 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're gonna do some work on some stitched dead flesh. We're gonna make some Frankensteinian monsters. This is the theme for my Giants and when I saw that, you know, I thought what a great chance to play with some freehand and do some stitched flesh and dead flesh and do a good tutorial for it. So you saw the paint list at the beginning and of course with all this area of flesh, guess what? We're going to oil paints. So what I'm starting out with here at first you'll notice is just a mix of kind of my highlight colors and then some interesting shadow colors in the flesh. So I started with kind of that shaded flesh, that kind of pink color through a little green in the midtone is an interference color because we want this flesh to look dead and whenever flesh gets purple or green it's gonna look dead and the basic idea here is to have a little bit of green tone in the sort of near the highlight and a little bit of purple near the shadows and that combination is sickly and strange and alien and will make it feel dead even though we still keep a little bit of pink and those kind of flesh tones on play just to make sure that we've still got, you know, the generic feeling of skin as it were. So you can mix in these various tones like I can take standard sort of Caucasian flesh tones, these sorts of white infused desaturated oranges and pinks and stuff like that but when I mix them in with these other non flesh tones they start to get real gross and strange. You can see I laid in some nice heavy shadows underneath. Here I'm just taking the purple and we're laying down a nice strong purple. In between every time I am basically cleaning my brush off before I go into a fresh paint. Now I've got a bone dry synthetic brush and I'm just gonna sweep all these colors together. Now you'll notice that some of these are much weaker than others and that's part of the thing you're gonna learn when you start messing with oil paints. Just like with our acrylic paints, some paints are quite strong, some paints are quite weak. We usually experience this in our world when it comes to things like coverage. However, with oil paints it's not quite the same thing. They're all going to generally cover. It's not really the concern. The concern is how much are they sticking around and emphasizing the mix once you pull all the colors together. You can see there's very little of that green left in there and that's okay because I can always add that back in. And I'm using some different tones as I come up high. You'll notice I'm not following the exact same recipe every time as I move around the creature. And that's because in the end we're going to put stitching on him that will make his flesh look like it's been sewn together. So if we have slight differences in particular areas of the flesh, that can actually be an advantage to us in the end because it will make the flesh feel more not harmonious which normally would be quite strange on a living creature wearing one skin suit as we all walk around doing with our electric meat skeletons. But in this case it's advantageous because I'll have slight variations in the skin that when I bring them together will make them feel like maybe this isn't the exact same person or skin stitched together. So once again, same thing. I just wanted to show it again here on the arm since the first one went by kind of quick. But you can see how I'm mostly following the volumes and that's the key. Like you see how I'm playing the shadow colors into the lower parts of volume where I want shadows. You see I'm placing the highlights where I want them to be quite bright. The advantage here with working with oils is I can still then bring them all together and make them nice and smooth. Now I covered over the whole thing and then let them dry. Okay. So this is past number two. So once you have everything dry, then that's where we can come in and kick it all up a notch. This is where I already this flesh looks pretty dead. There's a lot of gray infused in here. There's a lot of purples and things like that. So once I let it dry and then I come back in and infuse these other colors in here, we're just trying to sap all the life right out of this. And the premise on your second pass remains exactly the same. You'll notice once again, using a bone dry brush, this time you'll notice it's a much smaller softer brush as I'm using a small sable brush. And I'm just pushing that paint around and making sure that it's all nice and smoothed out all over the mini. Okay. So now we've had some big changes. I painted in the rest of the mini while I was waiting for the rest of the oil paints to dry. And once everything's dry, I then laid down a nice coat of varnish over everything and being happy with the tones that I achieved in the second pass, now it's time to add some stitching. So here I just have a mix of some Payne's gray blue black ink and some Abaddon black acrylic paint. You don't have to necessarily varnish over oils to then paint with acrylics. The oils do need to be dry. But I like to do so because a lot of times oils have a real sheen to them. And that can be kind of not what we're going for. So instead, while I was waiting on the oils to completely dry, I just went ahead and painted the rest of the acrylic stuff where I'd never touched it with oils, so the tubes and the face helmet and stuff like that, all the non-metallics. And then I varnished