 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we return to our exploring colors series and today we are going to explore the color orange. This is a fun one. I've been waiting on this one because orange is such a wonderfully interesting unique color. I mean that's what I say at the start of all of these. In this case it's very true. So let's talk about orange. Let's start of course with the history. The color orange has been with the human race for quite a long time. Obviously there are many things in nature that are naturally orange, flowers, animals, we see hues of it in things like the sunset. So whether it be flora, fauna, or just the kind of world around us, there tends to be quite a lot of the color orange in our daily life. Now that being said, orange is obviously in some degree a combination of red and yellow. However, interestingly with the color orange, we recognize a very thin spectrum of space as actually being orange. That is to say the human eye and how we kind of are trained to think about orange is actually a fairly narrow band compared to some other colors when you look at things like green, which has such a wide spectrum of different colors that can infuse it. If a little too much red gets in the orange, we very quickly recognize it as more red. If too much yellow gets in, we'll very quickly recognize it as more of an ochre or a desaturated yellow than we will as actually true orange. So where orange comes in is not as much in variation of hue, but more in variation of value. So I have a selection of oranges here and when we start over here on the Kalahari orange from Scale 75, this is a very deep, desaturated orange. You can see this compared to something like our Troll Slayer Flesh from Games Workshop. When you look at that, you can see just the incredible difference there in saturation. Generally, you would get to something like this by adding something that's going to desaturate it down. So in other words, blue when we'll talk about that in a moment. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you go to Citadel's Luganath orange or something like whatever this however you say this word, which was one of their edge paints, I quite like it because it's a really, really highly desaturated orange in the other direction. So this is tinted up usually by adding white, so you can see there, right? In other words, just as you would add white to green to make a sort of minty green, that's the same thing we see happening here with this one. So what's interesting about orange is we tend to get different oranges by either shade, so that can be the addition of a deep black or deep brown, effectively darkening color, by desaturation, i.e. the addition of blue to desaturate the color, or tinting, which is the addition of white to desaturate the color in the opposite direction. The other cool thing about orange is that orange is one of these great colors where you can have a true fluorescent. So this is war color's fluorescent orange, which is one of my favorites, but there are many others out there. And you notice just how eye-grabbing this is, I mean, it almost seems to glow, right? And this is one of the fantastic properties about orange. So the use of the word orange didn't come about until the early 19th century, that's to say in English, when actual orange trees, the fruit showed up being imported from Asia. Up till then, certainly the color was recognized. It was just the word was generally just, there was a lot of different words and lots of different languages sourced in Europe, but most of them translated to some kind of red-yellow. Once the fruit showed up, the fruit came first, then the color. So that's kind of where we get orange. And all the different European languages all have different derivations from the original Portuguese sailors who imported the tree. Orange is a very popular color in a lot of paintings, so especially when we go through the 19th century, a lot of especially impressionist painters used orange very heavily, because the interesting part about orange is that it's always going to draw the eye. It is naturally eye-catching. And so this is a very important point we need to understand. Just as I often say with yellow, it's the same with orange. When you use a bright color like this, a highly saturated orange, something like either the, this is Tiamat orange from Fantasy Games, from Scale 75, or Troll Slayer Orange, you need to be aware of the power you're putting into your miniature, because it either needs to be the main color. So it's quite dominant all around and naturally in balance. Or it needs to be used in very sparingly as a pop color and then balanced equally around the miniature. Because if you don't do that, our eyes are naturally attracted to the color orange. That's why it stands out from everything else. That's why it's become such an important part of so many different aspects of our society. Lots of Eastern traditions, the garb or robes that would be worn will be orange. And you'll see prisoners outfits often being orange so that if they escape, they're easy to see. Hunters vests are often orange. Warning signs, you know, all these kinds of things often incorporate the color orange because your eye is quite naturally drawn to