 Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci-V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci-V's style. Hello everybody and welcome to another happy-cheating video. And this is going to be a bit of a throwback to an older school style of video that I used to do. And the reason for that is simple. Uh, I think a lot of people are intimidated by big monsters. You know, I've seen videos recently, uh, from a lot of people talking about how much they're scared of big monsters, or they don't want to paint them, or they're too hard, or they take too much time. And I just find that to be untrue. I find big monsters to usually be quite a lot of fun to paint, something that you can experiment on. And they're so large, a lot of the common tools and techniques that we use or have that are very, very simple become really easy because you're not messing with a human-sized person. So I thought, let's do a video and show just how easy a monster can be. So this is a big mawcrusher. And we're starting out with just some dry brushing. Now, all the paints I show you on screen and the paint list is at the beginning, so I'm not going to narrate them here. But you can see that I'm starting with just an extremely heavy dry brush, going over all the scales, most of the skin, but leaving little wing flaps separate. And the reason for that is because I want to create some initial tonal variation. Think of this like a sketch. On these big monsters, one of the best things you can do, especially if they have really heavy texture, which a lot of big monsters do. Things like Archeon with his, you know, he has big wings and big textured scales. A lot of these big dragons, you know, with the Stormcast dragons and stuff like that, they have very textured skin and wings and things like that. Maybe the entire Seraphon range is another good example, right, of these heavy textures. But when we do those heavy textures, they take really well to this sort of dry brushing style of initial sketch, right? And my point is, I'm using here these two sort of a flesh tone and a white to create some variation, but you could use anything. The key is we just want them to be bright colors, so that later when we start using some glazes and things like that, we can bring more tones in. And a lot of what we're going to do from here is going to bring them down. Notice that I'm also doing things like these bony protrusions. Just because they're a detail doesn't mean we can't dry brush them, right? I turn the dry brush sideways, hit all those little bony protrusions, and now they're pre-painted. I'm going to do that again a couple of times. So for this point on, I'm going to use the airbrush to start giving this guy some color. And I take off the airbrush protector tip because that will let me be much more accurate. That little tip on the end of your airbrush actually kind of bounces the air around and makes it less exact of a point. Please note, if you're going to do this, you must be extremely careful and confident with your airbrush, as if you bang that tip into any part of this model, you will ruin it. Even a tiny bend ruins it, and then you will need to go buy a new airbrush needle. So if you're going to do this, please be careful. But I like it because I've used the airbrush quite a bit. I'm fine with doing it, and it makes it very easy to get exactly where I want. It makes the line very thin if you have a good amount of airbrush control, as you'll see here as I work through the thing. And I'm just being quite specific with where I'm applying the color. Now, in this case, I am using an airbrush and you can see I'm being pretty precise with where I put the colors versus where I don't. And this mix goes over wonderfully over medium flesh tone, giving you a really nice amount of flesh looking incredibly dynamic, or scales or whatever this happens to be. But you can even do very thin areas. These little bony protrusions in between the wings. I can shoot them pretty accurately like that and not really get much anywhere else. Like I overspray a tiny bit onto the wings, but mostly just on the piece itself. And that's fine because that area is going to be covered in shadow later, as you'll see through later steps. Now, if you don't have an airbrush, if you're sitting here going, Vince, this is cute. I don't have an airbrush. Well, my first recommendation to you would be by an airbrush. I mean, for the cost of literally less than this model that I'm currently painting, you can get an entire airbrush set up. And in your living space, you need about a three foot by three foot area to set up everything for an airbrush. Like a small kindergartners desk would be plenty of room for your airbrush. But if you absolutely can't get one and don't have one for various reasons, that's fine, then just do all this with glazes and a big brush, right? Don't use, get yourself a big, fat, cheap, flat brush. Big, very big and apply this all as glazes and it will work fine. No, no difference at all. You can do the same thing. Like I'm working here with a mix of contrast and inks. I'm doing the airbrush because it's faster, but I could certainly do it with a with a big glaze brush as well. Now, I want