 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're gonna talk about mixed mediums We're gonna talk about using oils and acrylics on the same project And why you might want to start thinking about using different types of paints on the same miniature together Let's get into it Let's strict techno man sir that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V's All right. I have this big rat lady now. She's a great model. She's super cool It probably raises questions about me that we don't want to answer the problem is she's got a lot of skin and One of the things that oil paints are really good at is skin. It's just a place where they excel So we're gonna start by doing some oil paints on the skin. I'm gonna show you how to render female skin Well a certain type of very pink pale female skin With oil paints, but I'm gonna show you how to mix and match and change your colors and make any skin tone You want first so let's head over the desk. Let's start mixing some paints around and see what kind of tones we can get Collection of different oil paints on the palette here There's just a dry palette that I'm gonna use Obviously because they're oil paints now. I don't use cardboard or anything to absorb the the white spirits out I don't want to do that. I want to stay workable. They'll dry in time I don't notably have any blues or greens on the palette because I'm going for this very pale pink skin If you wanted to mix darker skin tones or more tan skin tones You could bring in blues greens or any of the umbers and you'll be able to radically shift the sort of color tones You can get done into darker more tan skin tones But I started with my cadmium orange just integrating Naples yellow and titanium white Just to get basically what is a pretty nice peachy tone I keep adding it and then once I've got it in a place I want then we start adding things like reds and purples and Here what we can really experiment with is what do we want the sort of lower tones the flesh to be the shadow tones of the flesh to be That kind of thing so with this spread we can very easily determine sort of what is our high highlight? What is our shadow colors? What are we pushing into? So since the titanium white is a fairly cold ish Because dead white tends to get red is cold to the eye I'm keeping the shadows fairly warm with these sort of richer purples, especially the integrations of things like the Indian red little bit of the magenta Little bit of alizarin crimson here and there things like that now I've got that ivory black just sitting there because ultimately I want to be able to also integrate some naturalistic shadows as well And just a small amount of that into the mix is going to be vital You can see I've got a nice spread there to work with Now let's go over the miniature Painting with oil paints is unbelievably liberating if you're used to only acrylics Because you don't have to be careful. You don't have to be nice. You don't have to worry about blends You just get paint on the miniature. That's all you're doing So what you're actually doing is creating a value sketch. I'm starting here with the highest highlights Which is my sort of you know, near white pink and I'm just kind of placing it everywhere I think highlights will be Now a word of warning is you do have to have some understanding of vision of what the final figure is gonna look like and where you want these colors and transitions to go But you know, you can also just experiment over time and as you'll see it's not like you do it in one often Usually it takes a couple different mixes, especially when you're going for something rather pale It still has a lot of very subtle transitions as we are here But I start with the highlights then I start placing these mid tones around again, just where I think they should go Now unlike acrylic paint I'm not trying to be very accurate with it because once we start mixing this together and smoothing it out It's going to get real It's gonna change all these paints are gonna get up in each other's businesses and that's fine. That's what we want That's what keeps everything so smooth. That's what makes oil paints so wonderful and easy Especially for flesh tones where we need hyper smoothness, but lots and lots of transition of color and So as I place my shadow tones here, I'm just basically looking at the opposite of where my My highlights were and I start roughly sketching these in now as you're working with this wet paint on wet paint You're effectively working wet on wet all the time with oil paints The more you use your brush the more it's gonna start picking up the flesh like you saw there And I had to go back into the original one because I stopped basically putting anything dark on I had picked up enough of the Lighter color it had blended in enough that I wasn't getting a pure darker color anymore Don't worry if you've got large areas if things aren't exactly placed correctly. It doesn't really matter You know in the end you're going to do a lot of work to smooth things out and to readjust So you can be rather messy. This is just a sketch Now let's do our first smoothing pass a Smoothing pass is a subtractive painting method. I'm taking I'm mixing paints together and taking it off Every time you see my brush go off camera I am wiping on a paper towel all of the excess paint if you're concerned with like low quality paper towels that will leave Sort of what I want to say like detritus fibers in there, which is which is a fair concern. It can happen You can also just use a piece of cloth like an old t-shirt or something and that will tend to have that problem a lot less For example, if I was going to do something for competition I would absolutely use a piece of cloth just on the off chance that that would happen because it will very much ruin your paint job And add texture to your paint if you don't want But you can see as I smooth it together. I'm just directionally pulling from the light down into the dark and All of a sudden all those rough lines all that all that Sort of sketchiness just goes away and we get a perfectly smooth beautiful skin tone Now we could stop there. It would be acceptable There's there's nothing wrong with that and if you're just trying to get a big figure painted This can actually be a very fast method for doing so I'm focusing in on just this one section because I wanted to kind of show you the whole process but the You know doing all of this work on the torso was no more than an hour total And that's you know with me then changing and filming things and setting things up So to get where we are in less than an hour with this as you'll see at the end I mean, I couldn't get anywhere near that with acrylics alone if I was doing all this by hand And I'd even be forced to sort of it'd be tough to even meet that with just an airbrush with this level of detail That I'm gonna have at the end Although we will integrate an airbrush into this process later Now what