 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video, and today we're going to help you achieve those creamy, smooth, perfect blends, even with acrylic paint and importantly, no airbrush. Let's get into it. The strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci V style. Before we head over to the desk, I think it's important to talk about why blending is so hard. And that's really simple. Most of us are painting our miniatures with acrylic paint. Acrylic paint was not made to blend. It's bad at it. It's using a hammer to put a screw in the wall. It's actually terrible at that thing. Acrylic paint was designed for a very simple purpose. It was meant to dry quickly and it was meant to be highly durable. Those are two important things when we're painting miniatures. But because of its very solid crystal lattice medium and because it dries so fast, that makes it actually pretty poor at blending. If you've ever painted with oil paints, you know that a video of how to get smooth blends with oil paints would be completely insane because you just do it. You just put one oil paint down then another and then you just work them together and they blend. Everything's wet blending. It's completely ridiculous and easy. You can feather it. You can wet blend it. You can do any of that stuff. That's just how oil paints work. With acrylic paints though, because they dry so quickly, we have to figure out lots of alternative techniques. So in this video, I'm going to take you through many of those different techniques. What I think works the best, when to use them and so on and to help you get those smooth blends because it is something that with acrylic paints is harder and takes longer and really can often be quite a lot of effort. But as always, we're going to show the cheats and the shortcuts wherever we can to make this process easy. So let's head over to the desk. Let's take a visit with our old friend Larry the Ogre and see what we can do. All right, let's just start with some paints we're going to use. We're going to do some skin tone on Larry the Ogre. We're going to keep it nice and simple, but I want to run a wide variety of colors here. So we're starting from something low and dark like Bugman's Glow, which is what he's going to be base coated in when we flip over. We're going to end up in dark ivory, a pretty close approximation of white. So we're going to make it hard on ourselves. The first and easiest way we can combat the nature of acrylic paint where it doesn't want to blend is to treat it more like an oil paint and work quick. We grab a bigger brush. We work thick like I didn't thin this paint at all. You can see it straight out on the wet palette. I have no other random moisture in my brush and you just grab two different colors of paints like this, the key is apply thick, use a big brush, and then you're just going to mix them together aggressively. The idea here is pretty straightforward. What we want to do is start working these wet paints into each other. This is basically trying to solve the problem with acrylic paints, that they dry too quickly. When we work thick, our drying time extends considerably and when we work wet, we can now efficiently and effectively mix them together. You'll notice how I'm frequently wiping my brush over on the paper towel. So I usually keep a moist paper towel beside me and what I'm doing here is just working it back and forth and making sure that those colors are blending into each other smoothly. With wet blending, one thing I'll say is this is always your first step. It's never your final step. That's what I mean to say. I apologize. What I mean by that is no matter even though you're working these paints wet and you're bringing them all together, you're still not going to get the blends perfectly smooth. There will be rough spots, there will be places where it doesn't quite work as well as you want. This is a very organic process. It happens very randomly and you can work as you see here, I've added more colors in and I'm continuing to work them all together. There is however, not only will it not be perfect and that's fine, you can smooth it out with later layers, more wet blends on top glazes, you can see there how it dried. But in addition, the issue with it is that you're going to run out of working time eventually. You only have so long with acrylic paints. Generally, that's why you want to work with the big brush. You want to work thick. That's the maximum possible time but it's not the most. Our next option is feathering. Here we apply again to a relatively small area a thick amount of paint and then we take a brush, we void out the brush and then from the edge of that paint, we just kind of basically rough it in. We take it with that dry brush and we just place it. You can see how I'm putting it on there and then I take it and with no paint on the brush, smooth and thin it out. You can give it like you're spreading the rest of that butter across the edge of that toast. You don't have much butter left but you want to get it covering all of that slice of toast. You're just going to work it and work it and work it and work it until basically it sort of becomes thin enough and transparent enough that it smooths in. Now you notice the first time I did it, I did it with a relatively small brush. The problem with that and with a sable brush is that it's rather soft and it's kind of hard to smooth it all out. Using a synthetic brush can actually often have some better results. You'll also damage your expensive brush a lot less when you do this. But each time after I apply that thick dollop of paint, I'm then just working it. The problem with this, the sort of danger to this one is that you either overwork the paint, damage some of your work underneath, or create little gaps in the paint where it doesn't smoothly go over everything. Once that happens, again just later glazes or more layers can happen. Now let's talk loaded brush. I started with the thin paint, the thin very wet paint filling my brush and then on just the tip of the brush, I put a thick lighter color. You can also