 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video today We're gonna take a deep dive on painting display quality skin tones and using very different colors to do it This one's gonna be really exciting. Let's get into it The strict techno man sir that is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V style Now if you're a longtime viewer of this channel, you know, I love painting skin tones of every Color under the rainbow. I think skin is an amazingly fun thing to paint and frankly I need to paint more models with less clothing on I guess because just in general. It's a lot of fun and I think when People start out and and when you're building your way up and taking your early steps in the hobby Skin tone can be one of those things that really confounds people on their journey Now as we progress we tend to just pick up the bottle of paint that's labeled some kind of skin tone light skin dark skin, whatever it is But when we look at the art that really inspires us whether that be Frazetta art as I really love and looking at those colors or classic Fantasy pieces of art that I grew up on a lot of those even though it seems like they might be you know Have quote-unquote skin tones in them Those artists weren't making those from some bottle that said Sunny skin tone or light flesh or dark flesh or something like that. They were mixing paints to achieve that and so today we're going to experiment with a very different set of colors and The reason we're going to use these colors is because we're going to show how the interaction of sort of Pinks and greens and all these other bright tones can lead to something unique and Interesting and different and how by layering them back and forth you can achieve something that not only feels real but Exciting and different and has lots and lots of different Hughes and tonal variation to it that provides the viewer with a great amount of visual interest So this one's going to be a really interesting time to Experiment and for you to take some of the ideas here and try them on your own models. Let's head over to the desk Let's have some fun All right, so where we pick up with this I laid down just a single layer of bugman's glow over the skin, but I'm gonna do a second thin layer here Yes, that's right. It's two thin coats now Why didn't I do a zenithal or something like that because I'm going to be doing a very complicated lighting scheme with this Not a standard zenithal light from above lighting scheme. And so I'd rather have the control To set it with my individual paint layers by the brush And spit that does mean that I have to build up this base layer Now I'm not actually going to use this bugman's glow as any part of this But it's just putting down a nice base coat that the rest of the colors are going to work over top of And this is arguably the most skin Tony of skin tone things But you're not going to ever use bugman's glow as like its own standalone skin tone I'm just using it here to set a nice base tone to work with and once I get a good base layer down I'm all set. You'll also notice I'm ignoring parts of the legs because that's where there's going to be cast light later Okay Now we're going to get into my actual base layer, which is mixing bugman's glow plus this dark green And what you get is this really deep sort of greeny brown color And a lot of this video is going to be about the power of going back and forth between greens and pinks and how those two things together Can create these wonderful neutral sort of caucasian type skin tones We also this is the morrigan By the way, this is the morrigan from journeyman miniatures. Um, check it out I'll have a link down in the description absolutely amazing company and amazing minis And uh, you know, I want her to be this Very scary lady who's sitting on this stone throne. She's got skulls and candles. She's not a nice person So we're going to push her skin into this strange cold highlight at the top. That's where we're driving to So now we're going to take Uh, the same bugman's glow, but this time instead of a dark green I'm going to mix a much more light green and you'll notice what happens here as I get a much more sort of traditional pink infused sort of caucasian skin tone it almost looks like I could have just got this straight out of the bottle Uh, but what's wonderful about this tone is that I can adjust as you'll see in in The the value here of what I mean of mixing the two together as opposed to using coming out of the bottle Is I'm going to be able to go back and forth in the mixtures the percentages the amounts between these two To adjust how much green how much pink and put those two into balance And that gives me a lot of power over the whole miniature Now at the same time as I said, I do want to pass into some quite cold highlights off of her left side So her face is going to be done in Basically a Rembrandt style lighting and I'm focusing much of the light reflection Towards her. I'm sorry towards her left the right side as we're looking at it And That's why I'm going into these pastel colors and I'm starting with pastel violet because it's a smaller jump Uh, and it it's going to be much more Softly included it'll be countered out by the green in a stronger way And instead again give me more of a neutral highlight But as I continue highlighting up I'll start integrating more and more pastel blue Uh to to start really bringing the coldness Into the highlight of this flesh. I want to sap a lot of the life out of this. She's meant to be evil She's meant to be some powerful force in the darkness And so I want that cold in the skin And at the same time, you know, I showed uh frasetta painting earlier And when you look at a lot of those paintings you see the use of these different hues in the skins These blues these greens these exciting other colors That are representative of both the environment but also the emotion of the piece the nature of the character Everything like that when they're sort of a a dark sorceress or something like that. It's clearly dangerous to our Sword and sorcery hero That skin tone will often have a lot of green tones in it and stuff like that just something a little off to to connote the danger to our eyes And so we're going to play around with a lot of those those subtle Hues and textures here in the same way And as I continuing as I continue building up the highlights a lot of this is a very smooth surface It's very different to work the female form than the male form because you have a lot more soft Areas there's not like these they usually don't sculpt it with these individual Hardline muscles like you often get with male