I'm doing is you can see I put some more sort of very high titanium white infused color on there and a little bit More of the reds and the reason is because we can keep working wet over wet That oil paint that's down there that I just smoothed it's still workable and will remain so for hours Realistically depending on your lighting conditions local humidity, etc. Days Which is of course one of the downsides Now another smoothing pass my smoothing brush is a completely bone dry brush It has not touched anything except the paint that I am smoothing It has never gotten anywhere near white spirits nor has it gotten near any actual thick paint on the palette It is solely and only a Bone dry brush and I keep wiping it To get it clean again, just you you know as I said, which basically forcing it into that paper towel You want to have two different brushes also a note on this use your synthetics for this kind of work. Don't use nice You know sort of well the sables we use are really watercolor brushes, but don't use those kinds of nice brushes Use something that's cheap synthetic and as you can see here a large brush is also nice The you want something with a lot of belly a lot of bristle a lot of size to it Because that helps you really smooth faster easier. It removes any kind of wake or anything like that from the That you're gonna cut through the paint But what I'm going to do here is just continually keep Working this stuff over and over again. I just keep adding in little bits of more color And I can keep doing this until I'm absolutely happy with it The beautiful part about it is it's so fast and easy It takes me, you know a minute or two To to pull some of the paint off my palette place it in the areas I want on the miniature and then a few seconds to smooth it out and I can test back and forth Let me see what this area looks like a little lighter, right? Let me infuse a little more red here Let me pull this area a little more into shadow. I Can keep doing that experimentation over and over again just Readjusting slightly each time subtracting paint and smoothing it out Without ever really causing an issue I'm not because so much of it is subtractive because so much of it is me removing paint from the miniature and just Blending it into each other because I have this incredibly long working time. I don't have to ever worry That I'm putting too much paint on the miniature or that I'm doing something I won't be able to come back from I mean as a point of fact I could erase all of this I could just dip my brush in white spirits run it across the torso and reset this back completely to To zero if I was so inclined which I'm of course not but my point is is that it is You cannot make a mistake with these oil paints. That's the beauty of it And for things like skin, it's just the right tool for the job. I Love doing, you know miniatures that just have a ton of exposed skin With oil paints because it gives you this ultra smooth finish It lets you work in these very slight subtle color changes easily smoothly without no with no problems No fuss no must no hours of glazing no, you know exact airbrush control and so on and so forth It just lets you work and push paint around It is unbelievably cathartic The downside to it of course is that it does take a long time to dry its advantage is also a disadvantage But we're gonna talk about how we tackle that because this isn't just about the benefits of oil paint as good as they are And as amazing as they are and as much as I like Working in this method as you can see here where I'm just slowly integrating the colors working wet on wet It does present a bit of a challenge you can see now in between two shots I did go ahead and put the color on the rest of the miniature as well And now once I have it all set I'm just going in and reinforcing those those deep shadows You can shoot oftentimes you saw me working at both ends of the spectrum That is to say I'd put on a light color and a dark color and then kind of bring them together in the middle You can also just work with one color at a time as I am here just working with the the deeper Magentas and alizarin crimson kind of combination by the way don't ask exactly what paints I was using when as you can see from my palate It's a giant mixture of everything go nuts mix it all up Oil painting is not for recipes oil painting is for cooking not baking okay, and But I get myself to a place where I'm like, okay, that has some good variation. I like where that is I like the tones. I like it's you know as smooth as I would want We can stop But I can also just take the individual things like highlights and stuff like that and keep pushing them Once I get to a place where I feel like all right the skin's good And this was just one the all the skin on this miniature is about nine inches tall All this time all this work on this skin was maybe two and a half three hours total on a figure of this size You get that blend. It's great Now one of the keys here is that you don't use oils for everything in most jobs Now I like oil paints and certainly there's people like James Wappel who just use oil paints for everything There's nothing wrong with that, but me. I'm a right tool for the job kind of guy I am a very sort of technical the square peg goes in the square whole person and So when I want to you do something like skin where tonal variation and smoothness and these Small changes in hues are really really important. That's where the oil paint shine That's where I get them out When I want to do something like hair where I'm gonna work in a lot of small texture and Then sharp lines being built up repeatedly over time That's when I'm gonna go to the acrylics. It's so much easier to do those things Now, can you do sharp thin lines with acrylics or with oils? Sure, of course absolutely Hundreds and hundreds of years of artists have done so But when I'm wanting to build those layers and build these repeated sharp thin lines over top of each other and not Blend when I don't want things to blend together because I want to use the texture I want to call it out. I want that to serve me. That's when we go to the acrylics So let's see how we do that And so while the body is drying I just move over to a different part of the miniature here I'm working on the hair now as I mentioned at the beginning. I'm a right tool right Right job kind of person and so when I build up the hair I'm not gonna use oil paints here instead I go back to acrylics making shadows and building up that texture because I want layers and layers and layers of sharp thin lines and So you don't have to feel like just because you use one medium on one part of the miniature You have to bring use it all it will all come together, especially under a varnish Now back to the skin. Guess what it all dried. We varnished over it took about I let it sit for about a day and a half And now what I'm going to do is just punch it up even more with some filters