 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today it's time for another in the Exploring Colors series. Today, it's time to talk about gray. Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci Vee. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci Vee's time. Now, gray might seem like one of the most boring colors to talk about. It generally is the equivalent of saying something is bland, something is uninteresting, or something is sad. A gray sky, a gray day, thick fog rolling in, all of it forbodes sadness and ennui. And so it's easy to sort of associate this color with depression and with general lack of visual interest. But I hope today to show you how gray can actually be a really interesting and versatile color in your miniature painting. So let's head over to the desk and take a look at just what it means to paint something gray. Alright, let's talk about gray. So when we normally think about gray, we think about something in this range of colors. The simplest explanation for gray, of course, and we're all familiar, is just some equal part mixing, or roughly equal part, or something like that. Some combination of black and white. And of course, as you can see here, depending on the exact percentages in the mix, we can run quite a gamut and still end up with something we think of as gray. Now gray itself has an interesting history. It first appears in the English language more than 1300 years ago. It was basically the color of sort of undyed wool. So it ends up being something that a lot of people wear because most people's clothing was made of wool and most people couldn't afford dyes. So it just ends up becoming sort of the color of most people's clothes. As we move forward in time, it actually elevates and becomes a much more exotic color. It ends up being this sort of color of royalty and luxury and the rich becoming very fashionable. It ends up becoming the color of a lot of people's military uniforms. Animals and birds and nature gray exists all over the place. There's tons of gray in nature amongst both mammals and birds and everything else because it's a very natural camouflage. Same reason it was used for military uniforms. But of course, gray for most people is not their favorite color. In fact, in surveys, it often gets named as people's least favorite colors. Not only do not a lot of people like it, but they actively dislike it. And in general, gray is something we all try to avoid in our daily life for feeling gray. We don't like to be sad. People often go to great lengths to avoid gray hair or remove gray hair. It makes you feel old, that kind of thing. But gray and painting is pretty fantastic because even though the easiest mix of it is between just making black and white, of course, we know that there are other variations. So for example, we have something like Payne's gray down here, which is a very cold blue influenced gray. We can also have very warm influenced grays. So reddish gray up here from AK or some Sinai gray from Vallejo. Both of these are still certainly within the gray spectrum. But because of the additions of reds, yellows or oranges, they go very warm. So we can add colors to make the gray appear very warm. We can also add colors to make the gray appear very blue. And in fact, in a lot of the way we see gray now, which is digitally, like you're looking at this right now and there's nothing that's rendering pigments on your computer screen. Your computer screen is using, you know, tiny different little dots of actual colors to render this gray color in front of you. And it's doing that by putting together either RGB or the CMYK at sort of full mixes and then playing around with the intensity to lower how it renders that gray. So you can get two colored grays by mixing those colors together in the same way that you can with paints. And in fact, in the history of painting, quite a lot of artists don't use traditional grays by just mixing black and white. So people like Rembrandt often experimented with colored grays. Here you can see a picture on the screen where he layered a lot of colors on top of each other to make something look gray. At the same time, there's been plenty of more recent artists. So people like Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, I hope I'm not mispronouncing that, but I probably am. It was very famous for using a lot of gray in their work. Here's a couple of paintings from them. So you can see how gray is used and often influenced with color to actually then make the piece feel both more realistic, more desaturated, but also to control the tones. So let's actually go ahead and let's look at a miniature and let's make this real. Let's actually get some painting with some of our gray. Now here we have a black primed miniature and already it's going to read gray to your eyes because it's interacting with the white light that's up above it. And that's an important point. When black is very matte as this primer is and the light is being very diffuse and how it bounces off of the surface, it will appear much more gray. Now let's just go ahead and tackle this as though it were pretty standard gray. And that is to say here I'm using the mid-tone graphite from AK. This is a pretty neutral tone gray, what we generally think of when we say gray. That's fine. And we can see, yeah, okay, that looks like gray. No issue. Now the easy and way I think a lot of people start to think about it is, all right, well, if I've got that gray, I'll highlight it with a slightly lighter gray. So here we're going to go to something like Dectan. We'll mix those a little. And we'll shade it down with something that's dark gray. So here we're going to literally go to dark gray from Vallejo. You can see there's not actually that much of a difference between how the primer reflects and how something called dark gray looks. And that's pretty standard. The problem with painting in this way, just in these sort of standard neutral tones, these neutral grays, is that it's kind of boredom in a bottle. What I mean by that is the use of just everything being in the gray spectrum is in fact pretty visually boring. There isn't enough information being communicated to your eye visually. Your eye tends to prefer hues, colors, something on the color wheel. And as a result of that, when it just sees all of these sort of straight, very neutral tones with just black and white, it ends up being quite boring by comparison. It doesn't really grab you. However, it can still be useful. If you have a very colorful piece, working in some areas in this much more neutral tone gray can be a powerful tool to help control