 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video. And today, this is part two in our beginner series. We are focusing in this video on paints, painting techniques, and basically the terms. A lot of people will use terms, words when you start painting that are very confusing. You start out, they're like, oh, just do a layer, do a glaze, do this, and what does all that mean? Well, in this video, we're going to go through all the basics. What these terms mean, how to apply them, basically how they work on a miniature, and what their purpose ultimately is. So with these basic techniques, which are really the foundation of everything, you'll be ready to go to paint your miniatures now and into the future as you continue learning. So let's get into it. All right, we are going to start out with the most basic of steps. The puns begin already. And that is base coating. So one of the terms you'll often hear is the concept of base coating. And this is effectively laying down the first layer of paint onto your miniature. It's pretty straightforward. Usually you want to work with the miniature when it's in a zenithal prime state like this. If you watch the last video, you'll see exactly how we got here as it just makes it easier to find your volumes and pick out everything on the miniature. If you can't do this, it's no problem. You can always just have a solid color. If you have spray painted with a rattle can, and let's say the figure is mostly red and you've used red to start with, well then you might be able to skip this step, which can be a nice advantage. With my base coat, I'm attempting to just turn all of the things that are at particular color that particular color. It's pretty straightforward. However, you'll notice I'm working rather thin here. I have taken the paint out of the pot and I've mixed a little bit of water in and I'm working a little bit thin. That's so I don't get any buildup of the paint that I don't add any texture or anything like that. Oftentimes, and you'll hear it repeated over and over again in this hobby, base coats are best when you apply two thin coats. Now, that's not always true, but especially when you're starting out, it's great advice. So what I'm doing here is just applying a nice thin coat of this skin color, which is Bugman's Glow, and I'm going to go back and do a second one off camera. The important part to recognize is two things. One, by doing it thin, the zenithal is still coming through a little bit. I still have lighter and darker areas of skin. This is fantastic if you're trying to paint quickly, but still want to establish contrast. If you're using a contrast paint, this can be an absolutely fantastic method. The second thing I want to point out is I've started at the innermost part of the miniature. Notice I've started with the skin. When I say innermost, I mean the deepest part of the mini. The skin sits underneath clothing, which is underneath armor. That's what I've started with. That way, when I'm moving paint around, if I happen to get paint somewhere it doesn't belong, that's okay because I'm going to paint those other areas later. So it allows me to be a little messier in these early steps. All right, so now it's time to talk about washes. I applied a few more base coats to other areas of the miniature, but we're going to talk about applying washes. So washes are something that you're going to see a lot of people talk about, especially when you're beginning miniature painting. What they help you do is add depth and recess shading to the miniature. They are not a one size fits all solution. As you continue to grow and evolve in your miniature painting, you'll probably use them less and less. But especially when you're starting out, there's a reason that they're often called liquid talent. Effectively, your miniature is going to have lots of small areas of recessed detail in between muscles and separations between different plates and armors and things like that. And you want to be able to find the different areas, define those interesting shapes and washes help you do that. In general, picking the right wash is a matter of picking sort of the thing that fits the coloration best of what you're working on. That's a simple rule of thumb. For example, here with flesh, I would use Reiklin Flesh Shade, but you can also use things like Agrax Earthshade quite universally. It'll make give your miniature a more dark and gritty and dingy feel if that's what you're going for. The key when applying these is to use a big brush, not something nice, and keep it moving around. You want to force the liquid around and into all the recesses, but you see how I keep feathering my brush over the area. I avoid any kind of pooling. I avoid any kind of the wash settling. And what that allows me to do is that paint, which has a lot of flow improvement, will then settle down into the lowest areas and create depth and contrast without too much in the way of making the miniature stained or change color. So speaking of adding depth of color and contrast and miniatures, the other option that we have is what's commonly called shading. Shading is simply applying darker colors into what would be the shadows. One of the reasons we do this on miniatures is because our miniatures are only an inch or a couple inches tall. And because they're scaled down so small, the light doesn't react with them in the same way. So we have to up the contrast to make them more readable and to reflect how light and shadow would actually work if this thing were the six or seven feet tall. It's meant to be in reality. Shading is simply taking a darker color than what your base coat was or what's often called your mid tone and pushing that color into where the shadows would naturally fall. Now part of this is just something you figure out with time, but that's also where you can use that initial sketch from the zenith highlighting to create shadows. So you see here, I'm using, I'm having a light that's coming in from sort of two o'clock or, you know, from an upper left angle from the minute away the miniature's facing. And so I'm creating shadows on the opposite side of the miniature. To do this, I'm just using a deep panes gray ink, but you can use a darker version of the same paint you're painting with. For example, if you had red, use a darker red. You