 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video today. We're gonna talk all about painting red hair Well, let's get into it. Let's strict techno man sir. That is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V style So I'm painting up this really awesome fig of this druid for my wife so it's a gift for her and I'm painting this scene in nature It's gonna have lots of natural colors, and I thought what a great chance to paint some red hair So here in this video, I'm gonna take you through sort of the steps the tricks and the pitfalls of painting red hair Red is often one of the most challenging colors to work with. It's very transparent And so as a result it can be very difficult to get convincing red hair Highlights often look too pink or too orange shadows often look too messy So we're gonna show you how using some very simple colors some spread of red That you can make something that is convincing while still capturing the light and showing all the necessary contrast We would expect in here. Let's head over to the desk. Let's start painting All right, let's talk about paint So first off I've got a selection of reds here. I've got a deep hole red a darker a little more brown infused red and then I have both the red and To ladine red basically the two very bright reds are pure pigment one is PR 170 one is PR 3. They're both just intense reds Now our shadow is gonna be created with anthracite, but any pains gray or blue will you work? And our highlight is gonna be dark warm flesh. This is out of the pro krill signature series from myself and John the Generally those kinds of like flesh tones are gonna work really well as highlights for red. They're rich. They're warm They're a yellow orange But there's a little bit of peachiness to it that will make it nice So you'll see when we get there Now apparently this figure is going to San Francisco Because of all these freaking flowers in her hair, which ends up being very annoying for this painting process, but it's fine We're gonna start by just establishing a nice base coat and I do basically two thin layers here of this Whole red. I want to make sure that they all of the hair any black from the primer or you know If you even even if you're doing a zenith undercoat, you want a nice even tone of this all the way through so there we go Now I'm going to build in some soft shadows So this is whole red in the anthracite and it's in there is a glaze. It's quite thin like I'm not I'm not working with it strongly This is one of the few times I'm gonna want this to flow into the shadows and I'm gonna try to match the shadows on her figure, but effectively Nothing that's facing directly upward should have any of this shadow color in it Okay, so only the parts that are either down or facing, you know, like facing directly down remember in our Highlight colors we are darkest color that's there our shade tone in our highlight areas is our mid-tone and As I'm applying these initial steps, I'm really just going for I'm using a big fat brush This is like a size 8 or something crazy And I'm really just trying to establish these bands of light where are the values where is the light going to fall and Hair has this sort of specular highlight to it meaning it'll reflect to the viewer's eyes It also has sort of a halo effect of to it As always if you're not sure how to highlight hair Just do a Google search for hair dye bottles like the pictures in the front of hair dye bottles Those are all Photoshop perfect and will give you the exact placement of your light now the jump here between the burnt red and the Are up to the next color is going to seem very strong But this brings me to one of the challenges of red Which is as you're working with the reds you look how much darker that looks after it's dried Red goes on super bright and super intense and looks really really red When it's first on there, but as it dries and mattes out, it's very transparent So it shows the colors underneath That's okay. We can use that to our advantage in this process Because it'll help us create nice smooth transitions, but it means we really want to let it dry in between each application But these first applications are just big layers in areas to establish the values just shingles on a roof Nothing complicated. We're just each time covering less and less space Now with red hair the part that always throws everybody Which is we need to establish a really bright tone to create our Halo of light and those little light catches This is where the dark warm flesh comes in in this initial application. It's not mixed This is pure dark warm flesh and all I'm doing. This is my highest highlight color All I'm doing is placing it everywhere I want there to be a highlight and I'm actually going to go ahead and do two applications of this But the second one I don't cover everything that I covered on the first one It will be fairly transparent And so as it dries some of the red will come through and that will work to our advantage So with my second application, I actually cover less just pushing toward the areas that I want very very highlighted Okay, now that's going to look stark and insane, but trust me now as we then go to the next step I'm going to work with this to lead in red and it's going to be a thin glaze consistency but not super thin And I'm going to just cover over everything every all of the I'm going to cover over all of the highlight to mid-tone areas So beyond where I placed the flesh but not down into the shadows And you'll notice it has an immediate and punchy effect on that red Creating a sort of highlight area right away making it look rich and warm and vibrant like she's in sunlight That under toning coming through Gives us that powerful highlight punch that we want when we're dealing with red hair After everything dries here it is now if I was working on a just an army figure Honestly this step you can just stop like you're good here. This would be fine for an army figure But as this is a little more display oriented We're going to go farther Remember the important thing about this is you want to set the values first So I'm not worried about blends. I'm not worried about anything like that The first step is just getting those lights in place The other important thing here and I can't highlight this enough Is that in the highlight areas? Our mid-tone is our shadow in the shadow areas our mid-tone is our