to go back in and I'm just adding more yellow and more yellow to the mix to sort of increase those highlights. Big monsters need big contrast and big variation. So I want to make sure that I really make this thing interesting. When you have a surface that is a lot of the same type of material, if you just make it a color, it's boring. That's why I'm creating these hotspots of color where the muscles are gathered that are pointing up in the air that are, you know, would naturally catch more light and you can see that. Now, here I actually go back to the dry brush to pick out some of those final scales. Again, if you were just doing this all with glazes, no problem. You would do all the steps that I did and you go back to the dry brush and you notice here, I'm really just focusing in on the highest highlights, putting a tiny amount of white. Now, I really, really wiped almost all the paint off of this dry brush. Okay. It is, as you can see, barely leaving anything behind. So this is exactly the opposite of what I did at the beginning. Right. In the beginning, I was doing a super heavy dry brush. Just didn't want it to run down into the cracks. Here, I'm doing it, you know, much, much lighter and notice I go over all of these little bony patrusions again, because these things are the most annoying part of the mawcrusher. Why not dry brush them and speed this whole process up later because then they'll already be in the right area of color and it's just maybe applying a little detail. The other thing I want to do, contrast and tonal variation is more than just a contrast of value. It's also a contrast of hue. And I had base coated this guy in red because as I've, if you've watched any of my videos, you know that red is an excellent undercoat for green because it acts as a natural complementary color and shadow. So here I've taken some red earth and thinned it down to a glaze to build back in some of those shadows. Just again, the red over the green will have a different look than the green over the red. And when you mix the two together, you get a really interesting combination. And then I'm going to use that same red to get in there and start working on the flesh. Now, I'm not going to be super duper concerned with the flesh, especially the stuff underneath them. I'm going to try to make it look nice. Like most animals of this kind of type or imaginary creature, it does have a lighter belly is how I'll paint it than the rest of it. And I think this is often a challenge for people as you know, that part is in shadow. Well, the key is you don't have to darken it too much. You just don't make it quite as bright as it might otherwise be. So this is just me using that red earth and flesh tone to start creating it because I already applied the dry brush over the red. I had a great value sketch so I can work thin here and just build this up now in this case because I'm working with lighter colors that don't glaze. Well, if I didn't have an airbrush, my plan here would be a bunch of just wet blending. I'd get a giant size 8 brush and just go ham on this bad boy underneath. Just squidging it all together, working them paints. I have lots of videos on wet blending. You can find one of them up in the corner right now if you need more information on that. But I'm not going to worry too much about the detail on the bottom or stuff like that. And that's the next point I want to make about big monsters. Oftentimes there'll be areas on these monsters that just aren't very visible. That's not always true. Some of them are standing in unusual positions that make them all visible or so on. But if you've got something like this, he's so bestial and he's you know, hunched way down. So in that in that case, I'm just going to do a pretty basic job underneath. Honestly, because you're not going to be able to see it and if you can't see it, if this isn't for Golden Demon, stop killing yourself. Just get it painted. Have it have some nice variation and call it a day. Now for the wings. I want to make sure that they stand out and again feel more natural and the color palette for this is red, green and yellow, which is a really nice combination color palette. It feels very warm, very natural, very organic. And so here what I've mixed in is just ready to get these things base coated. And again, I'm using the fact that I had them drybrushed to set the initial value. And when this yellow goes over top of the red and the white, it produces that natural contrast. And again, I've taken the tip of the airbrush off to work very carefully and specifically and you can see how some how thin some of the lines are now with wings. Remember the middle parts of wings are going to be stretched thinner and so more light will come through. So in general, especially with rough textured wings, we want to draw the light areas towards the center of the wing and the darker areas towards the the outside of each wing section basically near the the bony finger. Tarsal, metatarsal, it probably has a name. I don't know what it is, but you can see how I'm lightening up the middle only covering less and less each time again. If because this is a lighter color, if I didn't have the airbrush, this