can integrate browns or blacks or anything like that. It's about creating a darker color where the light is not hitting and you're placing that carefully with your brush to create the illusion of contrast, that shading. OK, so this next one, panel or black lining, you're often going to hear about more when it comes to sci-fi miniatures where it's a very essential skill. But I wanted to talk about it here because it's still important even on fantasy miniatures. You see where the area of his leather connects to his leg there that I was just highlighting. What we want to avoid is that looking too light or having not being covered in paint or they're not being the occlusion shadow of separation between those two elements. So oftentimes what I'll do is I'll take a nice, deep, deepest darkest color of my shade. Maybe it's a panes gray ink. Maybe it's a very deep, dark color of what I'm painting with in my mid-tone. Maybe it's just some nulnoil or agrax. Any of those things are fine. But I'll then trace that thin line between the two different elements, in this case the skin and his leather pants. Because by making that a nice, dark line, we create a firm separation between these two elements, the miniature looks more clean and crisp and visually appealing. It's a simple step, but an important one. Well, we can't talk about shadows forever. So now it's time to talk about highlighting. And basically when you hear the term highlighting, it's exactly a continuation of my previous discussion. We have to not just create deeper shadows for contrast on our miniatures, but we also have to create light. And again, this is because our miniatures are in a small scale, we need to overemphasize the contrast. I hear a lot of people talk about realism or something like that. This is what realism means, to push those highlights, to make the thing brighter, to increase the contrast and readability of the miniature. Effectively, this is mixing a lighter color of paint into your midtone, or just using a lighter tone itself of paint. For example, if you were talking about blue, the highlight of that would be something like light blue or sky blue. You can also integrate other colors into your midtone, white, or various light Caucasian flesh tones, or light grays, or anything like that to create your highlights. As you see here, I'm trying to create that light on the side of his helmet, so there's really strong contrast. And the face has this bright readability, so you can absolutely see where there's light to shadow. Now it looks a little rough right now, but don't worry. We'll talk later about how we handle that. So the next most important term we want to cover is layering. I've told you where to apply light, but I haven't really mentioned how we're applying light yet. So how do we do that? Well, we mainly do that through layering. And this is one of the most basic forms of applying paint. Layering is very simply taking your paint out of your dropper bottle or out of the pot, mixing in a little bit of water, so it's a little bit thinner. And layers, it flows, whatever you want to say, a little bit smoother. You'll hear lots of different words for this. And we're simply laying down a slightly thinner layer of the paint in the appropriate areas. You can do this with shading as layers. You can do highlights as layers. Layers is simply a technique where you're putting down a single layer of the paint. It's important to understand here that acrylic paint is translucent, meaning it allows light to filter through. What that means is that it's going to slightly show the layers of paint beneath it. So as I'm working here, I'm just, and layering isn't especially a great technique for building up skin highlights, but it's something here to use all over the place on cloth and skin and everything. What I'm doing is slowly integrating more and more lighter color paint and reducing the area I cover with my layer to build up a gradual highlight. Think of shingles on a roof. So the first layer I laid down was the whole muscle. The second one was about half of the muscle. The third one was maybe a quarter of the muscle, right? Each layer covering less and less, but getting brighter and brighter. And I could do the same thing with shadows, covering less each time and getting darker and darker. Layering is just using translucent paint applied slowly, carefully, and over less of the miniature each time. Now one thing to think about when we're layering here is that not all paints layer the same. This is something you often run into, especially as a new painter. When you're dealing with things like flesh tones, they have a very high natural translucency. But when you're dealing with colors that get lighter by the addition of white, such as the gray I'm working on here on the screen, you tend to get very hard lines between your layers. One of the ways you can mitigate this is by thinning the layer slightly more. So it takes a few more to build it up. You build those shingles a little more slowly and a little with a little more thin steps. But you'll find you have a much smoother application if you go maybe a little bit thinner, add a little more water, something like that. One small note I wanna make here that's great for new painters and old painters alike. When you're adding water into paint, don't immediately go from that thinned down paint to the model. You want to also then touch that wet brush to a paper towel or something similar, wick out the excess water and then touch your model. You'll have a much better result overall. Glazing, the great challenge of miniature painters everywhere, this is a skill you can work on for years because now what we're gonna discuss is how you really get the most out of your paint, achieve the smoothest blends and make everything nice and creamy and bring it all together. Glazing is the final step of almost any paint job where you're trying to really do a nice job. Glazing is nothing more than thinning paint down to such a level where it becomes highly translucent. And what you're actually showing is the color underneath as much as the color on top. In other words, you're tinting the paint more than you're looking to cover. So you saw me there, I went into that black paint, I thinned it out, I added water until I got, I tested it on the back of my hand and I did