper towel this is a big part of blending with oils as I said it's subtractive you end up with a lot more paint on in the initial steps then you actually need to have so this smoothing step with a dry brush is pulling a lot of the excess paint off and smoothing it all down and it's really important to go through this step because oil paints especially if you you know haven't sort of heavily thinned them with additives or white spirits or something they're gonna be pretty thick like most of these are you know they're higher-grade paints but ostensibly they're made for canvas work they're not really made for something this small and that we want to keep this smooth I mean if you've ever looked at an artist paint on a canvas they're not exactly you know brushstrokes are fine and you can see that kind of stuff and it doesn't matter obviously here in the world of in the world of miniature painting we we we don't want that so that smoothing step is really important and that brush that I'm that I'm smoothing everything out with that never touches white spirits until the very end of the session when I can then wipe it down excessively and let it dry because you can wipe a brush that's been in white spirits for a long time and it will still have some white spirits in there they kind of need to just evaporate on their own so now I'm doing the same thing again taking that dry brush and bringing it all together and you see that what you can do is really just kind of push along the edges and bring your colors together it's one of the most magical things about oil paints when you apply them in my first application I was rather thick and so when I brought everything together I was really taking a lot of paint off my second application was a lot more thin I was using you know amounts of paint that I had thinned down more with more white spirits and so when I when I go back in on the second time I don't need to smooth over the whole area as much and I can focus much more on just the focus more on the the areas between where the two colors are meeting and it's really the power of oil paints that you can just be so light touch with them you can be so smooth like everything ends up so unbelievably smooth so here I've switched my blending brush this is a small sable brush it's actually a very small dry brush made of for sable but made from sable but nonetheless I find this to be sort of the finishing brush as it were so my initial smoothing brush was largely or was synthetic and that's really gonna push a lot of paint around the bristles are very stiff and it will do a lot of a lot of heavy lifting when you get into the more detail work when you're just trying to get those final colors placed and things really nicely smoothly blended out coming in with that little sable brush is a much nicer way because it has a lot more control than the than the bigger synthetic hard brush will have so it lets me go in there and just really define those edges pull them out I can lightly smooth over the the actual paint area itself and smooth it down without having a big effect and again you notice I'm still wiping very frequently with you know my hand is leaving the frame pretty often to go over there and make sure that I do my do my job with my wipey and and and get that excess paint taken off that brush because I don't want it getting places I don't want it and that's kind of how that goes and you see how with just a few quick steps and very fast we get to something frankly pretty awesome so then I just repeated that whole process around the rest of the miniature like what you saw me just do on his right side I repeated on the back and the left and all of that so now we've got some Indian red and some shadow brown on our palette and we're gonna mix in some blue into that and I'm gonna make my nice deep shadow color what I wanted to get at here was something that's much darker I wanted because I want to pop the shine on this armor way up and part of being shiny is not just being bright but also having darks and in general I like to avoid black for this kind of a task it's boring black is an empty color it's the opposite of color stay the lack of color as it were and you can mix something like that deep brown and a red and the blue and get a much more interesting tone right because it's gonna have purples in it it's gonna have those blues of the rest of the armor in it while also having a little bit of of red to it and that makes for a much more warm shadow for what I'm to counterbalance these very these very cold highlights that I'm putting on in this white so that's why you saw me mix that in the way I did now what I'm doing since I'm working on smaller areas I'm working my way all the way around the miniature and just making sure I place those shadows in every location that I want and you know I rotate him a couple times reinforce some of shadows if I don't feel like it went on strong enough this is one of the keys it's so fast and so stress-free when you're working with oils like because I don't have to care about blending I don't have to worry about applying exactly the right amount of paint or getting it in exactly the right spot it's just all that melts away okay you're not you're not worried about any of that instead you're just getting the colors basically in the general area that you want it right and then you're going back in with your other brush and smoothing it all out so now that I have that deeper shadow applied you see me again I'm coming in with that nice soft dry brush a stable brush and I'm just smoothing out that shadow so there was a little bit of time that passed in between the first step with all the blues and coming back for this step now you don't need to leave a tremendous amount of time and it's not like the oil painting a dry when I say sometime I mean like probably an hour or something you know and what that's going to do is the white spirits themselves will mostly evaporate in that time that does not mean the oil paint is dry the linseed oil in the oil paint takes is what's taking a long time to dry the white spirits when they evaporate they'll leave behind the oil but it might look dry it's not that still takes a day or two but because that linseed oil is ultimately the medium that's that the the oil paint is suspended in the white spirits is acting as basically a solvent much like water versus acrylic medium in our normal paints so now what you see me doing is just going through and smoothing out all those shadows and you can see how instantly it just makes the whole thing so much richer with those deep shadows added and the best part is if I happen to get something in the wrong place if it happens to not be