wouldn't really be a problem. I would just do it again with a big fat brush and wet blend this all right and I'd work on one wing section at a time. So all of this is doable without the airbrush. But I mean, look, the airbrush makes this faster. I'm not going to lie. This whole monster probably took me two hours all in, which is not bad at all for something of this size. And at the end, I mean, I'll let you be the judge of whether or not you think it was a good two hours spent, but I'm pretty happy with how he came out. He certainly seems ready to smash and or bash as would be necessary in that particular situation. The other thing I'll say is that because we're going to use streaking grime later in this video, I'm over highlighting everything. You notice that oftentimes I put in a little white and I've kind of brought things to a very high highlight when you're going to use something like streaking grime. You want to make sure that it's over highlighted. Now before I use that grime, I'm going to varnish it and that's my mix of satin and ultra matte varnish. One drop of satin to three drops of ultra matte. That just makes it. So when I rub later to get the grime off, it's going to be easier. Now here I am using AK Interactive Starship grime, which I quite like. It has a slight green tone to it. It's slightly different than the normal streaking grime. It's a little more green black brown, but you can use any sort of enameled grime. And I'm just literally coating the model. Now you'll notice when I shoot the belly, as you'll see here in a minute, I don't get the entire belly. I actually just leave some of the high high points clear because I'm going to wipe the paint off. Anyways, there's no reason to get it in there and it doesn't have a fine texture like the top scales do where I want those deep textures to absorb some of this grime. So there I just kind of shoot the low points and call it a day. Final note, where a full mask streaking grime enamel paints are very toxic. Please, please, please, please use proper safety protocols when shooting this stuff. Once it looks dry to the touch, we're ready to remove it for there. We're going to use makeup sponges. I have two different sizes, both these little tiny ones that that come on, I don't know the equivalent of like Q-tips. You can order them in bulk from Amazon or eBay or such and we're going to use white spirits. White spirits are our magic secret. So we have the makeup sponge and to begin with, I actually don't put very much white spirits at all in there. I put two drops of white spirit in that whole sponge, squeeze it in and then still use the opposite side because I want the hint of white spirits. White spirits are really powerful. So you just barely put it on there. Now this guy is rough as all get out and he's going to tear up your makeup sponges. A lot of monsters are like this if they have a lot of like rough texture. That's why I buy these big bags of cheap makeup sponges. You can usually get them in bags of 100 or 200 for, I don't know, eight or nine, $10 or something like that. I mean, they're a good deal because they're meant to be sort of this disposable resource and they're not really meant for the hobby. So they're not marked up in price. Anytime you can buy something from other fields and then repurpose it for the hobby, it'll generally be cheaper. But you'll see how I'm just wiping mostly in a vertical motion because I want the streaks left if there's any at all to be sort of vertical up and down to create sort of that movement to it. But I'm just going all over him and really trying to get that off there. The grime is going to come off but you see how much that darkness is left in the recesses. All of those scales are instantly done but I have no staining, no tide marks, no nothing like that. I don't have to re-highlight him and I can just slowly peel it away. Now I'm going to use the smaller one and get again one drop of, sorry, I bumped the desk there real hard, one drop of white spirits and only on one side. So I'll use the wet side to create the initial wipe away and to leave a little bit of spirit there. Then I flip it over to the dry side and I wipe down. That will simply smooth the edge of where I've wiped into the rest of the streaking grime. There's a real magic to this technique with these little Q-tip makeup brushes. You have one wet side, you create the wet area that cleans it and then you flip it and you feather the grime out on the dry side into the other areas and then you repeat. Don't try to overuse a makeup sponge. Once it's covered in gross black grime, set it to the side. You will go through a fair number of these, but I mean like this guy as a whole, I think I used five makeup sponges and about a dozen of these little Q-tips. So not too bad really. But you can see how once he's all cleaned, we've just added more wonderful color and tone and texture to him. So now it's just finishing the details. Many monsters have a sort of primary element. Their scales, their skin, that you know, things like that. If you look at again, the new Stormcast dragons, they're mostly one thing. Scales, skin, whatever you want to say, right? Same with this guy, same with a lot