do a thick darker color but then you've got to work up from the shadows instead of down into the midtones. So my belly of my brush is full of the midtone. As I then push it across the model, what happens is it naturally starts mixing and creates a smooth gradient. This is effectively wet blending in the brush. The advantage here is you can use this a lot better in a smaller area but it's a lot harder to execute. This one takes a lot of practice. I wanted to zoom in here because you can see how over all the layers my blends aren't perfect. In the wet blends, with the different feathering, with the loaded brush, none of these are perfect because the end of every road is going to be glazes. None of these methods are going to be perfect after one application. That's an important thing to remember. I think a lot of times when people try to achieve smooth blends with acrylic paints, they think, oh, all I need is the perfect way to layer or the perfect way to do some loaded brush and it will always just magically create this wonderfully perfect transition. The reality is that's not how this works. When you are working with acrylic paints, there simply will need to be multiple applications. There are going to be steps that take you back and forth and have you apply the same paints over and over again. If you truly want to achieve perfectly smooth blends with acrylic paints without using an airbrush or something similar, then the road is lots of time and back and forth and back and forth, applying either the same technique or integrating these techniques together. You can, as I said, whether feathering or wet brush, whether you're wet blending or whether you're loaded brush blending or any of these things you saw me do here, none of them came out perfect and now we're going to work really close to the miniature. I want to show you all of my sins. And the end of most roads, when it comes to acrylic painting and achieving smooth blends, is usually glazes, whether a sort of micro glaze and small or larger glazes like you see here. And what I've done is I've thinned down a little mix of my shade colors and you can see I'm pulling the glazes toward the shadow color. Working over top, wherever that layer line is showing, wherever the blend isn't smooth, I bring in the glaze. I apply it, sweep it around, pull it towards there and then let it dry. And that is one of the keys. When you apply a glaze like this, you put it on there and then you let it sit. Like right there, I went back when I shouldn't have and you can see I tore a little paint up over that highlight. Glazes will never greatly shift the color. They are meant to be a filter. They are meant to let some of the colors from underneath work and you can combine these techniques in pretty good ways. For example, you can glaze and then as you see me doing here, you can then feather. So I will create the glaze over the actual transition line but now I've moved a new transition line up above wherever my brush stopped. I can then void that brush out by wiping it on a wet paper towel or similar and then smooth the now recreated edge while it's still wet like that up into that brighter area. So a lot of this as I mentioned is just going to be back and forth and back and forth. Glazing lighter colors is something a lot of people often find challenging. The key with glazing lighter colors is to not try to glaze pure white but instead integrate other tones. For example, here I'm using my bright skin tone plus a little of that dark ivory. And again, you'll notice in this case I'm glazing up toward the highlight. Always glaze in the direction of the nearest color to your brush where when you leave that drop of paint at the end, it's going to have the least effect. All right, but we still aren't smooth. So let's talk about the final easy tricks and that is number one, mid-tone saturation. Here I've thinned out some of the mid-tone skin color. This is a mix of cork and that warm flesh and I've thinned it way down into a glaze and I'm just going to pull it towards the shadow color covering over the areas that aren't smooth. By recreating that intense saturation, not only does it make the miniature feel more alive and more real and more credible, not only will it improve your overall painting, but that extra thin layer of mid-tone will also hide a lot of those layer lines very easily. So after you've glazed down into the shadows and up into the highlights, the mid-tone glaze is a good way to bring it all together. The other trick you can do is what we'll call an interference color. Here, what you're doing is you're grabbing some other color that you haven't used. I'm using just a simple, very light red color here, you know, kind of red ink or purple ink or something like that would work and I am sweeping it from the mid-tone down into the shadows. When you introduce this new color, you will need to feather the edge as you saw me doing earlier, but the addition of a new color, an interference color that wasn't in your scheme before that works with the overall scheme, especially skin with red, can again really help hide those sins and smooth out the overall blends in a really powerful way. So this gives a great way to integrate inks or something similar, contrast, thin contrast paint into the last steps of your process for ultimate smoothness. There we go, Larry's all set up or at least his skin there is on that side. I hope this was helpful to you. If it was, do please give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. Don't forget, we've got new videos here for everything you'd wanna know every Saturday. If you've got any questions, you can drop those down in the comments below. I always answer every question asked. If you wanna support the channel, there's a couple ways you can do so. Myself and Uncle Adam from Tabletop Minions, we publish games under Snarling Badger Studios. You can find all of our games linked down below. Those are really fun miniature skirmish war games. If you wanna support this channel directly, there's also a Patreon link 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.