quite correct who cares I can always just touch a little white spirits to it erase whatever it was and reset it it is mistake free painting it is so freeing to to work with these oils in this process and this is really fast like look at where I've got this marine to in so that's about 30 minutes of real time like I'm doing this this is all at double speed so this is maybe 30 minutes of real time actual painting that's how long I've been talking I guess there was the other side of it so probably like 45 minutes all told I mean that is just nothing right just absolutely nothing so now the the oil paint dried I let it sit there for a good day or two and what I'm doing now is I'm taking a regular acrylic ink and I'm just getting all the non oil paint areas covered so like the little rubber suit that's in the middle of his carapace you know in between the armor plates I don't know what that thing is called black suit maybe or something I don't know maybe it's the black carapace I don't know doesn't matter the little rubber thing that sits under the armor plates doing that I'm also coming in and I'm making sure that all the deep areas have lines in them so that like all the elements are properly separated one of the things that's going to happen here when you're working with oils is that you can smooth a lot of stuff around and you can lose some of those deep blind shadows so what I want to do is I'm going in and really I have two goals one black out everything that's going to end up being non-metallic metal steel so I can get up so I'm laying down kind of a base coat for that some of that will be done with oil some of that will be done with acrylics but secondly I am also setting some tones so I can actually see how bright this blue is the more zenith old stuff that's around what you're trying to blend the harder it is to actually get a true sense of how deep your shadows are and how bright your highlights are because you have this weird flat interference color that's throwing off your perception of the thing right so by darkening all these elements that in between joints and getting those all all colored darker and then going in and making sure that all the things that I'm going to end up turning into steel are nice and dark so they're not in my way right and then getting nice solid black lines between everything it lets me then see much more clearly exactly what I'm working with as a comparative to the armor itself okay so that's my basic goal here and a nice simple easy step you see just like again covering all these little elements that are right pushing up against the armor making sure those have got nice separation lines and moving on so now that he's all dry with that now we've got a nice super super super duper thin kind of washy oil and this does have a little bit of ivory black in it and now I'm going to do my actual panel panel lining like the individual armor plate panels with the oil wash so here I have a nice sharp thin synthetic brush and with that oil paint all worked down and nice and thin I'm going to go ahead and get all of those panel lines so you can see I'm just touching all of these little areas that are recessed on the miniature and like the little vents and the lines in between each individual panel and you know in between the shoulder pad and what I'm relying on is just the capillary action of the oil paint which will just naturally flow because again there's no water in it it's not a water based thing so it flows much more naturally into the recesses if you've ever made an oil wash this is just a very simple oil wash and the advantage here is that it's so much more controllable and again if I get some oil wash where I don't want it or something like that hey no problem I can just wipe it right right away or touch it with a brush with some white spirits or whatever and easy peasy lemon squeezy it's all gone so this step is not the most complicated it takes a little bit of time to work your way around the miniature but using something like an oil is really so much easier than working with an ink or a paint I will tell you that much for sure and again you'll notice I did mix this out of much the same as my shadow color mainly being the red the blue and the dark brown I did use a little bit of black since this is the deepest of deepest shadows but that was just mixed in to add a little true you know darkness into what is otherwise a nice color uh there so there you notice like okay that one went a little wide around his one shoulder because I had a little bit too much in my brush no big deal I can clean that up later smooth that out because it's going to stay wet and workable so I can come back in with my normal brush and just smooth out that edge bang bang whereas if I did that with you know ink or something and I kind of fat fingered that edge out that's going to be real problematic in the in the long run but the key to this like I said is a good mix of an oil wash and a nice sharp sharp brush that'll let you get in there and just do that panel lining and that pin washing without too much effort so I'm just making sure I touch all of these little areas that where shadow would naturally accumulate in between the panels everything like that and he's good to go once again I just you know kind of let that dry as I'm going I find a couple more places here at the very end important to keep turning a mini like this around this guy's not my favorite because he's got that gun right in front of him I wish they had the gun down to the other side but sadly they did not put it like that so and there we go he's all panel lined so easy peasy found something else how many times will I find something more I want to apply a few more times at least there you go that's that's my example of like just cleaning it up right went a little wide no big deal tada and that was like a dark black color over white and you can see when I wipe it away perfectly fine all the white remains none of the black it's tinted easy so again it's just it's so nice to work with these paints because of what they allow you to do so now there we go he's all all panel lined all right so I obviously let that dry for a little while if you want to varnish here after those are set you certainly can but you don't have to now we come to the really important trick to working with oils and that is round two okay so the second round of oil paints is very essential you have to let them dry completely and in your initial blending it can be very hard to with just one pass to really pop highlights up high it's not impossible there are ways to do it but for the most part it's going to be challenging because the a lot of the colors are going to want to