 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and you know recently I started working on my Radcast if you've watched the channel you know that I've done a few videos on them and As I was painting through them it came time to eventually decide on bases Now I really take basing seriously. I think that providing a cool-looking and interesting base Sets your miniatures within a world. It turns them from toys into something that has a life and an existence Beyond the tabletop so to me having a base that conveys the Geography the environment the place that they live is really important now I knew my force lived in Haish which in Age of Sigmar is basically the plane of light and Admittedly pictures on this were pretty scant I looked around through the books. I looked online There just weren't that many images of what Haish looked like it seemed to be there was a lot of deserts Floating rocks and crystals Well two out of three ain't bad So today we're gonna talk about crystals how you paint them and you'll see how they look on my army The strict techno man sir that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style I think crystals are a really fun thing to paint Because it's a pretty simple effect now. They are also often time consuming So just to warn you in advance depending on how many of these crystals you're going to do Well prepare to be stuck in it for a while I'm going to use the color blue today as we get into this But you can apply the same basic lessons to anything and any type of crystal any color that you would want So let's get into it So right away from the paint list you probably saw that this is a very very simple Effect and we're gonna start actually over here in my little image check out my awesome graphical skills The key is dark to light crystals are translucent So actually they become darker toward the top because light passes through the crystal and gathers near the bottom The upward-facing angles of crystals whatever is directly facing the light will be the light facet It's going to be very very reflective. It needs to be opposed by a shadow to mid The last and most important component is white edges because that's where the glimpse the light is going to collect Around the edges of this gem and it'll give it its characteristic crystal look So let's translate that now into reality I'm going to start and whenever you're doing crystals you want to just generally start with the lightest sort of color that you're going to want not white color the lightest hue so in this case I have my Blue-green mixed with a lot of white Once you've got those all base coated then you want to start sketching in your shadows And I found it's easiest to just start with the darkest shadows And you notice how I'm always pushing the shadows up toward the top of the crystal um And on the facets that face away from the light In other words the facets facing downward I also then put some shadow up top to get that shadow to mid transition Now here I'm working relatively thin. It kind of depends on how much time you want to spend on this You want to use about a layer type paint Um, you can do this all through glazes If you feel like you want to take a long time as a point of fact if I was doing something for competition I would do this completely through lots and lots of glazes But I have a lot of these to paint as you can see this is just one base amongst many So yeah, we got to get into it And the key is I'm just making sure every facet You got to work your way all the way around and every facet on the vertical part of it the shaft part of it as it were Has the darkest up toward the top Now I'm using a mix of the blue green And the uh dark sea blue To like that initial one was just dark sea blue by the way I'm using a mix of blue green and dark sea blue to then Uh blend that transition in between the two I'm also hitting other facets that aren't facing directly toward the light Uh to make sure that they have a little bit of color in the top You'll notice the key here is unlike how we normally think about these things The shadows always go toward the top So the top of the item is the darkest part so you can see how on the facets I'll push the shade up toward the top I want to take a quick moment to talk about brush control and movement When I'm doing this you'll note that I'm usually pushing up Right like my brush is usually pushing up And the wherever possible some of these little crystals are almost too small to do it but I'm pushing up with most of my paint strokes because I want the paint to Push into the area of shadow And so that way the most paint is deposited in that area And the end transition down by the lighter part remains the thinnest Again, all of these are about the same consistency paints. It's all basically a thin layer type consistency Now on the biggest crystals. I take some of a slightly lighter blue white basically my original base coat Or something pretty close to it and I just go ahead and reinforce those Now comes the first glazing you got to smooth this out. You'll have four rough layer transitions So you grab the darker color not as dark not my initial dark sea blue But something like a glaze of the dark sea blue plus the blue green and I just glaze over all of it Work my way around every facet and do one two Three glazes as many as you think is necessary based on how smooth you want this to be Okay, so now comes the time consuming part which is the edge highlighting Dun dun dun But don't worry you can do it Crystals are actually a great way to practice your edge highlighting because things shaped like this often have very pronounced edges And because they're usually exposed You can use the side of your brush and it's a great way to practice The appropriate amount of brush control and brush pressure to get your edge highlighting in place For this i'm just using pure Titanium white. I'm using a heavy body acrylic, but you can use any white paint. It's nothing magical I just H heavy body acrylics are are really great white and I would recommend everybody pick up a heavy body acrylic white But if you don't have those any white paint or white ink will work And i'm just catching every single edge all the way around Now we need to talk about the facets So remember the facets that face toward the light are going to be very bright Because they are a flat plane That is hitting the light and because we're painting specular highlights That is to say it's highlighted as though we the viewer are looking at something a real light situation That face that facet of the quartz crystal would appear Very bright to us very white It's like when you look at a car and you see that bright reflection along a polished car's hood Right, but if you move the reflection moves with you So all those light facing highlights. I'm going ahead and Putting that bright white on now. What happens if you make a mistake when edge highlighting? We all make them Oops, there we go. Look. I fat fingered an edge No problem. Take your original darker color So in this case i'm taking a little bit of the dark sea blue plus blue green mix and i'm very carefully Just smoothing out the edge line and you notice how i'm Working from the safe part out and you can work yourself to a nice thin line As a point of fact i end up doing that on a lot of this just to make sure all the edges are clean It's a it's a good final step to do my last step here for the this kind of for the for getting down sort of the base tones is I am reinforcing the white and i'm doing that with a little white heavy body acrylic plus gloss varnish Why gloss varnish because gloss varnish reflects white and white paint reflects white when you mix the two together What you get is an extremely bright reflective white You don't gloss varnish the whole gem Because you are controlling the light you gloss varnish just in the white So that that way It reflects a lot of light This is me just continuing to clean up other edges. You can see i'm using the exact same technique Just making sure that all my finished crystals now are looking nice and smooth And that's how they come out when you're all done It's a nice look in effect It's simple. It's just a matter of those colors One final thing if you really want to push it as you apply all these other colors and glazes You may have some of your edge highlights dull The white paint won't be very strong. So go back over and do one more pass with your edge highlights And now here we go. Here's all the finished crystals across the army I'm really happy with how these came out. I'm sure you can see that some of my blends aren't as smooth as they could be That's fine such as life when you look at them in the aggregate. You won't notice the individual Issues you'll only see the overall effect So there you go Give that a like if you liked that if you've got any questions drop them down in the comments below I always answer every question subscribe if you haven't already We have new videos here every saturday, but I really hope you did enjoy this one and as always We'll see you next time