 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about doing a mirrored shield or reflective we're going to do super sky earth non-metallic metal and we're going to use that on sigvald shield famously he has a mirror shield and to understand this and what we're going to do we've got to talk about the principles of sky earth non-metallic metals up in the top left there you'll see I have a traditional take on sky earth non-metallic metal blue at the top some kind of brown at the bottom I've seen lots of people do this kind of style the problem with it is it isn't realistic that's a real picture of a chrome ball right there down at the bottom okay something that's really that reflective isn't just going to reflect the sky and the ground which is how I see a lot of these things done where it's just sort of blue and brown but there's not many places in our world unless you're standing in the middle of quite empty desert that's just blue and brown so instead we're going to make something much more like the bottom so I've started with just some kind of green the colors here aren't relevant the important part is you have to think of a scene and then you've got to figure out what are the core elements you're going to capture of that scene when it's twisted when it's put onto the shape like the shield in this case which is around convex shape okay so I started with just some green mixed with a little black and you notice I painted in tiny little lines just doing little slashes basically I'm just making trees this entire experiment is very much like doing something Bob Rossi you're just painting a scene but it's got to be somewhat twisted and the light needs to be dominant so the trees themselves pretty easy because they're they need to be darker than normal you can't paint anything in its normal colors because everything is going to be blown out by the chrome reflection of the light so I created some little sort of tree scapes just kind of so the ideas of where I want them doesn't matter they don't need to be perfect I can paint over them later then I took some pure white and placed where I wanted the sun then I started slowly integrating blue and working it around kind of the edge the key here to understand is that where the sun or the light source is reflecting in the shield is going to be basically pure white okay and the reason for that is because it's reflecting the pure light itself now what I'm doing is going in getting darker versions and reinforcing the centers of the tree and by the way almost this entire thing is going to be a lots of back and forth work because you have to create this vaguely fuzzy image even this chrome ball isn't going to reflect it perfectly right in this case this chrome shield so there's going to be some diffusion of the light now the shield especially fun because it also has all these other little weird shapes in it and stuff so I took and started integrating a little bit of blue now in this case I was actually using some turquoise color and some blue green from Vallejo it's the same color as I used on his cloak and other parts manager to make it you know actually fit and feel like it belongs and you notice again when I put these colors in a lot of what I'm doing is stippling and then spreading it out notice that I'm not trying to paint a smooth layer I'm trying to create the impression of a sky with clouds and little you know images and light refractions in it and so on then I grabbed here some ice yellow and around the edge in between where the Sun is pure white and the sky has blue I'm working in some very thin yellowish tones again to capture the light though being a warm Sun being reflected okay now I'm going to let all that dry because I worked a lot of wet on wet paint there and when I came back I actually went ahead and blacked out all the other little lines the things that aren't reflective or that aren't going to be sort of chrome that way I could really see what I'm working with so now it's time to refine and the first thing I need to do is make sure that the that the trees themselves are well defined you have to be able to see the edges of these things what's going to make it feel realistic when you're doing some kind of mirrored reflection like this is if you feel like all the distinct elements are still distinct and what that means is with those very dark trees I've got to have some bright light in between them so I've got to lighten up my blue just a little bit and start creating the space in between all of the trees so you can see each individual little tree you're gonna notice I do this several times I go back and forth I also at the same time will start taking some of the green of the tree and mixing it with a little white so it's quite fuzzy and I'll start tracing the edge of it in between the tree and the sky so it looks like that's the thinner part of the tree that light is passing through more easily now you'll notice I didn't really do a ground here and part of that is the angle of this thing okay the with sky earth non-metallic metal it's about the angle of the piece versus where the ground is orientated so as much as a five degree upward facing means you'll see almost no ground in other words like if zero degrees is straight up and down vertical if that shield is tilted even five degrees away then you see almost no ground now this is certainly tilted back at the nature of say Waltz model here is that he's kind of in a reverse position with his arm back so the shield is angled up but it also is a convex shape and so has this under part that's that's tucked down instead of painting the ground I'm gonna rely and initially I'm gonna let the sky kind of be where it needs to be I'm gonna let the trees fall where they need to be and then once I'm happy with all that I'm just gonna kind of fill in some of the ground so now what I'm doing is just reinforcing that light and those clouds getting my tree separated feeling pretty good about that but we still need to keep working it so now I've got some kind of brown tones and stuff like that and what we're gonna do is now I'm gonna fill in some of those ground some of that ground what I'm gonna do is make it so it looks like there's almost paths in between the trees so I'm gonna work it into the open spots that don't have color yet in between there and I'm gonna be a very light touch about it I just want to create a little bit of ground on the bottom and then you'll notice it's right back to the sky as I continue to reshape and refine the image that these trees are reflecting you'll also notice that I because of the shape of the shield trees are all pointed toward the middle again think back to that chrome ball we saw earlier things were pushed at an odd angle because it's reflecting them on a circular surface right it's not a flat plane it's not going to reflect it flatly instead