 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today, we're going back to the old world, and this time, we visit the noble lands of Bretonnia. Let's get into it. So, recently, I had a video all about speed painting skeletons. With skeletons, you generally have hordes of them, right? And so, you want to get them done quick. Bretonnian knights, on the other hand, well, that's a slightly different story. Each knight is really a sort of character, a hero in their own right, or at least in the story of the world, so you want to give a little more attention to it. That being said, you still do have a decent number of knights. So today, we're going to talk about the tips, tricks, and tactics to get these knights painted efficiently, but still have them looking really nice on your table. So let's head over to the desk and see what we can do. Alright, so to start, this guy has been Xenothal-primed, and really, it's going to save you a ton of time. I do recommend that you do so. If you can do so with an airbrush, great. If you do so with rattle cans, also fine. If you do so with just like a heavy dry brush, also, also fine. But the point is, don't try to work over black, especially when you're going to do these kind of split-color schemes like we're going to show today. I'm going to show a traditional sort of split-color bisected knight scheme. And so we want to start out with a nice Xenothal-prime, something that pushes some light, so our lighter color paints go over easier. Now, as we get to some base-coding, we're going to focus on two different things. The first thing we're going to do is we're not going to use a normal brush. Instead, we're going to get out a flat brush. Brutonian knights and these horses have tons of big, flat areas. And oftentimes, I see people struggle to get paint smooth on these large, flat areas because they're using a round brush. Flat area, flat brush, hammer, nail. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to do a lot of wet blending. When we have these big, flat areas, we want to work wet. We want to work quick. So we've got a big brush, it's a flat brush, and we're going to work fast. Between both the purple and the white, I'm going to be working primarily in a sort of spread of three different tones. So these three tones give me a progression between purple at the low end, up to its highlight, and then white, starting in sort of a mid-tony gray, up to a brighter white. Now let's get into the night. When I'm painting them, I'm going to take that flat brush. I'm not going to worry too much about the other little sort of shield thing. I can always clean that up later if I mess it up. But I'm going to use this brush. The great thing about a flat brush is it can be used in two ways. I can just edge very carefully with it and work a thin line by using the flat side of it, or I can roll it out and just let it cover a big area like I'm painting a wall. And I'm going to work wet on wet here. So I start with my darkest color first, filling in all of the shadow areas, like where I think there's going to be shadows or something like that. Then I go straight up into my mid-tone and I cover the rest. So as I'm working that, I punch in some of that dark purple and then I'm going to work up into the brighter mid-tone royal purple. Once that's still wet, I then immediately, in between all these, I'm just wiping my brush on a moist paper towel that's sitting right next to me off-camera. Then I go into the sort of sunny skin tone color, this warm skin tone color. I drop that in where I want my specific highlights, then go back into the warm purple and just smooth them all together. And the bigger flat brush will make wet blending really easy. Now I'm not thinning this paint basically at all. This is more or less straight from the pot in all of these cases. And the reason for that is if you want to wet blend well, then you've got to work thick. Instead, I'm smoothing the paint out on the miniature. When it comes to the white, it's much the same story. I start with the lowest tone of white, sort of my middle tone gray color, which is for me a shadow color on this bright white. And then I work my way up, just punching in the dark color into what the shadows are going to be, coating everything with the mid-tone. And then dropping the bright white right on top in just those highlight areas and then smoothing it all together with the brush. In between every brush change, when you see my brush come away from the miniature, it's being wiped on a moist paper towel. Just very quickly wipe it. This is so you don't have to eat your paint. It's a lot of paint on a big flat brush. You don't want to be eating this kind of paint. Keep a moist paper towel next to you. Wipey wipey, you're good to go. And really in a matter of minutes, I have all the base coat down on the horse. Like this took a few minutes at best. If the lines of the bisections are completely perfect, it's no problem. Now, they're actually easier to do like this because you can just take the flat side of the brush and run it along. And that'll give you a very naturally straight line. But if you still get something wrong, you can always come back with your normal brush and create that sharp line later. No problem. Now, when I go to the night, he's got a lot of much smaller areas, but I'm going to do much the same thing. With this guy, I'm just going to work with the round brush. But again, same tips, same tricks. This guy doesn't have as many big flat areas. He's got a lot more folds and small spaces and stuff like that. But I am still going to work thick, straight from the pot, punch in the dark colors first, mid-tone everything else, and then drop the highlights onto the still wet mid-tone, smooth it together. Same rotation. It's just a matter of you drop in the wet shadows, they're very dark, then you take your thinner mid-tone over, or sorry, you take your mid-tone over everything and then punch in the highlights and smooth it together. If you need to do a couple passes, you can. Wet blends don't always come