it. When you're looking across a landscape of greens and blues and browns, orange will naturally stand out. So for the same reason we use orange like that in those purposes to draw the eye, to make sure it's impossible to miss, right? For the same reason we need to be very careful when we use it on our miniatures because if we use it out of balance, then it's obviously going to be, it's going to throw the miniature into a sort of uncomfortable feeling. It will feel off in a very fast way. Now orange, our common thought about orange is that it's complementary color is blue. If you look at a sort of traditional red, blue, green color wheel, this is kind of what would be your traditional opposite. Red opposed by green, yellow by violet, orange by blue. Kind of simple. We all have this concept in our head. However, this actually isn't the complementary color of orange, true orange. The true complementary color of orange is actually blue-green. And when I put these two next to each other, look at the difference in impact. So let's start here. Look at those two next to each other. Kind of just get the sense of it and how much each tends to impact you. Now look at those two next to each other. Each feels so much brighter when they're next to each other. This shouldn't be too much of a surprise if you've watched, if you've looked at a movie poster in the past 20 years, you'll notice that the poster is going to have huge amounts of orange or oftentimes very orange tinted human skin, if they have people's faces contrasted with blue-green with teal. So if you're really looking for a miniature that if you want to have two colors that really, really, really pop in as far as like you want to make something really jump out, then orange and blue-green are as a place you can go. But then again, one of them needs to be used as primary and one of them needs to be used very much as a secondary color. So let's say you use this about 10% as much as you use this or vice versa. Okay. When orange gets on miniatures, so here's from my recent serif on project, you can see here I've got my old school slon and he's got some orange and blue of course because, and you'll notice I do have it more into that sort of blue-green spectrum there. But I love orange. I wanted to do this whole army in orange. Since I thought about doing the serif on it seemed great fun. I really do love working in the color orange especially on this. Orange when we're in miniature painting is going to highlight in a couple of ways. So when we do increase tint we can either have the inclusion of something like a white or a pale color, say something like a pale sand. Okay. At which point we will end up with a brighter color like the Luganath orange. It will appear somewhat weaker or less impactful. This can actually be helpful. By desaturating it you reduce the sort of oppressiveness of the orange. When you shade orange it's generally going to go into either a very desaturated color like this or it's going to go into brown. So if you think about something like rust, rust is a very naturally good example of how orange shading actually works. We're all used to seeing the color orange in our life whenever we see rust. Very fresh rust will often, old and yet fresh rust. I'll just say something that's an old item that has a lot of fresh rust on it. We'll often have this orange tint but it will not all be this color. It will disappear down into a sort of deep brown color with still hints of that true orange in there but it'll feel much darker overall. So moving the color into that brown spectrum is how you can get very natural shading. I should also say that just as we talked about how you can desaturate orange by adding blue so too can you shade orange by adding blue. So let's take a look at what this actually means when it comes to a miniature. For this we're going to go ahead and just use some simple troll slayer orange. We'll keep it nice and in the middle of the spectrum. When we look at our basic orange, one reason people often have a challenge in applying orange to a miniature is because they'll put it over black or something like this like a zenithal and immediately what's going to happen is it's not going to look super great especially if it's thin. Now one of the reasons that's happening is because all of these colors that are on here right now that are on this miniature are cold. They all have blue in them. So we often think when we're applying a black primer or a black paint that we're using black but as a point of fact we're actually usually applying a very very very dark blue and blue is obviously part of the complementary color to orange. It also naturally desaturates it. What that ends up causing is the orange to feel very weak, the orange to feel like it lacks punch and impact and if you've ever tried to get a really bright strong orange over a color like that and been unable to do it, that's largely likely because you were painting over something that sneakily enough had some blue mixed into it. You didn't realize it, you thought you were going over black or gray but of course it was actually blue. Now if on the other hand we take an ivory color, so this is the same pale sand that I just used. And we run some of that down first. So let's