 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about striations on bone. So I've done videos before about painting, you know, sort of traditional bone. And as I'm sitting here working on this big, beastie here, it occurred to me that I wanted to tell that this is a great, because this guy just has like bone shards everywhere. This is a great chance to talk about bone striations and so a couple different uses of it in practice since this dude has all sorts of different weird bone pieces coming out of him. So there are kind of two different ways to do bone. The first way is just to kind of establish a gradient throughout and you'll notice I'm not doing anything traditional in color here. These are all sort of bright blue, very Godzilla-like, which is what I was going for when he fires up his, like the old Godzilla when his back spines would light up to fire as atomic breath. That's kind of what I thought would be cool here for this guy. But you can do a smooth sort of blend where it goes from a light color to a dark color or, you know, a light color on the base up to a dark color on the top, doesn't really matter. The point is that what we recognize as something like bone is usually a matter of shape and that kind of transition, but you don't have to do just that blend. One of the other options and one thing you'll frequently see the GW folks do, especially in their sort of heavy metal style and various box art, are more like striations. So I thought we'd walk through that today. The way I like to do my striations, and there are admittedly a couple different ways to do this, are I like to start by establishing a rough blend. So these were just quick, wet blends. You can see that they're still pretty rough, but they exist and it gives me kind of a base to work off of. And that's all I need. I don't need them to be perfect. One of the great parts about doing bone in this way is you don't really have to worry about it looking good. It gets rid of a lot of the blending challenge because you're going to do it through texture instead. Texture is the great answer. If you can't blend, texture. So here I have some black. This is just black ink. Here I have some Holdra blue. Here I actually have some golden acrylics cobalt teal. This is just a heavy body acrylic that I happen to like for the color in this case. I have some white ink. So we're going to start actually with some of this Holdra blue. I also have some flow improver here. And we just want to get a little bit of that in our brush so it's good to go. And so we can get a nice smooth line going on. And we're going to do it on this bone right up here because that'll be a nice one that's easy to see. And I'm going to start here down on the dark part. I've gone through those four colors already. Those were all wet blended. The exact four colors you see here on the palette that I just talked about are what's here. And what I'm going to do is in the middle here I'm just going to start drawing some nice thin lines. Just sketch out some nice thin lines with the dark color. And I start with one of the darker colors and we're doing that because we want to start bringing some of that up. You'll notice that my blend here was pretty even. Like you can see it on the other one that's on this side. It's pretty even. Like there's about 25% of the darkest color and 25% of this mid and then the higher and then the highest, right? So it's kind of evenly dispersed throughout. That was intentional. I'm going to go back into my flow improver, grab some of my cobalt teal. As a heavy body acrylic it's rather thick. So we'll really need to get that working with the flow improver. I'll do a whole video sometime about working with heavy body acrylics. Okay, so now what we're going to do is same thing. We're going to just go ahead and get some lines in there. Yet again, we're going to just start here. I'm starting like one step down. I start in this darker part and I start bringing some lines. Okay. Now you can see we've got those lines there. Then we're going to take some of that white ink, mix it in there with some of that cobalt teal. That'll flow real nice because we've got the, because it's ink based. So just a touch of flow improver and that's your brightest one is the one you need to really flow. A lot of these beginning lines, they can just be kind of messy and it's all right. It doesn't really matter because they're just there to kind of break up some of the texture and make sure it's all like that you've got some kind of vertical travel. Then what I'm going to do is now is when I need to be a little sharper and more controlled. So with the white teal mixture in this case, by the way, if I were doing this with normal bone color, I would have a white ink, a bone colored ink, a light brown and a dark brown. Right? It's, you can see exactly how it would match to say normal colors. I'm just going to come all the way down and start tracing these nice thin, I'm going to focus toward the edge, make sure that every edge has one. Now they'll be somewhat transparent and that's what we want. We actually don't want them to be completely opaque right out of the gate because what we're going to do is then go over a second time. Okay? And when we do that on some of these, we'll trace some to the same amount, some to different amounts like different durations. And then what we get is that nice striation there. Now we can then go back down. So let's grab a little bit of that deeper blue, kind of mix that with what we've already got there. And then we can start pulling out from those lines, like we use those white lines we made as guidelines. And you notice I kind of trace over the edge, like wherever my, can