still wick off that excess liquid as I mentioned. Now I can make something even thinner. One of the tricks to understanding glazing and layering and all of this is that there's no magic recipe, right? Both of these consistencies you see on my hand are glazes because both are highly translucent and will show the color underneath. One is simply more translucent than the other. So you can mix a glaze to different consistencies, allow different amounts of the color below to show through, okay? And so when you're making a glaze, it's often a matter of what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to blend two colors together? Are you trying to have a very minimal effect? You can test and go from there. Now, the nice part is if you ever go a little too far with a glaze, of course as always, you can come back and do a layer just as I'm doing here and then re-glaze once again. You can always go back and forth. I see a lot of people when they start out painting feel like they have to do everything in one shot and look, we don't always wanna be repeating stuff but of course, if you need to, you can. Don't ever be afraid of just putting more paint on the model and doing it again. The reality is there's always more you can do because you're applying paint that's so thin that you can do layer after layer, glaze after glaze until it's somewhere that you like it. As long as you're getting that paint thin and controlling it by wicking off that excess liquid, you can do like I'm doing here with bright highlights and then glaze down to create your consistent blends. One small note, glazes work better with darker colors than with lighter because again, darker colors have less white and are hence more translucent, okay? So there you saw how I used both glazing and layering together at the same time to really push my contrast and then I can glaze back over this once again to bring it all together at the end. Let's do another glaze because I really feel like this is the most important thing I can show you and explain here I'm gonna do it with some of this magenta color. So once again, I just add in some water. You see the consistency I have there. It's very, very thin, a lot of liquid in that. Here I'm gonna touch my paper towel so you can see it in action. Notice how all that flows right out of there. This is what you wanna avoid. If you all that liquid spilled onto your miniature, it would be a very bad time indeed. As usual, I test it on the back of my hand. You can see how absolutely thin that is. You can also see how the paint builds up. See that little dot? That builds up where my brush stops. Directionality matters when you're glazing. So always make sure that you're pulling your brush and stopping the movement of the brush in the direction where you want the most paint to accumulate, okay? And again, all of this stuff is things you'll experience over time and this really just takes practice. If you wanna deep dive more on glazing, I have a video linked up above. Also, as you saw in the previous section, there was a video about achieving smooth blends. All of this eventually becomes wrote when you've done it enough and it's really just that. It's just time and practice. Glazing is the most important tool you can master in your arsenal because it allows you to really, really make your models look smooth and finished and push your colors around in great ways. So that's everything else about glazing. Remember the keys. You thin your paint down using water or something else. You wick off that excess liquid into a paper towel. You test it on something to make sure it's the consistency you want. And you can always go back and forth and put on more glazes. You're not gonna ruin anything by doing so. Take your time, repeat your steps and you'll be just fine. A final note as we finish up here. Sometimes when you're working on a model, especially when you work with a lot of glazes, you'll get a shine to your paint. And that's because when you thin paint way down, it often gets quite shiny. Some paints, especially reds, are just naturally quite shiny. And if that shine is up in the shadows, as you can see there as I'm turning it, where you can see that light reflect off those shadows, that's gonna make the model feel strange. That's why we have varnish. This can not only be used to protect your miniatures, especially if they're gaming as you handle them, but it can also be used to kill that shine and make sure that if there's anything that looks out of place, shadows shouldn't be reflecting light. It's gonna stop that. Now there's lots of different ways to use varnish. And I have a whole video on it if you that's linked up above. Your basic varnish like this is just used to protect the model. It'll matt it out a little, but not much. Satin varnish you use if you're trying to really create a large amount of protection, but it will make the model shiny. So after you apply something like satin for protection, then you wanna use something like your AK Interactive ultra matte varnish. This kills all shine out. A matte miniature, especially once you've done your highlights and your shading, you've got control of the light. So in most cases, unless we're talking about reflective blood or something like that, you don't really need additional shine. Always do your varnishing before you apply your metals. That's how I do it. So I paint everything matte, varnish the model, then apply my metal paints. That keeps your metals shiny and fresh. And metal paints tend to be a little tougher and won't generally have an issue anyways. So there we go. That's all the basics of painting. Really, if you just work on the stuff you saw here, the layering, the glazing, applying your highlights and your shadows and establishing that contrast, that's really 90% of the challenge. I hope this was helpful. I hope this gave you the basics you need to understand the terms, a sort of glossary if you will, of those things that get thrown around all the time online. There's a lot of other videos in this playlist that go a lot deeper on these topics. Most of them were linked up above, but of course, feel free to scan the playlist and look at anything that interests you. Give this video a like if you liked it. Subscribe for more tutorials like this. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time.