just make that area nice and warm. We'll leave the bottom parts shaded. My very old empire spearman here, I don't even know where this guy is from. Maybe he's the new one, I don't know. I haven't bought an empire fig in many many a year. If we warm up our base tones, then what we're going to find is when we apply the orange it has much more impact and you can see as I've gone over here, notice how wherever any part of the base coat shows through, which again is a blue-black or a blue-gray, notice how much weaker that orange looks. Look at how desaturated and sort of dead that looks. That's not grabbing your eye. That doesn't feel like this, right? It's a big difference in effect. And that's largely because you've put it over something that has naturally desaturated it. So for example, when I painted my serif on army that I knew was going to be all in orange, I didn't prime them in black and white with a zenithal. I primed them in brown and ivory, with a little bit of like a light rust color as my interference in the middle, as my ambient gray lighting. What that meant was then I had naturally warm colors underneath the orange so that when the orange went over that luminosity, if you will, the brightness of the color could shine through because all of our acrylic paints are naturally transparent and that really helped that shine. So let's look back here again. It looks like our ivory is pretty much dry. We can work over the previous orange. I could come in here and I can keep putting on layers of this orange, and eventually I could work it up to be bright. But that leads us to the other problem specific to orange paint that isn't necessarily the case with orange in nature. So the first artificial orange pigments were introduced again in the early 19th century. I'm sorry, I think I said earlier the fruit was named in the early 19th century. The fruit came over before that. I apologize, that was the 17th century. Please don't um, actually me. The pigment, the first artificial orange pigment was created in the early 19th century. There we go. That's what led to it suddenly becoming very popular in painting. And what we're dealing with now is often still a lot of different pigments. There are multiple different pigments that can be used for oranges. And so it depends on whether you have an artist grade paint or not and on and on and on. But the true orange pigments will generally in paint give you a true or orange than just mixing red and yellow. So even though orange is one of the tough colors to get a true color out of if you're using a limited palette. Because true orange artificially, that is to say what we use in paint is best when it comes from an actual orange pigment. And again, there are, you know, there are many out there. You can, it depends on kind of exactly where you get your particular paint from that you'll find the different pigments. Okay, so like there's cadmium oranges and there's all sorts of different ones. Okay, so now that our ivory is dry, let's take some of that orange there. Same exact troll slayer. And let's run that over the whole arm. Oh, and yes, so the point being is because orange pigment is so transparent, it naturally shows a huge amount of the color that's underneath it. This is just the nature of orange paints. Now there are some out there that cover better than others, of course, with everything, the more highly pigmented a paint, often the more intense the color will be. So if you move to something like a pro acryl or a, or a chimera colors, you'll have a naturally stronger orange, but it's still going to be one of the more transparent colors in the line. And that's just because orange paint is pretty transparent. Just like yellow, it doesn't have a lot of the elements of pigment that make it highly opaque. The difference between painting over a white and painting over a gray or a black or something that has blue in it, because again, the nature of how we mix pigment. I'm not saying that all of the color black in nature has blue in it. I'm saying that when we need to mix paint, we can't just put the magical Photoshop dropper over a thing in nature and then 3D print the color. We can't use real pigments. And so oftentimes to make things like black and gray, we're using some kind of blue pigment mixed in there. So as that both dries, you can really see the difference there, right? Especially if I put the original color up against it. So there's two coats of the Troll Slayer over the just straight over there and you can see its comparison. Okay, whereas if we come over here, look at how much brighter that is, how much closer to the actual color, right? We turn both of those toward the light. Look at the difference you get in just how luminous one is over the other. So the take home point here is when you're working with orange, you always want to make sure that you're working over a warm base color. Even if you're just, if you don't have an airbrush and you're not doing a zenithal, that's fine. Just make sure that you have some kind of warm ivory as your rattle can primer. There's lots of bone colors and ivory colors out there in rattle cans. Whether it's the stuff you're buying from GW or Army Painter or just going to the hardware store, there's plenty of warm