highlight Right so basically We don't want to have the deepest shadows up on the top of the head where it's facing up toward the light Nor do we want to have the brightest colors down in the shadows where there's basically no light reflecting All right, how do we go farther and take this paint job? Now we get out the thin brush and now becomes the time of lines The rest of these steps are not complicated. It's just time consuming So here you can see I'm working with basically a mix in the shadow colors But I'm going to work with a lot of half steps And all those half steps are just going to be lots of little thin lines I'm going to extend those in to the areas To bridge the two colors. So for example here, I'm tracing a lot of them over the shadow area up into where that red starts This will help bridge those two colors The hair we don't want red hair to actually be dark blue But dark blue is a nice cold shadow for the warm red hair And so I just keep Bringing it down in the method of thin lines trying to show the individual strands the texture Of it while at the same time smoothing my blends basically through creating just hundreds and thousands of little thin lines As I move up of the spectrum into my higher mid tone So too do I move up the placement of my layer lines? Now I'm going to start working, you know higher up And if you've got a particularly deep ridge like you see those couple ridges that are creating really strong Shadows on her head. You can then push a little higher up into your highlight areas with this stuff But you you want this banding of light to occur So it's not a flat even line Instead it's traveling like a band over the particular areas, but you want it to be uneven staccato Right, so it looks like a volume in an the volume in an audio recording Okay, where it's lots of thin lines that are bouncing up and down in exact length But I'm just using these thin lines over and over again Covering in between the two areas where those paints are So if I mix two paints together then that layer line has to extend into both sides Right, so if I use burnt red plus the Tulidine red then wherever those two colors were That's the space I'm going to cover with those lines, but not any completely even fashion I will alter the length of all of my strikes on the miniature As I move up into my highest highlights now I'm pushing actually slightly above what would technically be registering on this figure And um, this is where most of the action is the shadow colors with red are pretty easy Because everything is so naturally Transparent and dries out very transparently your low colors your mid to shadows will all blend really smoothly The highlights where we start adding the flesh you have to walk this very careful balance a little too much And it starts to feel weird and false and not credible not enough and you don't get that highlight there But red hair will turn either like orange or pink Or or peach in the highlights just depends on the sort of underlying base color here. We're going for sort of um real stark irish red hair, right? So as we continue to move up I'm getting thinner and thinner and thinner with my strikes in these highlights But you'll notice again not all of these lines are the same length We need real and true variants some are quite thin some are quite long It extends up and down across that specular Band of light that I want to create And I'm just slowly integrating more dark warm flesh in there To to sort of branch out that highlight And then what I'm going to do Is just then take some of that very thin tulidine Red and glaze it back over One more time And by the way, if you're working on like a real display figure You might do this three times five times ten times where you just keep slowly Building and shrinking and building and shrinking and building and shrinking until you get up into this really smooth fine specular band of light One important note here this tulidine red is very thin which means as I'm working in these very thin lines It will somewhat run down into the recesses That's actually an advantage here at the highest highlight because that will act as the mid tone effectively for those High highlight colors, but that's going to be my deepest shadow I don't want anything up in the highlight area To be darker than effectively that red Now here I am back again with a little mix but still with a lot of that dark warm flesh And just reinforcing but shrinking That band of light so every time we cover a little less And then we glaze and then we cover a little less and then we glaze And you'll notice I'm not just hitting that band but also the part in the center of her hair I'm also hitting the lower areas pushing those highlights to remember the tops And the sticky outty bits every time there's a volume change So where where it comes out from under one of these flowers and it pushes back out and becomes a sticky outty bit And so we have both the top of the volume and something sticking out Then we're pushing a highlight there These last steps are all just refinement more thin lines more slight adjustments of the color Making sure that my bands of light extend completely across that entire area where they're hitting So you can see here she has a highlight at the top In the middle where it sticks out over her shoulders and at the bottom where it sticks out over her butt And those are our three bands of light Now it's just refinement And there she is that's how the hair looks I thought I'd do this as a video here So you could actually see where she's at And this is where it is and still a lot more work to do on this figure But of course you can see how all those highlights are registering across the surface I really like how this came out. I hope you do too There you go. The hair is all finished. I've still got a lot more work to do on this figure But she's coming along nicely and I think the hair turned out okay If you liked this, hey, give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future We have new videos here every Saturday If you've got any questions on this or any other topic that I didn't answer drop those down below I always answer every question asked if you want to support the channel There is a patreon link down below focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey We'd love to have you as part of the community As always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time