you see how where my white line, the very light whitish line that I went, I pull onto it. You can also flip them around, like if I was doing this normal, I would flip them around and do it from this direction because it would be a heck of a lot easier but that's a lot harder to shoot on camera and hold this guy. But like the actual way to do it when you're doing it at home would be you start in the opposite direction. You start with your brush at the edge of the line you drew and you just pull straight toward it. Then we go back to our nice middle teal color and we find those spaces that are in between. See these little lines that are in between? We find these and we trace them up into here. And then what we get is that real nice striation that goes right throughout the whole thing. So it's a real simple process, but it has a really cool look, like it can just make it look like a more interesting structure. If you want to finish off, if you want to really make it sort of pop all the way, then you come in with just like your white ink. By the way, I'm just using my standard Daler Rowney white ink here. If you don't have white ink, just make sure you have a white paint that flows really, really well. You can come back in to finish it and at the very top, now that we've established all these lines, we can come in and just very carefully work the highest highlights. And there we go. Those nice long striation lines. You saw how I built those up by just first creating some texture and some lines organically with the two mid colors and then really setting it down with the lighter color where I then determined kind of how everything went. And that's where it set up the pattern that I then followed. By doing those other lines first though, what happens is you get a nice sketch hiding underneath any of those blends that might not be too completely sharp and keeps it so you get that nice even, that nice even transition throughout. Right? And look at that. Now we got this nice smooth blend hidden with my texture. The other thing I wanted to talk about here we're going to look at is his front, his front fingy. We're going to look at his little, his little fingies because these claws can also provide a nice opportunity for it. So here I'm going to do the same thing. I start with sort of the darker blue and on his little fingy here, we're going to just very carefully sketch some small lines starting in the black. So we're starting in the area that's darker than our current color and pulling into the area that's lighter than our current color, like one step darker to one step lighter covering over in the middle. Then we'll go to our teal color here and same thing. I'm going to start one step down and come up. Then we'll go ahead and take our very light white ink plus cobalt teal mix here and what's going to be different about this time, sorry I just need to mix a little more up here, what's going to be slightly different about this time and what we do is we're going to use the shape of this, this nail like a lot of bones, especially on GW stuff have this kind of shape where we have this hard line right here. So what we'll do is we'll very lightly, we're just going to use the side of the brush, catch that edge highlight. We're going to go ahead and grab the top edge of it and we'll get that line as well. Think of it just like edge highlighting basically, right? So we've got all edges of that triangle. Then within the triangle, what we're going to do is make sure I'm not covering it with the top finger on the camera. What we're going to do is we're going to come in and we're going to just very carefully draw those lines all the way down and when we do that, you notice there I'm going well into the dark and the reason that I want to do that is because that creates those channels of those different colors and that's really, that's the most important part about this is this step where you come in with like sort of your very light color, say your white bone mixture or something on a normal bone or whatever you're happening to be doing, whatever your highest color is, right? This is where you're actually needing to be careful and you're setting what will be the channels for the rest of your work, okay? Then we come back in with our dark blue and we're going to pick up from the light edge of those and just trace right up. Pick up a little bit of that lighter mixture. Then we go into that pure teal and we just refine the middle spaces up top using the negative lines we just made, i.e. the dark spaces and then finally we go back to our pure white ink, make sure the extra of that's wicked off, I'm wicking my brush over here every time like you can see up here where I've wicked off all these extra things from this color because things like these inks and things with all this flow improver, it's going to flow really well and when you're doing stuff like this edge highlighting, it's important that you have the minimalist amount of paint on your brush because otherwise you get fat edges and things flow off where you don't want them and stuff like that so you want just the minimal amount of paint come in here and just trace out the tops of some of these lines and there we go now we get cool fingy striations and you can do that and it gives you a nice outline of this shape, you can do stuff like hit the corner there with just a little touch of white you know make sure that kind of shows up and bounces and looks nice as an interesting sort of light reflection but that's it that's all there is to it and you just kind of repeat that process around the whole around every horn which on this guy is going to take me a little while since he has 52 of these all over