 Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to talk all about Vampire Skin. That's right, it's time to join the creatures of the night. 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. Alright folks, let's get into it. So, Vampire Skin. Vampire Skin is obviously extremely pale, and so when we think of something like a Caucasian skin tone, what we're going to do to get Vampire Skin is we're going to have a lot of the same tones in play, but we're going to subtract the orange. So over a zenithal highlight, I want to set up some deep purple tones. Purple is a big part of vampiric skin, but I want that only in the deepest areas. So I have very much thinned down this Gucci violet here, and we're just going to run this over the whole model, and you notice how we're applying the wash. We're moving our brush around. We're making sure nothing's pooling. Even though this is the very first layer, I still don't want it to pool everywhere and make a big mess and make it hard for me to clean up. So my brush is constantly sweeping around the miniature very quickly, spreading out all those pools. I just want a thin tint of everything. And this is to set a little bit of warmth down in the lower areas of our tone. We want it to be warm in the shadows because it's going to be cold in the highlights. Now for this paint job, I've decided to employ some sketch style because we're going to sketch out the individual lights, and I'm actually jumping to the highest highlight, to the titanium white, and I'm just going to place the highlights exactly where I think they need to fall. This is a very expressive sculpt. Radicar has a wonderful face. He's got a lot of movement and dynamism. It's a really, really, really wonderful sculpt. And so I want to make sure I'm picking out all of these volumes and really paying attention to them in the right way. So I start at the highest highlight. Now I don't expect this white to actually last. We're going to cover it a lot, wheel it back, stuff like that. But I'm placing those highlights first. This is a good trick if you're just starting out and you're not sure about how to place highlights. Sketch them out first. Don't worry about it looking rough or bad. It's fine. By placing these highlights in as your step one, you'll really get an immediate sense of the contrast of value that you're laying down on the whole miniature and where the light is falling. So that's why I'm doing that here. My goal is to set down all of these individual highlights, all the areas where I think there's going to be light. Please note I'm not painting the areas I think they'll end up white with this white color. No, no. We're overpainting, covering more area where we think we're going to want any amount of light. All right. Next up, we're going to apply a little bit of what will effectively be our sort of high mid-tone. We're going to take some of this bright warm gray, which is funny because it's already actually a pretty cold gray. But I'm going to mix in just a tiny amount of blue green from Vallejo. And the reason I'm doing that is to just make this even colder, make it feel more like moonlight. There are some people who've asked me in the past about how to paint moonlight figures. Adding these kinds of soft blue tones into everything and warming up your shadows is really one of the key elements to that, the other being to desaturate all the colors. But that's a future video. Now what I'm going to do with this bright warm gray blue green that it's become is I'm going to start bridging the gaps. This is going to be my next step down. So I'll overlap some of my previous white and then I'll also overlap into the areas that are just more still the original zenithal or have more purple tone to them or whatever. Effectively, my mid-tone areas. This is step two of my sketch and setting what will effectively be the middle parts of my light structure. Now again, not everything I paint here will necessarily stay this color as we go. I'm building from the highlights down instead of from the shadows up. And what that means is that we have to cover more than we think. This is the hardest thing to do when you start with this style. You try to put everything only where it's going to go, not realizing you're going to cover other things with shadows later. Paint more than you think you need to with these. And then you're going to wheel back those colors through the later layers of your sketch. Here would be one of my basically one of my low tones, which is this sort of purplish color plus again a little blue-green. Still keeping that deeper darker purple in the deepest recesses, but now I'm going to go ahead and lay this in and start laying down the next level of my sketch, which is my skin shadows. On say traditional Caucasian skin, this might be where my red-brown sort of warm tones would end up to add life and color, maybe even some purples. But here on this guy, we need to drain the life out of it. The key with vampiric skin is it's much like a sort of Caucasian skin tone, but with all of the orange subtracted out. Most skin tones, but especially Caucasian skin tone are very influenced by the color orange. We've got to subtract all orange out of there because orange is the sun, its life, its heat. So that's what we're removing to get this extremely pale color. Now with that pure brain-eater-azure, that pure purple color, I set the absolute deepest shadows of the miniature, paying a lot more attention to the lower areas where the shadows will be deeper because of his legs. Okay, so I'm going to jump in here real quick just to say, look, I know this looks like crap right now, and that's okay. As I mentioned, we're going with a sketch style on this, and that's because with something like vampiric skin, it's really important to get the various tones correct. You notice I'm playing with these whites, these blues, these blue greens, and down into these purple shadows. And I want to set those in place all around the miniature before I worry really about what's smooth. And this is an important thing. Oftentimes, miniatures can have an ugly face. That's okay. It doesn't matter. You can smooth all that out. But if your contrast is right and your value variation, your value contrast, the variance of hues and tones is right, then you're in a good place. It's just refinement from there. So let's get refining. All right, so yes, it is time to refine. And our first step in the refining journey off of a sketch style is half steps. So here I'm going to work from the darkest back up to the top. Then we're going to go back down again with glazes. So think of this like a wave, right? We go, as we start up, we go all the way down to our darkest, then we come back up and then we're going to glaze back down again. So lots of back and forth, stacking those translucent paint layers on top of each other to add visual confusion and increase the richness of our colors and the smoothness of our blends. So here I took a little bit of my previous blue mixture, mixed it in with some of the blue, green, bright, warm gray. That's a lot of words. And we're just smoothing in the half steps between those two colors. Wherever the sketch was rough before, this is where I'm now sort of blending that together by putting a half step in there. I'm going to take the next step up, go into the warmer, sorry, up into the brighter color. It's not actually warm, it's quite a cold color. And each time I'm working a little thinner, my initial layers were pretty thick, normal layer consistency. These are slightly thinner layers. We're not down to a glaze yet, but they are thinner