the whole thing down. About a day later once everything was dry. And now it's time to do the stitching. And so I started, as you can see, by just drawing a nice curvy line somewhere across the flesh. Didn't have any plan when I started that line. I literally just started drawing, got to a point, broke it off. I mean, we've all seen Frankenstein's Monster before. We understand how these things work. It's overlapping flesh sections. Pretty straightforward. Now the super trick to do stitches. It's so easy. So after you do the thin line, then we come through and we draw these little lines, little hash lines. We make little barbells. So I'm just doing little straight lines. And I'd put little dots at the end of each one. And you can see now he's completely covered in these little barbell lines. Now, as it stands right now, that doesn't look super great. Trust me, it's gonna work. Just stick with me. I know you're probably looking at me right now going, RUINED. Totally fair. I get it. Trust me, the little barbells will come together and you want to make the little barbells kind of wider than you would think. Okay. And you'll see why in just a second. But now I need to separate these various pieces of flesh. These little pretty pieces of flesh. So going back to my oil paints, as you can put them right over top of the acrylics once they're dry, five minutes after. And this is just some purple thinned down. And you notice I laid it in there. And now I'm just smoothing it out. So I started with a little bone dry brush to smooth it out. Then I took a brush with just a hint, a hint of white spirits in it. Okay. I ran it along the side and then I took a separate bone dry brush and I'm just kind of feathering the oil out into the white spirits. And then what I get is this nice shadow bruised effect on the edge of the flesh. Now I'm going to show you a couple different colors here because I'm doing it in purple. But of course, you don't have to. So here I'm just laying down. I'm picking the opposite side because part of what you're doing here is creating a shadow where it looks like that flesh is sort of going down and the other piece is stitched somewhat on top of it. Right. So you're kind of you want to create this almost think of it like a separation in elevation like a top of graphical map. The more you have that overlap, the more realistic it'll feel. But you don't always have to go as strong as I'm doing here. You could be much weaker with it. You could be much stronger with it, whatever you want to do at any rate. I don't do all the same side. So here you'll notice that when it comes to the two pieces in the center of his torso, the piece on his left is the one going underneath. Whereas then the piece over his tummy is overlapping all of them. And the reason that I'm doing that is because then we create a nice little visual change. So now I'm taking some light flesh on the opposite side of my dark shadow. Okay. And I'm boosting that edge up again, just to make it feel brighter, to make it feel more like it's the upper part of where this connection is. I'm doing the same thing every time here. I'm just feathering it with a bone dry brush, running a tiny amount of whites like a brush that kind of heard about white spirits one time back in the 60s. That's the that's the sort of, you know, that's the kind of amount of white spirits I have on the brush. Run it along not over the paint next to the paint. And I take a separate brush and just smooth it out. But of course, we don't have to do only that. You know, here you see me, I'm just kind of taking a second flesh color. It's a little bit darker. It doesn't really show up on camera too well, but it's a slightly darker. And I'm just using that to feather this line out a little farther. You just kind of keep working with it until it feels not too abrupt, but like it matches into the the general flesh tone. Right. And if you ever go too far, you can just go back to whatever your flesh tone mix was like the gray I use for the most of the flesh. You just pull that right in there. Now, we can also tint the flesh in some interesting other colors. Dead flesh will have big patches of rot or death or something like that. There's not an active circulatory system in this guy, keeping this flesh healthy. Right. So here I've taken some of that permanent green light. I've just dropped it down there on the on the sort of reverse shadow. And now I'm going to wipe most of it off. You'll even see that I, you know, use little white spirits there to kind of soften even some more of it up and then pull a little bit more of it off because I just want it to be a hint. Again, you can do as much of this sort of thing as you want. You can see, you'll see me scatter this color around kind of all over him in different places. Again, just making the flesh components feel slightly different. We can also just add kind of bloody bruising. That's what I'm doing right now. Any kind of interesting glaze color can be fantastic to add to the edge of these stitches. So in this case, I've picked a nice alizarin crimson thin to that down. Or actually, I think this is cadmium red, but either one would work. And just doing the same thing again. And you notice I just add that nice red tone to the edge of that bruising, just making it feel like there's a little bit of a like a bloody freshness to that to that to that flesh piece there. Right. And then finally, I'm just reinforcing the