his body but but obviously if you have a you know just a normal set of two horns you can actually get some really good results out of it like you have a sort of traditional demonic figure where he's just got a couple horns you get a nice look out of that just real fast so there you go that's striations bone striations all right we're back you can see all of his scales are now striated all the way around so we have this texture labeled on everything I just wanted to make a few final notes here on corrections color stuff like that so the ones that have the most white are the striations that are happening up here at the top around his face because if you notice these are all kind of pointing in towards his head and this should always be the center piece of your model so in a situation like this where you have lots of bone all over the model make sure you're using your highlight color the most up here at the top like if this were a humanoid person standing upright like this this area would have the most up here highlights and the bones that are down here at the bottom or in this case on him you know it's down here this stuff I don't go all the way so for example on some of the undersides of these I don't go all the way to the white I only take it up to like that teal white combination and I don't use this final sharp white highlight at the end okay so that way this is the area of brightness around the shoulders and the head of whatever your model is and it slowly diminishes as the light goes down toward the lower part of the miniature especially on something like this where this underside would be so cast in shadow right so that's just a note I wanted to make about using those color schemes again if I were like to put this in terms of say normal bone color this up here in this area is the only place I would use pure white everything else or the undersides the highlight would stop at bone and that would be my highest striation whatever your ivory your bone color is you know some shop to bone or some buff from whatever you know that kind of thing yeah uh in addition if you happen to have lines that you look at when you're all done and they feel a bit messy like right here this one I was noticing I didn't like I thought what a great chance to correct something you can go back into your darker color so this is my dark blue I didn't use the black at all in the initial tutorial and that's because it's only there to set the color but you can do the same thing with the black if you need to get something really dark so here I can come back in and I can resharpen any of those lines right so I can come in and very carefully draw a few new striations up so you can always correct back with your initial color and kind of bring it back in line so there you can see like some of that's been chopped out now I can go back into that highlight color that I had that sort of mix of the teal and the white and I can come on come back to that line and just kind of redraw it there real slightly real carefully and get a nice sharp line for it okay so one of the great parts about this method that makes it so fun is it's meant to be random and organic it's not it's a very imprecise painting style you don't need to be perfect with it you can just have lines these bones would be naturally really really organic and just really random in how those striations occur so some of them get a little wiggly or look a little strange that's fine that's no big deal because it's still just it's it's a natural creature it wasn't you know it wasn't pasted on there finally if you get something where it looks like that where like okay well now I've got some bright stuff going a little too far down you can always grab some of your low tone which in this case for me is that blue we can thin that out a little bit and we can just glaze right over the edge there and notice how that just kills that right down right instantly that's fitting in a lot better so you can always kind of glaze out you pull the glaze toward the shadows on these bones and you can actually achieve some really nice harmony in the overall striations where you can just kind of have them fade into nothing really really really easily and it can just be a great effect that makes it look like you spent hours and hours doing something when in fact it's a really quick fun simple process so there you go those are kind of all the tips for striated bone I hope you enjoyed that I think it's a cool look you can be real sharp with it you can be real precise if you want everything to look perfect I like them to look a little bit more rough because these are organic things but you can see how going all the way around him you know you get the edges of the claws you're traveling toward you start by just smoothing your tones with just some very random lines you're drawing with your dark color and then your middle color mix then you come in with a very high tone and you just start drawing very careful lines and in the channels you make you then start pulling those lines back out climbing back down the color spectrum so in other words here I started with some blue lines and then some teal lines and then some white teal and then with the white teal after I had those nice and etched in I came back to regular teal drew the line out came back to teal blue drew the line out and that gave me this really nice variation across the entire space where everything feels like it's very organic like I did all this time blending when in fact I just drew lines for a couple seconds okay so there you go that's bone striations I certainly hope you like that if you did go ahead and give it a like 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