layers. I want them to be more translucent, to more easily blend the two steps together and show the colors underneath. A tip for when you're working with these colors, especially in this thickness, these will dry a very different color than what you paint on. When you put the wet paint on the vampire, and you're using a lot of these whites and blue greens and faded purples, all of those colors appear way brighter on initial application because of both the medium and the fact that they're very wet, and so they're reflecting a lot of white light in your room around you, and then you're going to let them dry and be like, wait, why does that not look anything like it just did? So in between your layers, as you're working, get a sense of how the color is fading, and then you can better balance all your colors out. Here I'm using a different trick. I'm integrating another color I didn't use previously, which is Miskatonic Gray. It's like a really nice, very translucent gray purple. And the reason I'm using it is because it just has this kind of flat tone. It's somewhat boring, but that's intentional. There's a lot of really rockin' colors here in this purple, blue, green, these aquas and scions and things. I need to calm that down a little. So in the very mid-tonish areas, I'm taking a thin Miskatonic Gray and just kind of running it over there. The blue, green, and these other colors, they'll still show through there, but this allows me a little bit more room to then increase the saturation as I go into the glazes. It kind of flattens everything down. So you can glaze and smooth things out with a color you haven't previously used. Like I never used that Miskatonic Gray in the previous recipe that we've built up to so far, but it was just this wonderful mid-tone that would perfectly, because it was so transparent, it would just flatten out the other colors and add a nice half step. Now moving into glaze, the highest highlights. So I worked in those whites, re-established those. Now we get into the firm glazing period. Here's where we refine, refine, refine. This is the final fine refinements. The fine refinements. Nope, just the refinements. I'm taking the deeper purple, and these are really, really thin glazes. And I'm just working them, especially into the deep shadows, kind of once again go back up again here, work through my colors. I'm using this to both smooth the layers and smooth my blends, but also to increase the visual confusion and the richness of his skin. Because that purple will show a lot of the white, and when the purple goes over the blue-green, it will look more interesting. Now I'm taking a thin glaze of this white, which once it dries will be very translucent and not so much. I'm hitting all those highlights. You just pop up the brightest highlights, and I repeat this two times. When you're working with very thin translucent whites, you're going to need to do them multiple times, work your way around the figure multiple times, because they will look way brighter, then they'll dry and look very dull. And I'm just building up that cold, white, moonlit feeling, right? Catching that full range where the vampires, where Radicar here is really in the light. Okay. And now, yet again, going back to the extremely light glazes, this is just the brain-eater azure, sort of the purple-blue. And I'm just softly glazing this into those lowest, lowest areas to create some more interesting shadows to run it over our previous times. Every time I do a glaze of these colors over the previous mixes, all the previous mixes show through just slightly. So not only does it smooth, but it increases the interest from looking at it and makes it feel more like skin. Skin regardless of the color palette has a lot of different soft, subtle transitions in it. That's true no matter what skin tone you're painting. And so these soft, subtle glazes and just stacking on top of each other are vital. All right, now we come to the secret of vampire skin. Everything I've done so far has been in these cold, cold colors, these cold purples and blue-greens and pale whites. But now we're getting out violet-red and a little bit of pink. These are very warm colors. Vampires still have blood, like that's literally their whole thing, is blood. And so we want to pop a little bit of warmth onto this model. This is our secret weapon because this is the contrast that makes everything else actually seem cold. A white dot on a white screen doesn't show, but a white dot on a black screen stands out and you can see it from across the room. Same thing here. By taking a little bit of this violet-red putting it around his eyes on his lip on the undersides of his cheeks just slightly. I kind of put this all around the miniature. This is a very thin, very light glaze of this. You don't want a lot. But by just hiding this warmth in between the fingers, up under the armor, in these deep shadows, we introduce this small element of warmth to the miniature that then makes all the cold white-grey blue-green purple transition we've created really pop. Adding this last sort of interference glaze it makes everything else stand out and seem much more vibrant. The cold white seems colder next to the warm red glaze. Integrating the ishtar pink to bring a little bit of life into the lips again as well as the sort of under the eyes. These little tiny touches of just the cracks in the lips, the bags under the eyes or around the eyes, right around the cheeks, you'll see me do some real tiny little scooches of the edge of that on the knee. Again, just fading that violent red glaze. This is still working very, very thin because I just want the filter of this color. If it's too strong it will look cartoonish and it just won't read as real. But when we have just that hint of warmth in there, that hint of blood beneath the surface, even in a monstrous vampiric creature like this, it sets off all the other colors and brings them into a feeling of reality and vibrance, and it increases their feeling of saturation even though they are all highly desaturated colors. So I'm just hiding this little violet red glaze slash red ishtar mix all around him, right? You can see right there under the bracer the warm shadow, these tiny, tiny, tiny little touches are really the key. But as you can see, the way that we worked this up was up, back and forth, back and forth, up and down. And it all started from that initial sketch by setting the lighting right away into those cold tones and then integrating that blue-green into our white. You can do a vampire that's just white gray, purple, and that's fine. It will look okay, but by integrating those soft blue-green tones, it then helps us set off later against these warm tones and just adds so much more visual interest because the hues of the color wheel, even when softly integrated into our pieces, always give them more impact than neutral tones like whites, grays, and black. Okay, so there we go. It brings us to the finished skin on Chattacar, the beast. He's ready to stalk the night and kill his prey. Although, given the size of the guy, I don't know why he's stalking around. It feels like he could just march anywhere he wants and kill people. But hey, that's not for me to decide. Chattacar does as Chattacar wants. So, with that I'll say thank you so much for watching this. Give it a like if you liked it. Subscribe for additional hobby-cheating videos in the future. If you've got any questions, drop those down below. I always answer every question down in the comments. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one. And we'll see you next time.