out perfect the first time. So it's perfectly fair to apply it, mix it in, it's not perfect, let it dry, and then just repeat the process. It'll be a lot smoother and easier the second time when you already have some undershading of those exact tones, and you're just building it as opposed to trying to start from black and white. All right, with all the main colors of the horse done, we already have our highlights, shadows, and main tones on the horse, and it's taken us, I don't know, 15 or the whole night, and it's maybe like 15 minutes into the sky. So we're in a great position. Now we could keep working this, we could do some glazes, we could punch things up, you can always choose to refine, but instead we're gonna go to the next color. So that's gonna be all of the sort of leather bits. These horses have a lot of sections that are divided by these leather straps. And so here we're gonna use this dark brown green. Why am I using the green influenced brown? Well, because I'm using purple on the miniature and green is a sort of complimentary color. So even though this is only very weakly green toned, it's still gonna really work and punch in a bit of extra contrast. It's subtle, but it'll be there. And I'm also working dark because I want that dark to be a nice hard separation between the very bright, vibrant colors of the rest of the barding and his cloth. So by working in this very dark brown, it helps to really separate those areas and give us those nice dark lines of separation between all the elements that make the miniature look clean and credible. Once all of those dark brown leather is done, I then just mix in a bit of my previous mid-tone gray, what I had used for the lowest tone in the white. I mix in a little bit of that to my brown and then I come through and I just hit some edges very quickly of all the leather straps, knock in a little bit of texture. So sometimes I'm working my way along the edge in a little bit of a staccato fashion. Sometime I'm just doing a little hashing along the bottom. I wanna make it look like rough, worn, aged leather where it has those natural scritches, scratches, cracks and hashes in there that shows that it's been worn over time as the horse moves and this thing gets wet and then dries again and again and so on. With all those leather parts done, it's time to turn to the horse itself. So the little pony. There's not a lot of horse showing but here I chose to go with a dark horse. Now one of the things I like with horses in general is actually to vary all the horse colors. So you can kinda use some browns, you can just use some light washes, you can do contrast paint over it. With plutonium horses, there's almost no actual horse showing because of all the barding that's on them. So it just kinda becomes more of a mixing it up for a little extra touch. Here I take some of that Tenebra's gray from AK and I just thin it down a little and basically just run a thin layer over everything. Nothing too complicated, I wanna darken it down. You could stop right there, really there's so little showing, it wouldn't matter, it would be fine. But I do then mix in again that mid-tone gray, or sorry, the low gray color from my whites and then I just very quickly knock in some thin highlights to the nose of the horse, the knees, stuff like that. In the interim here, I did quickly paint his cuffs and his socks, whatever you call them, as well as his tail and that was just done by mixing a little bit of that brighter color that I used for the leather and I just basically used the same thing for those. Just did some quick scratchy lines, first done. But with that horse looking good, the last final touch is I take a little bit of a sort of pinkish color that I happen to have on my palette and I just touch his nose a little bit. It's such a minor thing, but a little bit of pink on the nose of the horse just helps it kind of sell and be real. Not every horse shows pink colors there, but some do. And so it just kind of, there's a little touch of red there, a little touch of life, I don't know. It's an extra thing I like to do on some of the horses and it took like 30 seconds, so why not? All right, with all those base coats done and the highlights and the shadows, the edge highlights everything. Again, we're not very far into this paint job. I don't know, at this point I've maybe, let's be generous and say about 45 minutes, a little less than an hour. It's time to give this guy a matte, a varnish of ultra matte varnish. Why? Well, because things like the purple are very shiny and when we're knocking in highlights like this through the quick web blend and thinning stuff out, we can get some unnatural satin sheen. We don't want that. We want to tell the story of where the highlights are and when things are satiny or glossy, it's telling the story of where highlights are and it really disrupts and conflicts with how you paint the miniature. So I ultra matte varnish everything out and with that done, now it's time for the metals. For that, we're going to turn to our old friend's Vallejo metal color and one of the things I like to do is I do not like to wash my metals. So instead, I'm going to start very dark. I take some magnesium, mix in some Tenebrae's gray and I use that to base coat all of the steel on him. So both the chain that's hidden under the varning but as well as the, you know, all the armor on the night. And this is so naturally dark and matte that when I then come in with later steps and highlight, it's going to look like I've got these natural shadows but I didn't have to wash it and ruin all the metals. So I'm working up in the same way, just like you saw me do with the barring itself. And working up, I do. I just go basically to the magnesium alone without any matte paint mixed in, hit some higher areas, some edges, stuff like that. And then once I'm comfortable with that, I then go to some silver. I don't go to pure silver, I mix a little bit of the silver and the magnesium together for my highlight, because I don't want it to gleam quite that much. And