 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today is a special one welcome new miniature painters This video is going to be all about the very very basics of painting miniatures I've been painting miniatures for more than 20 years now and The reason it's taken me this long to make what I think is really the introduction video is because I wanted to make Sure, I have the right angle to really help you on your journey My focus in making these videos and in having this channel is in helping people take their next step in their hobby journey But the question arises. How do you take your first steps when you know nothing about what this is? That's what this video is all about so 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 style Alright, so to begin. I'm we're not going to do assembly or priming in this video Assembly is its own separate thing. It requires its own separate tools and you can find a video all about that linked up above Priming you have lots of options when it comes to primers. I made an ultimate guide to primers You can also find that Linked up above right now So if you have questions on those two topics hit those videos I really go in depth on them and I hope they have the answers you need Alright, let's start with miniature paint itself. We're gonna be painting miniatures We need some miniature paint and that's my first advice Just get yourself some actual miniature paint Don't use craft paints or folk art or stuff like that. You would buy other acrylic paints There are some uses for those things they have purposes, but we're gonna keep this simple when we're starting Miniature paints are generally mixed to a thickness of viscosity and a Readiness for application that is what we need for miniatures. So we're just gonna start there Now you might be asking yourself. What brand do I buy? The answer is it doesn't really matter as long as it's miniature paint Each brand is going to perform is going to paint miniatures. There are differences I have a video on a miniature brand paint brand comparison. You can check that out. It's linked up above But honestly with you by Citadel a GW Vallejo AK interactive pro acrylic Reaper It doesn't matter for your first miniatures. Just get some miniature paints whatever is available at your local store As long as it's a miniature paint will be just fine There are differences, but those differences really only come into play once you're more Once you have your legs under you in the hobby and you establish your own painting style Because there is a lot to grow here, but I'm not gonna overwhelm you with all that We're gonna start at the beginning Acrylic paint consists of three things pigment, that's what makes it colored binder, which is acrylic medium and water I Tell you this because I want you to understand what the tool is you're working with chemically When acrylic paint dries and acrylic paint dries very quickly, that's part of why we use it for miniature painting The acrylic binder the acrylic medium dries in a sort of crystal work lattice that lattice traps the pigments inside water acts as our solvent and Water is also going to be our thinner We're gonna talk a little while about thinning paints But water is how you thin your paint and it is already there in the bottle That's what makes non-toxic acrylic paints easy to work with Because they're using water and a relatively stable acrylic binder There's not a lot of toxic chemicals or stuff like that So they become safe easy to work with for people of all ages One thing you're going to notice as you look at paints is that sometimes amongst some of these ranges You'll see a difference between a miniature paint and an air paint What does that mean? Well the air paint has been pre thinned for your airbrush It's the same paint. It's the same three things pigment binder medium It might have a few additives in it. Don't worry about that for our purposes. It's the same stuff. It's just thinner Now which one of these do you buy? Honestly, it doesn't matter too much. You just need to know which one you have Because if you're working with air paints when we talk about thinning your paint You will need to thin it less Oftentimes air paints if applied with a brush, which they certainly can be all acrylic paint can be brushed as well as airbrush So they can all be used in both tools But air paints because they're already pre thinned will require less manual thinning by you All right thinning paint. We've danced around this enough Acrylic paints are thinned with water You start by putting your paint on to either a dry or wet palette We'll get there on to some surface and then thinning it with water Now one of the places I usually see people go wrong is in the thinning of their paint They dip their brush completely into the water then dip the water completely into the paint Swoosh it all around and then try to apply it to the manager. This immediately makes a mess Instead what we're going to do is we're going to dip our brush a little bit into some water and Then we are going to take that into the paint and mix it up a little bit to thin it out and draw it out We're generally looking for a thinner consistency and what that means is when I Move the paint around it flows smoothly. You can test this on the palette or on the wet palette and You should see it's flow smoothly if it's still really having buildup when you draw the paint out if it still leaves Ridges that stand alone. It's not thin enough There's one more important step that I think a lot of these videos leave out and that is the magic of the paper towel Or kitchen roll whatever you happen to call it When you water down your paints and then your brush is all full Step one is after you've mixed your paint rinse your brush Immediately, so you've meant you've wanted to water