figures And so um, it's just a lot of very smooth transitions around the figure Now in this early part i'm working all in layers and that's what I recommend Don't worry about blending too much as you can see here when you look at her leg There's still clear differences in the individual layer lines between the various paints that i'm doing and that's fine This is about getting down the rough volume or the size of my highlights and the rough tone of my highlights Right. I don't care about blending and that's one of the best things I can tell you like eventually I will blend this out and smooth it out. We're going to spend a lot of time doing that But when you're first working it's a lot easier to just make sure that your values are right and your volumes are right So is your highlight going bright enough? And is it big enough or small enough or in the right place? Those are much more important questions to answer than is the blend smooth? I think a lot of people especially early in the journey you get caught up trying to Smooth blend every individual transition. Who cares? It's irrelevant The piece will still look awesome if the colors are in the right place and they're of the right size and they're credible Okay Now we're going to get a little fun and experimental here We've got a little mix of our two greens worked way down into a glaze And i'm going to start sliding this into all the shadows Specifically working over a lot of where the previous red area that bugman's glow was still showing through But bridging up onto the brighter colors as well So when i'm glazing here to smooth out my transitions instead of doing it with any of my existing colors I'm doing it with a complimentary color. Now the advantage to that is when the green hits the red It goes neutral because the two colors come together and effectively make a sort of brown Now that doesn't mean there's not a green influenced tone here. Of course there is But it's going to be much weaker and you can see how when it goes over that red It doesn't really feel like green And what I continue to do here is just slowly integrate little bits of that green with little bits of the bugman's glow Turn that into a glaze and then bridge those to that divide again So I don't list the paints here because honestly, I couldn't I was just mixing back and forth with a lot of different Paints, but it's all the same stuff And most of the glazes I'm doing here are just different formulations of the bugman's glow The yellow green and the green sky That's all we're doing is some percentage of those different paints being mixed back and forth And then glazed over the colors to bridge the different layer lines Draw the individual layers together add more tonal variation Smooth out the piece but also increase the visual interest by having lots of these interesting cues Dancing them off of our highlights. And that's the key The the high highlight we can still keep in this bright clean color and the lowest shadows will still be quite dark But in the bridge between in the mid-tone in that saturated area where really the credibility in the life of your piece will live That's where we have the chance to just play with colors and do really interesting things And sometimes it can go on a bit too strong like that green. I just put on there is Way too strong, but that's okay. I'll just have later glazes and wheel it back In the end, I probably do 20 30 different maybe 50 different glaze layers I don't know I was at this for a while because I was just having fun Playing back and forth different mixtures adding in a little more red a little more of the green sky By red. I mean the bugman's glow A little more of the different tones just to sort of keep working back and forth And determine what was going to be the right balance with this With the highlight with the highlights in place with me knowing the rough size Of the volumes of the highlights and where I wanted them. I didn't have to worry about that anymore All that's done Now we could just get to spend all this fun time with these thin glazes Setting the individual colors and adjusting these final elements. Maybe I'm shrinking a highlight volume a little Maybe I'm expanding it a little for the most part. I can just work back and forth pretty freely Confident that I'm going to have the ability to just because I'm working in such these thin layers To just constantly adjust what I'm doing You can see there a lot of that green subtracted out in between the two layers because I went back in between off camera Working with some more of the red and as soon as you get that red back over top of the green It just basically disappears and becomes again a more neutral skin tone The classic verdaccio of the old masters was to paint the whole thing in green first and then lay Various pinks and such over the top which would then sort of magically transform into what we would recognize as a Caucasian skin tone But ultimately I'm going to keep Working back and forth on this and back and forth And I've repeated this lots of times in my videos, but it's worth saying again One of the things that makes skin feel realistic Rich and have depth is when you bring the translucency of skin to life Through the application of lots of these thin layers through these glazes Where there's lots of different interplay between the colors happening across the figure When that's occurring the light is filtering through all these different color layers Much as it does in reality As it's going through your skin through the blood that's right underneath the surface in the capillaries You know, you have tan that varies all these sorts of things So we just continue to work it back and forth I know a lot of this might seem scary or insane And certainly I am benefiting here from just years of painting experience But there's no reason you can't do this as well The core lessons here to remember Are just what colors are underpinning those skin tones in the lessons of the old masters When they would do verdaccio and undercoat their their Paintings in green and then lay the pinks over to get these realistic tones We can use those same tricks to create natural shadows natural sort of tan and darker and ochre infused tones Even with our miniature paints and it's not actually that hard for us to do so What I would recommend is whenever you're going to grab a bottle of paint There's nothing wrong with grabbing something that says hey, you know This is some Caucasian flesh tone or African skin tone or anything like that. There's nothing wrong with using those bottles But at the same time as you think about the colors that you're putting into it for the