with the airbrush When you have this ultra smooth blend of the oil paints it tends to bring everything together So you either need to go in a second time with oil paints or the quicker option is we work with filters with our airbrush Here then I'm just going to use the airbrush. This is my hard-earned Steinbeck infinity from the the Ukraine edition some beautiful airbrush and With a point to needle it lets me work like a surgeon. I can work on individual muscle groupings really really tight spray pattern and As I just continue to reinforce and filter out those shadows the light placement stuff like that Just bringing back some of the saturation One of the downsides with oil paints is once you pull them all together with that subtractive method They will be fairly desaturated all your tones have gotten into each other the lights have gotten into the mid-tones and the darks have gotten into the mid-tones and saturation lives in the mid-tone and So to re-instantiate that we need to either go around with a second layer of oil paints once it's dry or We come back in with the airbrush or with the brush glazes or something like that And we just carefully carefully carefully work very thin filters I'm working all these paints and inks are 10 to 1 reductions. They are very very thin I am working very close very tight You know there's not you probably can't even see much that's changing really on the miniature But trust me and in reality I can I can see the difference over the whole figure With that then done I wanted to also show can you brush paint over the top of it? Yes, absolutely the key is you let the oils cure completely which will generally take a couple of days Then you give the whole thing a good varnish in this case I used my standard mix of three to one Ultramat to satin varnish and Now it's completely ready for any kind of acrylic or brush painting airbrush or brush to go over the top So here I'm for example, you know lining the wounds where this warp stone is glowing out or growing out of her You know taking the tips the flesh and making them look rather sickly and and as though they've sort of ruptured here To show the open wound just hitting those like high points of flesh and things like that with rougher areas where it should feel rough and You know we can work from traditional layer consistency or with inks all the way down to a glaze You know I want to show the wound in the stretch skin So we're gonna glaze them just very gentle magenta up into each of those wounds to show the stretch skin But all that's completely possible I can work with that acrylic right on top of that oil once it's completely cured and then varnished Ready to go Don't limit yourself to one medium even in any area. Of course one of the big challenges here is drying time Oil paints do take a long time to dry. There's just no two ways about it So if you're gonna get into these kind of mixed mediums It's best to have something like two projects going on where you're doing all the skin or everything that you know is Going to be oils on the one miniature you get all that going. It's very fast It's very easy then you set that to the side for a few days Cover it up so it doesn't get dust in the oil as it's drying or something and then let it dry and Once it's dry varnish, and you're back to using whatever you want on top easy peasy lemon squeezy All right, we've talked about when to use oils on things like skin versus when you need texture We've put acrylic over top of those dry oils We've talked about working on separate areas the miniatures with the different mediums to allow drying time But what about oils on top of acrylics? Oh, absolutely There are some colors that are so super annoying purple is one of them If you've ever tried to highlight purple by integrating white, you know what I'm talking about You can see the layer lines so clearly. It's really really annoying because of the nature of white acrylic paint however, here, I've just base coated with a Daxine purple acrylic and Guess what? We're gonna do all of our highlights with oil paints and make our lives so much easier Stop killing yourself with impossible colors when you're trying to highlight them up so things like purples that are really really difficult high blues where they go into sky blue and all of a sudden you can just See these gross lines in between the two because they're integrating white and that has such a different opacity than the very Translucent blue colors or purple colors that are there Instead, let's just use some oil paints over the top create a quick value sketch over our acrylics And then guess what once again? We get out our smoothing brush are and we just go ahead and bring that together smooth that out and in Seconds we have a completely smooth purple Again, no fuss no must easy peasy lemon squeezy. This is so much easier I do not kill yourself do it trying to do something like painting purple when something like this exists Oils over top of acrylics as you're finishing or to achieve your contrast is great And you can go back in as I said here with a second layer of the oils to then re-instantiate your your saturation Or any color that's lost we just go ahead and put that, you know, basically base dioxazine purple on there and Then once again get out our smoothing brush once we have it all in place Smooth it together and boom we have a beautiful transition purple that is You know looks like we spent hours doing a careful blend But of course what we actually did is spent 30 seconds with oil paints and then called it today I can't think of a better way to paint for me, especially for these problem colors Can be a great way to paint anything that has this high opacity in the highlights problem. So blues purples being big offenders, but you can see the same thing with sort of mint greens as well So I hope I gave you lots of ideas for how to mix these mediums and make your life a lot easier So there you go. Our rat lady is all done She's ready to bring terror to the mortal realms as my new vermin lord And you can see that once she's all finished the oil paints and the acrylic paints really doesn't make a difference You've used them. They've come together. They look like one coherent piece things like the varnishes and all of that Bring it all together without an issue and I think she turned out pretty cool So if you liked this give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future If you've got questions about anything related to mix mediums to using oils and mixing them You know not directly with acrylics, but using both on the same project. Hey drop those down below Always happy to answer every question that gets asked if you want to support the channel You can do so we've got a patreon down below And that is full of a great community full of enthusiastic hobbyists And that is focused on to on taking your next step on your hobby journey As always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time