of monsters, the Seraphon monsters again being a good example, right? The big mega-gargants mostly flesh and so on and so forth. But what makes all of your work and tonal variation and contrast in the color pop is when you also get those other details popping. So this is the longest step I did, which was going through and just drawn those thin lines on all of the bones. But look at how much more the green contrasts now that there's the white to make it stand out. Now this is a fun step and on all my orky things, I always use this Orkish Dermis from Scale 75. It's this beautiful pink color. It goes on really bright pink, but then it actually dulls as it dries. It gets quite dull once it's dry. I really love it. And it adds a little bit of pink color into the green. One, that makes it seem like there's blood under the skin. Two, that makes the thing feel more alive because we as humans recognize living things as having these pink tones. And three, it adds this wonderful value in contrast, right? Of a slightly different color. And I'm focusing mainly on the face because now there's an interesting red-ish color on the face. Human eyes naturally track toward red. And so by adding those slight pink tones to the face, we highlight the most important part of the face and draw the attention there. Making it seem, again, like we're really doing a better paint job than we are because people will just look at the face and then the rest just becomes kind of the high contrast work that we've done. Things like these straps I'm not going to spend as much time on, right? Because they're not as important. They do break up the skin, which is a cool look. Any little elements that break up big, flat, samey areas are good. We already did a lot of high contrast work, but these things help us go farther. But I'm just going to give them a nice coat of Rhinox hide to get them a different color. And then I take a little bit of that deck tan that I've been using for the bone that was still on my palette and just kind of give the the each strap a little bit of a fast edge highlight. And you'll notice how on the top I'm doing kind of a stabby-gabby line and then on the bottom I'm just stippling just to create some visual interest. I would consider this an optional step. It would have looked fine without this is my honest answer. But, you know, we got to try a little hard, right? I mean, it's fun. And by the way, that probably took five minutes. So it's not that big of a thing. Next thing, because I just drew a bunch of straight lines on the bones, I do want to create just a little bit of more smoothness of that, a little bit of a transition. So I grab my old friend Agrax Earthshade. I'm just loading up a brush and I'm just pulling it down to the bottom on everyone. Quick touch of the Agrax to every little bone again, not too long. Now the metals. All right. So this is a complicated recipe, but this is how I do my copper. Three drops of copper, one drop of gold, and then one one hundred and twenty-eighth of a teaspoon of pigment and then two drops of flow improver. Yes, I know. If you watched the previous video on painting the army that this guy belongs to in a week, you'll be familiar with this recipe, but I did want to restate it here because it is a very complicated recipe. But to me, it just creates a copper I really, really love. You do have to mix this extremely thoroughly. Anytime you're working with the pigment by putting it into normal paint, you need to really mix it because that pigment has to be moved around there. But this creates such a wonderful, nice, rich copper tone that covers in one easy pass. It's still highly liquid. It's super shiny. I just really love the recipe. I don't generally believe in recipes, but with metals, it's kind of a thing. Now we're just going to add a little bit of quick variation in a sort of non-metallic style. So where there would be shadow, I'm taking some of that brown ink, dropping a little on and then feathering it out. Then we're just adding some silver highlights. I'm using pale metal to just quickly create some scratches, edge highlights, stuff like that. Again, you want that stuff to be varied. Even though we're going to weather the copper here in a moment, it's still metal. It would still reflect light. The last step is some nilic oxide, which you see me get to here in a moment. But you can see that guy's done. That's it. Right. Like I said, this whole thing maybe took me two, two and a half hours. And I think you look pretty cool. I'll let you judge for yourself. But this was a combination of a lot of simple techniques, glazes, whether through the airbrush or through a traditional brush, dry brushing, stuff like that. So if you liked this, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. There's some images here for you to look at of the finished guy. I do hope you enjoyed this and I hope this helps you lose the fear of painting your big monsters and helps you to get those big gribblies on the table. If you've got any questions, drop those down in the comments below. I always answer every comment that's left on my videos. But as always, I thank you very much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.