you mix your paint you went to water you mix your paint Take your brush back to your paint water, which is just a cup that you've put some water in It can be any kind of red solo cup or whatever and mix it up Rinse that brush off do not use your mix Brush to directly paint. It's got a bunch of water. It's got paint way up in it It's gonna make a mess. So we immediately rinse that Then we go back into our wet paint and we touch the tip of our brush to paper towel or kitchen roll Why do we do that? Well, remember our paint consists of two liquids and one solid in the in the form of pigment and All of that excess liquid especially with thin paint Can cause your paint to run to move uncontrollably and to flow to places. You don't want it to We want a nice clean application of the paint. We want it to go Only where we put our brush and not beyond Touching the tip of the brush to a paper towel or to a kitchen roll is going to make sure that that Excess liquid that's gonna run out and go crazy when we touch the miniature Will instead run into the paper towel. Yes, a little bit of paint will come off. That's okay You're then ready to move to the miniature and start painting Let's have a little conversation about a dry versus a wet palette. I Have a video all about what you purchase in your first six months of miniature painting That's linked up above check that out as well. That gives you sort of a buying guide, which is a good companion to this video and In the end I do recommend that you invest in a wet palette sometime between one and three months into this project But it's not essential to begin a dry palette works just fine There's no issue with it at all however, you're working It doesn't matter what your palette is it matters how you thin your paint How you wick off the excess liquid and then apply it to the miniature What a wet palette does is naturally thin your paint a little bit through osmosis of water coming up into the paint It also keeps it more workable For a longer so if you're sitting down for a long paint session Your paint doesn't dry out as it will on the dry palette and make it more difficult to work with My best piece of advice I'll give you if you are new here is If you're working with a dry palette, which is the simplest thing You can usually get packs of them quite cheap from your local hobby or art store or Amazon or wherever you like My best advice is don't try to push it with your paint put some paint on the palette Thin it as we've discussed Begin painting your miniature and go when your paint starts to dry When it gets too thick when the water and medium has evaporated and it seems to look chunky Or it's hard to work with or you're having to over thin with too much water Stop just let it go. Alright, if we're going to do some painting then it's also time to talk about brushes There are two main types of brushes. You are going to be concerned with synthetic brushes Versus natural hair brushes. I have a video called the five types of brushes. You should own linked up above That goes into more detail on it but in simplest form a natural hair brush is real animal hair and could be sable or something else and Because it's more soft and easy to control it will generally do better in painting However, they are expensive usually running at least 12 to 25 or $30 per brush That's a significant investment When you're starting out a nice pack of synthetic brushes will do you fine You can go to your local art store or hobby store or Amazon and find a nice pack of synthetic brushes Don't overpay for these Cheap brushes are fine. You will use them for a couple of miniatures Maybe a couple weeks and then you will toss them in the trash So do not overpay for synthetic brushes. There are not many tangible differences between synthetics They all for the most part work the same when it comes to sables Invest in a simple size one. There are many brands out there Windsor and Newton Da Vinci Raphael 8404 it doesn't matter a simple size one that you use for detail work and finishing work is a good investment And that's all you will need but synthetics Can carry you the vast majority of your painting and certainly all you need to start. Let's talk about holding the brush This seems kind of silly, but there is a specific way you want to hold the brush You'll notice in my videos, by the way, I often don't hold the brush properly 20 years ago when I learned how to hold the brush No one made such a video and I developed a bad habit at this point I've overcome my handicap and can paint just fine holding the brush in this weird way But you want to hold the brush Regardless near the top Think of it like a lever. Okay, and the closer you are to the tip of the brush with your fingers The more precise control you have when you're applying paint to the miniature You don't want to be attacking it straight on What I mean by that is the tip of your brush is the most fragile part and for the most part unless you're doing Something where you need that very very precise tip like an eyeball You can rotate the brush sideways Your brush is a multifaceted tool and the flat of the brush the side of it Uh, the front side of the tip all have different purposes and can all allow for different effects For right now, what you need to understand is that your brush should generally be at something like a 45 to 70 degree angle Against the miniature so in other words rotated down onto its side at an angle by hitting those angles You use The broader part of the brush there are less brush strokes in the way you apply the paint and most importantly You protect the tip so your brush lasts longer Cleaning cleaning your brush is very important Now there are whole videos I have in on this channel on cleaning your brush But right now what I'll say is three simple tips that