it's going to distort the image like a funhouse mirror and so constantly what I'm doing here is back and forth working the interior heart of the tree and making it darker and darker and darker and infusing more and more black or in this case I'm actually using Payne's gray ink but it's a dark blue black ink and that's because against the light those would be almost completely silhouetted and any color they have will basically be irrelevant okay you need the hint of the color more than you need the actual color so it's you know I could do this completely without green but you do want a little bit of it some of that's going to come out on the same reason I'm everything here you'll notice is extremely desaturated right because the white light on this chrome surface is going to be blowing everything out so now it's just a matter of refine refine refine as I continue to reshape those things make sure the trees have a tree shape make sure the sky is well defined in between each piece and just continue slowly refining all of the different elements okay so I've covered the entire model in some plastic putty it's basically just black silly putty I've got the airbrush and with a six to two thin ratio of six thinner to two drops of white ink I'm just slowly applying a very light light light light coat a little bit of glaze of some white and you'll notice what that did is it fuzzed everything out and that was the goal see how now everything looks fuzzy what that did is that gave me that soft edge to everything that I wanted where the light is dominating now it's a little too strong but that was a necessary step because now when I go back in and fill out the center of the tree it's going to feel a lot more smooth to where there's this fuzzy outer edge of the tree that the light is filtering through so as with anything in miniature painting if it's worth doing once it's worth doing multiple times and so now I'm just reinforcing the deep shadows of the tree a lot of this is whenever you're painting this scene you're basically painting a distorted version of a canvas painting so the trick to high reflectivity things like chrome is I see a lot of people trying to do just the blue and brown but that feels eminently false because high reflection things reflect the world around them when you've got a perfectly shiny car like a perfectly shiny black car or something like that it's super high gloss it doesn't just reflect blue sky and brown earth you see the pavement and the cars parked next to it and somebody walking by and a tree in your neighbor's yard or whatever so the key here is you have to create some kind of scene that's going to be reflected that's what's going to make the sky earth reflection actually feel like it's reflecting something more than some generic blue fade into a brown fade is ever going to matter because again unless the person is standing in the middle of an endless desert it's just not going to sell so what we're doing now is we're just reinforcing at the centers of those trees and then I'm again going through and reshaping everything now a couple of times here you're going to see me make some hard pivots and that's because I did a sketch of this first on a piece of paper but you know as I went to recreate on the shield and being in three dimensions some things I didn't quite like as much I didn't quite like my tree placement as much you're gonna see me swap kind of the tree placement around make one taller one shorter so that it felt a little more realistic all my trees were a little too samey in height which was weird like trees have very you know like trees are naturally very different sized so it was kind of strange that all of a sudden I had one set that all my trees were exactly the same height and that was making it feel false sometimes it can be just those little things because nature is very random it's very organic you know trees are just a bunch of different sizes there's big trees and little trees and if your image doesn't reflect that then it will ring hollow to people so now we're just getting the center of that done I went ahead and took the putty off because I'm done with my airbrushing step and now it's time to bring this bad boy to a close so what I'm doing here is I have a very very very thin deep blue black because when the chrome reflects off of the light it doesn't just reflect a normal blue it reflects this very deep sort of color the color of basically the steel without the light touching it so it just has this very natural deep blue steel tone and so I was just doing a nice very controlled glaze of that around the edges of the shield outside of the light further up the contrast of the light now I'm just reinforcing some on my yellow so again I grabbed some of that ice yellow to just get a little bit of that worked back in there and you can see that that then pops out that deep blue even more because it helps to reinforce that contrast now I'm just going ahead and reinforcing some of the main trees the main reflections there closer would be more clear than the things on the side so I need to build those up I need to reinforce some of the earth and the earth tones at the bottom to make sure that they have the appropriate light so the earth that's directly near the bottom of the shield that would be in effect closest to the figure itself I'm adding a little bit of a light color to and then I'm going to put a little brown glaze over that way it feels like it's there's more light gathering near the figure so effectively just as the the light needs to be opposing each other so the lightest earth is on the opposite side of the shield from the lightest sky right where the Sun is and by pushing this up some these kind of tiny little refinements this is what's going to help me to sell the overall illusion that the shield is reflecting some scene out in nature right and that the thing is perfectly mirrored you could you can play with this forever constantly applying little glazes adjusting colors all those sorts of things what I'm going to do here is I want to make it even a little more realistic so we'll add a couple birds that happen to be flying in the sky just two little quick birds but for the most part there I'm pretty happy with that that's a pretty much done shield I adjusted a few more things off-camera but for the most part this is it so there you go there'll be some images coming up at the end so you can see what this looks like when it's all done our reflective pastoral mirrored shield but I do hope you enjoyed this again the keys are imagine a scene and then bring it to a distorted life give it a like if you liked this subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future if you've got any questions on this technique drop them down below but as always I very much appreciate you to watch in this one and we'll see you next time