get in each other's business and some part of it is quite organic that is to say you might not end up with quite as much highlight as you want you might not end up with quite as much shadow as you want when you blend them together everything tends to pull toward the middle okay so the key is if you really want to pop those highlights way out which maybe you do maybe you don't if you looked at the the marine after the first pass through and said now that's that's where I want to go I'm not looking for ultra shiny marine I'm looking for you know a good level of contrast and and I'm I'm good to go great then stop there you don't have to go any farther there's no absolute necessity to it okay but for me I wanted to make this guy nice and shiny and it was a good example to show how in general when you're working with oils that the second pass is a critical moment so what I'm doing here is I'm taking that light flesh color and again same reason I'm not working with a with a pure white right I'm working with light flesh which is just a very cold pale flesh tone but it actually has a little bit of like other color in it like a little bit of pink in it still so it's cold but it's a cold pink and it just again makes it in more interesting highlight color so now what I'm doing is with all these other paints dry right because these these the other oil paints are dry they dried completely and you may have even varnished in between these two steps now what I'm doing is I'm going in and I just applied the light color and I'm just feathering it out just feathering out that one color and I've got so much time to work with this I can just apply all my you know popped specular volumetric highlights around the thing and then take that nice bone dry dry brush and just slowly smooth them out over the whole thing how I want it right so I can just keep working my way around popping up those highlights however I want it makes it really really easy to achieve this kind of like very smooth blend and if you ever have trouble getting things to be exactly like the way the smoothness you want or you play something in kind of the wrong way or you want to diminish something like I just did there you notice I took the brush dipped it in white spirits dried a lot of it off and then went in and kind of just very much muted some of those colors so I'm going to go in and reapply place them a little bit more where I want them and and then go in you know clean the brush obviously before it goes away get my nice dry brush and then smooth it all out right so it just lets me work in a in a much more sort of natural way where my blending is kind of happening automatically I don't have to do that much for it I just put the highlights where I want them at sort of the highest point and then feather them out into the rest of the color now I'm doing this a lot with the highlight here in this second pass you can do this with anything you can do this with your shadows you can do this with your uh with your mid tones if you have too much highlight you can glaze effectively by just placing a little bit of you know and blue in this case in the mid tone and then feathering it up into the highlight it'll effectively get the same thing but it'll be a nice super smooth transition so all in all it's just a really nice trick and you see I'm just working that brush around nice and and regularly picking all those spots smoothing out the edges making sure I hit every part of the marine you know testing to make sure I've got everything I want every so often you'll see me as I'm going through this process like stop and rotate him in my hands and what that's doing is just looking at it under slightly different lighting in between shooting by the way I take him out from under my painting light and move him around in in normal quote unquote normal light and what that's letting me do is really understand you know is there any areas I missed is there anything I didn't smooth out because I've got some time I can sit there over the next 30 minutes or an hour and smooth all this stuff out and just keep working it so it really is an easier way to go as I work my way around the figure here all right so there we go he's looking pretty nice but he's not quite as shiny as he could be yet so now I've got a little bit of the sort of a dark holdra blue I'm going to mix it in with some white acrylic ink obviously all the oil paints have dried once again he's been varnished again you can varnish a miniature so many times in the middle of painting it it's fine same same mix every time by the way the mix of satin varnish and a k ultra mat and now comes the fun the most fun step in painting marines edge highlighting oh yeah a lot of people fear edge highlighting I actually find it rather relaxing it's it's pretty easy thing once you mix inks then have a little bit I have a little bit of flow improver on my palette at all time so I'm mixing a little bit of flow improver in with this mix as well get yourself a nice sharp brush and then you're just slowly working it around the miniature this isn't an edge highlighting tutorial I have whole videos on that but I just kind of want to show you you know how I work with it so I use the mix of ink and paint for two reasons and I always mix ink and paint when I'm edge highlighting paint adheres and doesn't run ink flows well and is and gives you a much more pen like control a little bit of flow improver in the mix makes it just wick right off your brush very simply so then all we have to do is the next key is a really nice sharp pointy brush doesn't need to be small but it does need to be sharp so here for example I'm using like a 2-0 from a Raphael 8404 2-0 to do this work and I'm just working my way around the mini on all the edges now I will tend to I have two different mixes of edge highlights over there on the side on my palette one of them is sort of a more white blue kind of middle color and that's what you see me using here on a lot of these lower downward facing areas and the lower part of the mini I also have one that's a lot more white and that's what I'm using on a lot of the upper facing areas the mini the edges that are facing a lot more straight up toward the light you'll also see me do a second pass on those eventually I shouldn't say you'll see it because I didn't it's not going to be in this recording but I do come back and do a second pass on just the upward facing angles with you know that more closer to white edge the other thing you'll see me doing I'm trying to do these really like careful edges so for example here on the most dreaded edge highlight of a space marine the top side of the shoulder pad trim oh boy the inside ring