whites out there you can get. It's a very common color to find in a rattle can. So the dividends it will pay in your final effect is so massive. Now, the last point I want to make about orange is that orange is a really magical color because you paint with orange even more than you think, even if you don't actually use the color. Here's my palette. It might be too reflective, so I'll turn it like this. There we go. Because Caucasian skin tone, in fact, most skin tones are mixed from orange. So when I take the orange and put it here, get a little bit of that out, get most of that out of my brush and then let's go ahead and grab some of my, again, this is my pale sand. And when I start to mix that into the orange, what I'll get is a Caucasian flesh tone. And just to sell that point, in case you think I'm lying, you're a liar. Let's go ahead and put it on there. You can see you get a pretty pale, but believable Caucasian skin tone. Now, you can, just as I made this with a simple inclusion of orange and ivory or white, you can do the same thing with, by adding some red back in, one of the constituent colors, you can get a more pink flesh, right? If you add a little bit more orange back in, you'll get a deeper, more ruddy kind of flesh. If we take just a tiny amount of blue and add it in, we'll get a colder flesh. So this is more of a desaturated shadow flesh in there. That's one of the reasons why blue tends to look great. I think Van Gogh famously said that there is no orange without the color blue, because his paintings would often have both in there. And you can see how now I'm getting a much more shaded flesh. More blue I introduce, more shadow it becomes. So the sort of summary points of orange as we wrap up here is one orange has a smaller range of hues that we recognize as orange, but has a lot of different power through its values. Whether it's really intensely pigmented, where you've got a fluorescent, or you're using actual fluorescent pigments, or whether you have the both ends of the spectrum where it's desaturated either through tint or shadow. So orange can deliver a wide range of emotions. It tends to feel eye-catching, exciting, and it tends to give you the impression of life of fall, of a lot of different things. It's not blood, it's not red, but it feels very natural. It is one of those colors because we see it so much in nature. It has a lot of connections to us. When you see pumpkins, when you see carrots, when you see orange flowers blooming, or orange as a major color in the night sky, you tend to remember it because of the impact of the color orange and how it works in the human brain. When you're painting orange, remember going over your black or gray primer is going to do nothing but desaturate the orange and weaken its effect. If you go over something bright, like ivory, you will have a much stronger orange to show for it. Orange is complementary, we think of as blue, but it's actually blue-green, but as a point of all that being said, you can use sort of standard blue as a shadow color to desaturate it and bring it down and create deeper, more realistic cold shadows in warm orange. You can also add brown or brown tints. Think of like a deep rust color. Old rust would be a great shadow color for your orange. When you're trying to highlight, you want to be in two different ways. You can either go straight with something like the integration of a very warm ivory-like pale sand, or you can simply introduce more of the pale sand over top, like if I wanted to really highlight areas, maybe this part should be very bright at the top of the shoulder or something. You could put a little bit of thin pale sand on there, or ivory color, right? And much like I did with the red, instead of trying to mix them, because then you are going to fundamentally change the property of the color, because orange is so naturally transparent, I can just take my existing orange, thin it down to a nice glaze. You could also use an orange ink or an orange contrast paint, and as a point of fact, the orange contrast paint is excellent for this. I really like the orange contrast paint, but you could then just run that over the top, and then what you'll end up getting is a nice brighter orange. It'll still show the ivory through, but it won't completely ruin your color. It might take one or two glazes, but you'll get there because the color is so naturally transparent. It'll still show the brightness that the ivory brings through without allowing it to really change fundamentally the property of the color orange. So, there you go. That's Exploring Colors Orange. Lots of fun stuff in this particular color. I hope you enjoyed this one. This one was a real joy to make. We're going to continue working our way around. Don't worry, this video series will go on. There are lots more colors that I want to talk about. I've been focusing on what we think of as the color wheel hues, but we're going to be branching out soon beyond that. If you liked this, hey, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got any suggestions or questions, feel free to drop those down below. Always appreciate those and respond to every comment. But as always, I thank you very much for watching this one, and we'll see you next time.