are going to keep your brushes lasting longer And staying clean and avoid getting frayed One remember what I said about when you mix paint immediately rinse your brush two Don't let paint dry in your brush When we start it's often our instinct to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and painting and painting and painting And I'm going to keep going and it's got a little more a little more a little more a little more That allows paint to dry in the ferrule or the belly of the brush one of those two areas and either one is good Regularly Rinse your brush in your water cup What does regularly mean Don't paint for more than a minute or two without rinsing your brush When you first start it could be acceptable to set a little repeating one minute or two minute timer And every time it goes off Rinse your brush go back into your paint number three is Get yourself a simple thing of brush soap. It's very cheap. It's available from all your local art or hobby stores or amazon again And when you are when you complete a painting session Be it half hour an hour six hours a day a three day marathon where you drink 72 red bowls and don't sleep at all And then begin hallucinating the colors on your miniature. Don't actually do that Use some brush soap, uh, just rinse your get your brush wet Swish it around in the brush soap rinse it again Take a little bit of the brush soap draw it through it and then smooth out the point And you're good to go Again, I have other videos in the playlist You can check those out if you want to go real deep on keeping your brushes clean next up painting This is what you came here for So when we paint we paint in multiple thin coats Uh, that's how we're going to start out. There are other ways to paint. There are times you'll use thick paint There are times who use really really thin paint and use it over and under shade and all of that Don't worry about any of that right now For now, we're going to keep this very simple. We are simply applying layers of paint We've already thinned our paint. We've wicked off our brush and now we're just going to apply it We work our way around the miniature Duncan Rhodes became very famous for saying too thin coats and it stuck because it is a good lesson when you begin Acrylic paint is naturally translucent It does not create high opacity upon first pass with most miniature paints As such thinning it down and applying a couple coats too is a good rule, but sometimes you'll need more Is it easy way to get a nice solid looking color onto the miniature Having it look clean avoiding ugly brush strokes Just work your way around with those thin layers and you're good to go Remember your brush should be at an angle Helping you to save that tip and apply the paint more smoothly Once we've applied some what we call base coats or the first layer of color. That's all that means One of the common next steps we learn are what we call washes or shades. These are just very thin Very very thin ink like Uh paints that use a transparent medium often Don't worry about or sorry a transparent pigment. Don't worry about that in a liquid medium They're very thin because they're meant to be applied all over the miniature and they Have a lot of flow improver in them that basically breaks surface tension and allows them to run down into the recesses When do we use washes? We use washes whenever we need to add depth to a textured surface So washes will excel on things like fur hair Uh, even a highly muscled being you know, you got somebody with so Rippling torso muscles. They have a 12 pack and Several other muscles at the base of their ribs that probably don't actually exist in reality Or at least they never have for me. I don't know. Maybe I'm doing the wrong workout routine Those kinds of situations a wash can do an incredible job of making your miniature suddenly pop to life and add depth Now let's talk about how we apply that wash We dip into the wash usually directly. These can be thinned, but they don't usually need to be And then we uh, we do not necessarily need to go to the paper towel here This is one exception We take it to the miniature we apply it on and then we swoosh our brush around Keep that brush moving. This is a very different technique than your standard layer painting I see a lot of new people apply Washes and shades in the same way they do their normal paint layers and then they don't look good A wash is meant to be applied with a thick amount and then spread over the miniature effectively painting on the You keep your brush moving quickly You return to anywhere where you see it pooling pooling just means I can see a lot of the wash collecting in one space You're going to return your brush to you there and start dragging it out Drawing that wash over the whole miniature your brush moves quickly sweeps around the entire miniature And once it's been spread in an even thin layer Over the area you're working you stop Let it dry Washes will dry slightly slower You can speed this up by keeping a hairdryer in your paint area and just hitting it with a medium warm hairdryer Don't get it too hot And then that will dry quickly if you're not using something like a hairdryer You do want to allow five 10 15 20 minutes for it to dry The reason they're such a wide range is because they will dry very differently depending on your local humidity Once we've applied that wash the easiest thing to do next is we want to apply some highlights Washes create what we call our shadows our shades our lowest tones Our base coat ends up being our mid tone or middle tone Now we need to create our highlights or our highest tones the brightest areas And we're doing that to reflect light All of miniature painting is trying to capture how light interacts in an average way Or in a very specialized way