of the shoulder pad trim is a real ball buster to highlight again the key here is make sure that paints new make sure it's flowing little ink little paint little flow improver very sharp brush you notice I locked my hands in position there you see how my one hand is resting in the other what you can't see off camera is both of my feet are planted firmly on the ground I'm sitting in an upright posture my arms are locked against my desk my hand is locked together the only thing that's moving is you know my fingertips essentially that's moving the brush right that way I have a much more control over my range of motion nothing else can actually move except the part that has the brush so that's basically it that's my sort of tricks for edge highlighting one don't feel like you've got to nail everything the first time through you can use don't feel like you have to hit every single edge on the miniature if some are really recessed really hidden then they might not be catching light in the same way you know there can be we don't have to have like the heavy metal hit every edge hit every edge four times with different lines sort of style to every marine we do if you want that there's nothing wrong with it but I'm saying that doesn't have to be your only option and make sure you have that paint plus ink plus flow improver mix you can get flow improver from any any art store any craft store or you can order stuff like war colors flow improver which is what I use I really like their brand but your mileage may vary but the I just like their mix and find it to be quite effective and the always be using a side ear brush whenever you can when you cannot lock yourself into position feet planted firmly on the ground and then just patience and time and make your way around the marine hitting every edge you can it's nothing too much more than that to it than that I see a lot of people say they have challenge with edge highlighting it's usually because they're just using paint they're not using a sharp enough brush or whatever as I go off camera right as I try to end this that is the quality that I bring to you today this last part is going to be relatively quick these are just some final touches you can see all the edges are there he's looking pretty pretty solid but now we're just going to touch up a few last items here on the armor so this is actually a very thinned down hold your blue which is a nice sort of slightly deeper shade than the phthalo blue and what I'm doing is I've worked it down into a very very very thin filter and what I'm doing is just taking some of the areas and saturating them where the oil paints hit the highlight sometimes some of the areas will be a little desaturated might have a little too much white in them and so in this case it's nice to just do your final adjustments which some with some very careful applications of acrylics of course once again the the oil paint has completely dried and you know I would have all varnish in between any of these kinds of steps again I already had before because I was putting on acrylics with the the edge highlighting but this is just sort of a final smooth everything out step it's a nice way to hit those final details just these really nice thin filters make sure all the lighting is set exactly how I want it I could certainly have done this with oil paints but at this stage it's you know I don't want to wait another day for some more stuff to dry so part of this is kind of me being like impatient but at the same time part of it is also me wanting to make sure that I have a really really fine level of control and doing these kind of like very very very careful filters in some very small areas like you'll see me doing it on the you know the top edge of the knee plate right it's just some better because with a very very thinned down acrylic I can wick off I generally have a little bit more control so this is just a good way a good final pass get some acrylic on there it's a very thin glazes down to a filter level where you're smoothing everything out and making sure that everything has the appropriate tone and that nice deep rich blue we ultimately want all right so this is a little bit of a bonus step here I've got some mayhem red from scale 75 but I mean I wouldn't call this a crimson fist tutorial if I didn't show you how I actually did the crimson fists that would feel kind of inappropriate so I'm going to talk over this and we'll close this video out as we're done here the armor is all completed except for his nice crimson fists so I begin by just laying down a nice thin layer that mayhem red is really transparent which you know makes it great for this purpose so I just get a nice layer over that that's some deck tan which is a really interesting light gray color and it'll blend in well as highlights with my existing light flesh um because it's effectively a light gray fleshish tone and I'm going to come in and I'm going to hit all of the areas on the gauntlet that I want to be reflecting some kind of light there the crimson on the crimson fist is generally a little bit darker obviously because it is you know crimson and uh so you know you want to make sure that that red isn't what I want to say over highlighted but you do want some highlights in there I also then took some holdra blue the same dark color I used on the armor for its glazes and mix that with the red to get my shadow color because when you put that deep red and that deep blue together you get a really nice shadow color for red again avoiding black if we can so once I have those highlights and those uh shadows placed then I come back in with a little glaze of the mayhem red again tie it all together and there we've got some nice we've got a nice crimson fist you can of course repeat this as many times as you want I did repeat this a couple more times you'll see me do a little bit of work here where I'm fixing things but even off camera I went back in and popped up and popped in a little more of the highlights and so on but that's really all there is to it for the fist it's such a simple step uh little little base red little place highlight little place shadow glaze over everything you're good to go so with that I'll bring us to a close as I'm finishing out the rest of this uh and say thank you very much for watching this I hope you enjoyed um you're going to see a fair amount of oil paints on the channel it's something I'm painting a lot with and I'm going to be you know true to myself and true to you I want to be representative for how I work if you like this give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future but as always thank you for watching this one and we'll see you next time