where the eye goes. Because the gray is so naturally boring, the viewer's eyes will not tend to rest on those areas. And so instead, you can direct them around by interspersing quite highly saturated colors with extremely neutral tones of gray. In fact, let's take a look at Will Hahn's piece, one of my favorite he's ever done. I'll put that up on screen right now and you can see really there's most of this piece is gray. However, what you're looking at right now is the red. That red gets your attention so strong. And that's because it's set against all of that neutral gray. There's nowhere else for your eye to go. The skin, the marble, everything is appearing as very neutral and your eye is just snapped like a magnet to that red. Now, let's talk about how we can make this a little more interesting in our own painting. Okay, when we're talking about making gray more interesting, we have to start with the color wheel. Oh no, it's okay. Don't be afraid. When we look at the color wheel, you can see how the closer we travel toward the center, increasing the tint, the inclusion of effectively white or gray, you actually get gray versions of all of the different colors. So you can very much work in grayed out tones of any of the existing colors. And it becomes a way to control, to desaturate, and to utilize hues without actually making them overwhelming to your piece. Bright, intense, saturated colors can become sort of a clown fiesta very quickly. But when they're this desaturated and this infused with grays, this piece will still read quite neutral but yet have a lot more visual interest just because of the color. Let's make that real and see how that looks on a miniature. So here I have another of our little Skaven friends, and this time he's been base coated completely in just our flat, neutral, boring, sad gray. But instead of going up into just basically more white infused gray for the highlights and more black infused gray for the shadows, let's use some colors. So instead here, we're going to mix in some actual yellow into it. So we're just putting in a traditional yellow ochre in there, along with still just a touch of the white to lighten it up, but to get something very warm. When we do that, what we'll get is a color that has a lot more visual interest to it. So we can see as we get this color on there, you can still feel the yellow infusion. It's still there certainly. But it's so much, it's so desaturated, you'd never mistake that as reading for yellow, right? If we put that up against a real saturated yellow, of course it would look quite pale, quite gray, quite desaturated by comparison. And of course that's what allows us to then create a little more visual interest in the model. So we can still use our regular colors, and I could do this with anything. Some of these are premixed, sometimes you can find paints that already have these other colors in them. I showed reddish gray earlier, right? But now all of a sudden this guy feels like he's in a little bit more of a warm environment or something like that. And we can of course just smooth that right out and get to a color that's still visually compelling, but still feels naturally aligned with the gray, more like he's in maybe a sunny environment or something like that. In the exact same way, when we're dealing with our shadows, this is why Payne's gray is so popular and ends up showing up in almost every miniature that I paint. Because Payne's gray involves those natural, wonderful blue tones and just gets things a lot more visually interesting while still being quite a natural shadow. So here, if we take that, and we just infuse a little bit of that Payne's gray in there, this isn't going to be the smoothest paint job in history, but that's okay. No big deal. Then you can see how we get a much more natural looking shadow while still actually providing a lot more interest to the overall color. The blue standing out and feeling like quite a natural shadow against that yellow highlight. So by infusing colors, and here I'm, you know, one of these is a straight paint, this is just Payne's gray out of the bottle. One of these is me mixing a yellow in. There's no single right way to do it. If you feel comfortable mixing paints, go ahead and get amongst it, get, you know, mix those paints. You can just put them into your grays, make warm grays, make cold grays. Never trust what's actually on the bottle, by the way, because you'll oftentimes see things labeled as warm gray or cold gray or something like that, and oftentimes that will be very wrong. I don't know why it is that people can't label their grays correctly, but for some reason they can't. So we could continue just highlighting and shading this guy up using our yellow infused and blue infused gray, and we get something that's a little more visually compelling and interesting because of the addition of the colors. When we compare these two next to each other, you can see how this one feels almost like a black and white sketch, like it's on an old black and white TV. Nothing really going on that draws the eye, whereas here we have a lot more color and visual interest. Now of course I'm going pretty extreme to make this show up on video and explain what's going on, but you can be a lot more subtle with it. You don't have to have hugely influenced tones. You don't just because you want to have something that's cold doesn't mean that you have to suddenly put, you know, this strong shock of blue in there. Very minimal infusions of those colors will have a huge effect on the overall feeling, ambiance, and environment of the piece. So always feel like you can experiment, push your colors around, and get to somewhere that's pretty cool and fun and interesting. So there you go, that's grays. Let's go back to me and we'll wrap this all up. So there you go. As you can see, gray is actually pretty versatile because gray is just a high tint version of basically every color. There's lots of ways for you to incorporate gray to use it as both a balancing tone, a neutral agent, and an otherwise colorful paint job to control it, or as ways to work in very subtle, highly desaturated versions of other colors to make your overall paint job more interesting and actually elevate the visual interest and the amount of hues there. That's pretty versatile for our old, friendly, boring, sad gray. If you liked this, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. Remember, we have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got any questions, drop those down in the comments. I always answer every question. 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