shadow because I wasn't quite happy with that. Again, one of the best parts about oils is that I can go in and do this. I can just keep working any number of times over what I was doing, just smooth and stuff out, making it easy. And you notice by doing this, I've also softened up the extreme of that green color since there's a little bit of purple in here. And that's going to sort of naturally counteract that green. Easy. Now I've reinforced the shadow under the belly. I've made that skin feel rotten and kind of bloated. I've created nice interesting colors. And so here you can see all around the mini where I continued that activity. You'll notice by the way in all the places where sort of the pipes and things connect to his skin. I did the same thing with the red. I put a little cadmium right around there and then feathered that out to make it look like it was swollen, bloody, that kind of thing. Now comes the magic trick with the stitches and the little barbells. So here I have some deck tan just very fresh with a little flow improver. And I'm trying to put this on camera in a place where you can see it in a very sharp brush. And I'm just going to trace a line right in the middle of all of these little barbells. I'm going to create the stitch. And just look how instantly awesome that feels because there's suddenly a lot less black. Now I went for real big stitches because this guy's super big and I wanted to begin on this kind of a fun cartoony type paint job. But if you don't want to be that big, you would just do tiny little barbells. And there I was just retracing some of the edges. Sometimes if you get a little too squirrely with the white like I did, that's okay. It's no problem. You just go through and you trace a nice thin line of that black right back around it. But now I'm just continuing the same thing, just adding in those stitches. Key is don't try to do too many. Like you'll see me do three, four, maybe five stitches at most. And then I'll go back and freshen up my paint. My paint is just fresh deck tan right on my wet palette, mixed with a little bit of flow improver. Then I can touch that up, maybe mix the deck tan with a little bit of white or something like that and really pop them out at the high points of the stitches. So now that he's all stitched up. See, doesn't feel great. Like you can see those. Let's just feel like nice three dimensional stitches. Got to sell the illusion just a little bit more though. So on the bottom of each of those holes that are punched in his skin, I've taken a light flesh tone. And I'm just going to make a little underlight right underneath each hole, not on the top side. We're not edge highlighting. We're just creating the illusion of three dimensionality that that hole is physically there. And but it's just like think of when you've painted a cloak, and you've got holes in that cloak, like an, you know, a night haunt cloak or something like that. You know, any kind of ghost, and they have holes in their cloaks. And you highlight you put a little edge highlight on the bottom side of that. And it just feels so great because it's what our eyes expect the light to just kind of catch along that edge. I'll mention I did again, let the oil paints dry in between here. It sounds like there's a lot of drying time with this. But I mean, keep in mind, if you know, depending on the your average time you paint per day, if you can sit down for a half hour 45 minutes, you can do huge amounts of stuff with oil paints. You let it sit there when you come back the next day to paint the next night, if you're somebody who only has like 30 minutes to an hour a day, it's going to be dry. So you're not losing anything. If you're trying to batch paint a bunch, then it's super easy. You do, you know, a bunch of dudes, I was actually working on my other giants at the same time I was working on this guy. Final touches and steps here. So now I have some burnt red from pro acrylics nice deep red color. And wherever the stitches form a tri-state connection, or or I got a little I got a little fat with my black line. I'm just dropping a little bit of that burnt red right in there. So it looks like there's just some fresh blood seeping to the surface kind of scabbin over the area, right? So like he's not as tightly stitched together as he should be. And then on a couple of them, I just take a nice, again, sharp brush, take that burnt red, and pull a single line straight down, right down. Okay. What I'm going to do there, then, once I have my lines established with the burnt red, is then I'm going to get out our old friend blood for the blood god. There it is. And we're just going to trace a nice thin line over that. And you see me touch a little bit of the blood into the hole to make it look fresh. Like there's a little bit of fresh blood seeping through. I'm going to trace my burnt red down. Now why do I do the burnt red first so that the blood doesn't seem to pale as it would if I put it right over top of a very pale flesh. It will feel fake. It will feel too fresh. Blood oxidizes quickly. It needs to feel a little deeper, a little darker. So that's it. There you go. A couple images will be coming up of him all finished, but I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, go ahead and drop those down in the comments below. I always appreciate those questions. But as always, I very, very much appreciate you watching this one. And we'll see you next time.