depending on what you're doing as you go on with this hobby With you know, what is effectively a figure? Because you're not not painting a six foot tall person, but you're painting a one inch tall miniature Light in the room does not interact with your little tiny one inch person In the same way it does if you're six feet tall So we have to up the contrast contrast means the difference between light and dark We need to over Accentuate that and we do that with highlights by placing brighter colors of paint on these areas Highlights and where you place them on volumes is really A whole video in itself But in the simplest way to think about it You pick the tops of the various shapes or elements you're working on And you're going to highlight those up using a brighter tone Then you used before Let's take a minute and talk specifically about highlights and shadows I think this is something that often is tricky when you're a brand new painter All we really mean is lighter and darker versions Of whatever the color you're painting in So for example, if we're talking about brown You've got your mid-tone brown that your is your pants You get a dark brown for the shadows and a light brown for the highlight It's pretty much that easy I think a lot of people get hung up on this. They're concerned. Is it the right color? Is it the right tone? Which lighter brown do I use? the answer is Some pick one. It doesn't really matter Now, of course, there are combinations that don't work But my answer is experimentation as always is going to lead you to truth And most lighter shades are going to work and most darker shades are going to work You can also choose to just mix the paint so you could work with one tone And then you mix in a lighter color Here I have some ice yellow. Maybe I'm mixing that in directly As we go over to the palette You'll see that I can produce half steps by simply taking my darker tone my mid-tone Mixing them together and then I get something that's in the middle In this way you can create more natural transitions between your two colors If you're just working in simple layers I can also mix my mid-tone into just any near white or brighter color I usually advise new people to stay away from pure white as it's often too bright And we'll kind of mess with the the model and make it hard to paint But here I've mixed in this ice yellow and I get a nice simple highlight for my brown So highlighting and shading is just that easy Some paint lines have things like triads where they have recommended highlights Those are fine. You can certainly use those as a guide, but they're absolutely not required In the end if you've got a mid-tone of a color be it blue red brown anything like that A slightly lighter version of that color is a good highlight And a slightly darker version of that color is a good shadow. It's pretty much that easy So if I were painting skin tone as you can see me doing in this video You saw how I applied a rather dark base coat Then I washed with a sort of red brown color to add life and shadow And now I am highlighting With a mid-tone flesh And you can see how I'm bringing that on the tops of the muscles Whatever is on the top area facing the light We assume For the simplest form the light is coming from above because the light is the sun or something similar That's what our eyes as humans are used to seeing That's the average lighting position that we view most other humans in whether interior where our lights are above us Or whether outside where the lights the sun So you find the tops of the surfaces And that's what we highlight It's a simple rule and there's a lot more to it, but for now we're keeping it simple You can do multiple layers of highlights So here you see me applying another slightly brighter skin tone And in fact your real journey as you begin miniature painting is really learning about contrast And continuing to push your highlights and shadows Now as I mentioned before washes don't work well on large flat surfaces So areas like this model sort of torso where she's wearing a leather jerkin Is not great. It's just a big flat surface. A wash isn't going to do anything There's no recesses for it to sink into In this event What we do is we work up So as we base coated it you can see here with a darker red What we're going to do now is simply use the same layering technique. We've been using Just painting with thin layers, but instead of using a wash We're just going to build up progressively higher layers of color And i'm going to focus those in the most raised areas Where light would naturally catch so you don't always have to wash everything You can just use layering to build up especially on those broad flat surfaces Think shields armor plates things like that are usually great candidates for this kind of technique So with that you should have everything you need to get started in miniature painting Between what i've said here and the videos i've linked. I hope this does lay down a great foundational experience for people as they join this hobby There is a playlist full of all of these beginner guides you can find on my channel So feel free to work your way through that. Hopefully it will get you started with confidence And expose you to a world that truly has may brought so much joy to my life over the past 20 plus years Miniature painting is a wonderful hobby. It lets us be creative and artistic and explore and play fun games with our friends What's not to love So give this video a like if you liked it subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future There are new videos here every saturday As always if you have questions drop those down below. I answer every question I thank you so much for watching this one. I wish you nothing but the best in your hobby journey And we'll see you next time