shadows for the highlights Just start experimenting there Instead of just using an ivory or or pushing up into something like that Try some light purples or blues or pinks Greens something unusual See what you can do with it and ultimately it'll only help you learn and take your next step on your journey Now I could keep glazing, but I'm going to go ahead and work with the airbrush here Just because that's going to help me smooth things out a little bit faster and a little bit cleaner I'm going to use my two Harder and steamback airbrushes one being a cr plus with a point one five needle at 18 psi and the other one being my Iwata infinity key edition with the With a point two needle and again at 18 psi and in both cases I'm just going to work real thin Here I have a mix of the pastel violet and pastel blue together And I'm just using that to sort of reinstantiate some of the highlights, but it's very thin All of these paints are eight to one probably thinner to paint. So we are working extremely thin I want this buttery smooth and I want it to be To come out of the airbrush no problem And I want it to have very little effect and you can see how subtle and careful I'm building this up You notice how little my finger rocks on the trigger. I am just barely letting out any air Barely letting out any paint Just working it over and over again through this gentle rocking motion to sort of slowly through multiple applications Smooth out all of these transitions from my earlier layers and glazes And the beautiful part about the airbrush is it's so fast You know, this took me much less time than all the rest of the glazes But at the end it lets me do these amazing things and shifting these colors around Um, so that last one was a much more neutral mix much more of the Uh, bugman's glow plus the green sky here. We're back to bugman's glow plus a little bit of the Yellow dark yellow green and yet again here. I'm going to be working down the shadows Getting these things a little more infused with some of these warm tones But also still bringing back in those greens So even with the airbrush, I'm going to work back and forth The speed of this tool is such that it lets me move around the miniature very quickly Control my my spray very precisely with this extremely thin paint And make sure that what I get out of it is something that's just going to Add more filters over the top of the work I've already done And so as I said a lot of this is thin 8 10 to 1 11 to 1, you know, like this very very thin paint very watery paint And that's because with when we're working with the airbrush in this fashion We can build it up just multiple very light very Small touches right so we don't need to work heavy Now here at the end I have a little bit of thin Green this is some of the dark yellow green and then this does have a drop or two of um Dark green ink in it as well. Basically the same colors. It's a little bit darker The ink is just there to help it thin And this is about working in those those very subtle final transitions into the low part of the tone Right having introducing these final filters of some soft subtle greens All around the lower area of the miniatures and you see Frazetta and a lot of other artists do this all the time Or as you get towards the bottom of the piece, they'll integrate these more earthy natural tones these deep blues and browns and greens To sort of bring the piece together into the environment it's in and that's what we're doing here Now we have to address this unpainted part I did want to take you through this ultimately just so you could see what I was going to do here There's a lot more work that happened off camera, but I wanted to give you the idea These candles and there's going to be sort of a blue light that's emanating up from this side of the piece And so I'm just setting some initial tones with the airbrush here. This will require more Brushwork on top, but I'm sort of setting my overall Sphere of the glow and where it's coming from based on the placement of the candles And then working in some of those lights And I wanted to take just a moment to talk about this as well Because ultimately the the what I'm aiming for here with this piece is a transition from cold pale highlights Into warm shadows into cold Environmental catch lights So that's the sort of contrast and warm or sorry cold warm cold that I'm aiming for this piece So as I work on this I try to focus the light nearest the candles as I then This is all just variations on this one blue color plus either paint gray or or a white Just to keep it nice and simple And as I work this I want the area around the actual Candles to be the brightest and then catch on the legs But I'm also again just as before working back and forth here I have some some pains gray ink that I'm using to just reinforce To instantiate some of those shadows I want that strong occlusion shadow that area of darkness that separates my cast light From the natural environmental light of the piece And then I build back up and reinforce the blue and so on I want that to move back and forth and to have an area where there is a really deep shadow In between the two elements that way I can make sure that the the story of the light is Is such where there's a clear divide between the shadow that the primary light is casting And the actual pale blue light that the candles themselves are doing So there you go. She's obviously not done yet But this is the skin in a pretty complete state I'm sure I'll still play around with it more Afterward just to continually keep readjusting stuff as I'm painting the rest of the figure But this was an incredible amount of fun to do Just working these tones back and forth and seeing how they would balance Was just an unbelievable amount of fun and frankly exactly the kind of stuff that I Really really getting a big jazz out of in painting right now So I hope you're enjoying these videos I know they're a little different and more experimental But I hope at the same time you're able to extract lessons from them that you can use in your own hobby Whether you're painting 20 guys for a unit in an army or a single figure for a competition Whatever the case hit like if you liked this subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future Don't forget if you've got questions you can drop those down below I always answer every question asked if you want to support the channel It's very easy to do so not only is hitting all those buttons help do that But also there's a patreon down there focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey As always I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time