again, just cover a little less, hit some high highlights, we're good to go. And with that, all of the metal of the night is ready to go. And it's amazing how much having that dark metal now set against the purple and white really changes the image of the thing. Our next step is the gold. So for this, I'm going to use my gold recipe. You can find the link for that up above. And basically I just, this is an easy, simple one coat to cover everything. And basically just base coat all the things in gold. From this point, I then I'm gonna wash it or do in some quick glazes with a little bit of Rhinox Hide to shade it down and a little bit of silver to highlight, but it's pretty minimal, honestly. The goal here is just to get everything covered in this gold. It's so naturally reflective and rich. And there are lots of tiny little shields and elements there. But once it's on a few simple shadings with some Rhinox Hide and then a little bit of silver edges and we call it a day. Now, it wouldn't be a Bretonian night if we didn't do something with those shields. I've cleaned them up, of course, by this point. But we gotta get something in there. Fortunately, the new Bretonians come with a set of decals. And so I'm gonna just take the pretty standard Fleur-de-lis here. I love the Fleur-de-lis as a signifier for Bretonians. A bunch of my existing Bretonians have the Fleur-de-lis on them. So I was happy to see to get more Bretonian decals. And basically on the white shields we're gonna use the black decal and on the purple shields we're gonna use the white decals. So that contrasts, it's not complicated. There are, let's talk about how we apply decals. So to apply them, we're gonna use microset and microsol. And we begin by basically slathering the area in microset. The decal has been sitting in water for about a minute. And with that point, it will loosen and separate from the paper. And putting a decal on while recording is one of the most impossible things you can do in the world because of how I need to hold things for to record. But so I apologize that this is a bit wonky, but you basically slide it off of the piece of paper and into the area. Now the reason we absolutely slathered that whole shield with microset is so we can just reposition the decals. We just push it around. You can use a brush. You can use the end of your little tweezers. You can even use the very tip of an X-Acto knife if you're careful and you move it around, but you will tear paint if you're not careful. But once it's lined up and in place, we then let it sit for a minute. We take our dry brush and we just lightly touch the areas around it or roll the brush to absorb the extra microset from the area. We don't wanna leave big pools of liquid. So we just carefully absorb the rest of that and let it sit. We're good to go. It has to sit there and dry naturally. You can speed it up with a hairdryer or something, but it's gotta be completely dry before we go to the next step. The next step is we get out our micro-soul and where this basically melts the thing down and makes it really conform to the exact surface. Really, really, really much so it will like, you can actually see the texture of the paint if you have it. It will break it down so much. But I do two full coats of micro-soul over all of the decals and then in between each time I'm letting it dry completely. So once that's totally dry, now our last step. Our last step with the Bretonian Knight is of course we've got to make sure that these things are matte. The problem with decals is you can't just micro-soul and micro-set your way out of it. They will still look glossy, shiny, weird and not like they're part of the miniature. So we have to take a bit of ultra-matte varnish, basically what we used on the rest of the non-metal parts earlier and we're gonna just heavily slather that on there. We don't wanna let it pool anywhere because that'll cause weird things. So after you put it on, if it's run down, take your brush and sop up any extra pools. But we basically just coat all of the areas with that ultra-matte varnish. Again, let it dry naturally. And with that, we glue Ryder onto Pony and we're good to go. So there you go. That's that Bretonian Knight all done. Now, this was a relatively simple paint job. Took me maybe like 90 minutes total to get this guy going and a fair amount of that at the end is honestly drying time. But it's a lot of fun. These guys are, they don't have to be a huge chore and that sounds like a lot of time but you run your knights in units of six or maybe 10. If you do one night a day or one night every couple days within a span of a few weeks, you've got a great looking unit on your hands. And especially if you have a unified color scheme as opposed to the sort of technicolor rainbow coat that Bretonians used to be, it's even faster as you kind of get your scheme down and really learn how to execute these steps quickly. But I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you think this guy's cool and that some of these tips will be useful to you. In getting your own noble Bretonians onto the table in the old world. If you liked this, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday and we will be returning to the old world again in the future. If you've got any questions about anything I did, hey, drop those down in the comments. I always answer every question that's asked. If you wanna support the channel, lots of ways you can do so. You can share this video. There's links down below for all your hobby supplies so you can find links to Microsoft MicroSet, all that stuff down there. If you wanna pick that up, that gives you Amazon links, doesn't cost you anything extra but gives a nice kick back to the channel. There's also, of course, our Patreon focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey. So if you wanna do some simple nights like this or elevate them even more, we'd love to have you as part of the community and help you get to that place. As always though, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.