 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about something pretty important. Why it's okay not to be happy with your work. Recently as you know I've been working my way through my rat cast trying to get my army ready and this is an army I'm taking to a display standard. I put a lot of time into every figure. It came time to do my night Vexelor and that's basically a banner bearer guy and his standard banner comes with some engraved detail. I don't like engraved detail in banners so I cut it off and shaped a piece of plastic card to be my new banner. It was blank and I thought fantastic. I'll do my own symbols, my own iconography. I'll make an awesome banner. I was inspired by this piece of art what you see up on the screen right now. I just think this is the coolest thing. I think the Celestin Prime looks amazing but it would be very hard for me to translate this into something the size of basically an inch by two inches at most. So I decided to just draw on the color palette and make my own banner with my own icons and images and things on there employing different freehand and that but that general color tone to a cool effect. In the end I wasn't happy with what I came to but that's all right because I learned a lot and I'm going to take you on this journey with me give you some tips on freehand and how to work your own banners and importantly how to know when it's just time to be satisfied and move on. So let's see what this journey looked like. Let's get into it. The strict technomancer that is Vinci V. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci V style. All right we're going to begin today by just doing some some quick color down on this banner. What I'm trying to do here is set an atmosphere a tone. I don't actually care about how smooth it looks and in fact I want it to be rough for reasons you'll see later. I'm not using an airbrush just some mix of yellow and white because I'm trying to set an overall ambiance. That's the part I'm drawing of inspiration from the original art piece and part of my goal in laying this down is just to create some interesting transitions throughout the banner. Now you'll notice it's very streaky that's okay don't worry that's going to have value later. What I effectively want to do is have this light from below thing reaching up just like in that original image and then spreading out to sort of darkness on the sides and fading in the light from above. I think oftentimes we try to get very smooth colors out of our you know out of our paint and most of the time that's usually the right answer but just as though sometimes we want to be rough to create textures with things like fabric we can use brush strokes and things like that to communicate visual information. So here what I'm doing is I'm laying down the airbrush color over the top but a little bit of that of those streaks are still going to show through and what it will effectively do is it will make the banner itself feel as though the light has rays to it as though it's traveling in a direction. It will create movement within the image and that's much more visually interesting than just the flat perfectly smooth colors. So sometimes roughly sketching with your brush first and then going to the airbrush can be a great tool. Now I decided this was way too annoying to do on the pole still so I took the snap the banner off the pole and now I'm just going to do it here because I have much more control for the freehand and here's where you see me making my first mistake. I'm doing the same custom icon, link is up in the corner if you want to see how I do these but I'm making it way too small. Now I end up adjusting a little bit you'll see in between this image and the next but right away I should know that the golden rule is that freehand images within negative space need to be at about 50% of the size but I'm just laying it down. What I want to talk about here with freehand is when you're doing complicated freehand the key is start from the simplest shapes as I did just a little cross and then I connected that to the circle and then I'm making the arrow at the bottom but break freehand down into its simplest constituent shapes and then fill everything else in. So as I filled in that shape can make my icon for my rack cast I then wanted to do just a little outlining. Now I think a lot of people find doing this kind of edge highlighting on nothing that's kind of tracing a thin line to be very difficult and honestly sometimes it can be even I have challenges with it but there's a simple trick. If you are trying to do a thin line push towards the inside so you mess it up a little bit into the darker area there into the area you're trying to outline and then go back with your original color i.e that dark sea blue black that I'm using here and fill in and push towards the edge. I actually have a video about this linked up in the top. Now the storm cast the new storm cast the thunder strike storm cast have this like gem iconography about them and somewhere on all of the new storm cast is a little blue gem and it's always a diamond gem like a diamond shape and I thought okay cool let's translate that over into the banner so I'm going to put a little diamond in the normal of my or in the middle of my normal symbol and one of the ways to creating the freehand of a three-dimensional object like a diamond like this where it's meant to be reflecting light is you need to create the planes of light that separate it from what's underneath a little four part four facet gem like this is very easy one of your planes is capturing the most light the opposite side should also be quite bright and then the two opposing sides need to be varying levels of darkness with one being quite dark usually toward the top and one being just moderately dark down at the bottom now we come to the part of this I actually really like and I'm really proud of and that's the lightning and I thought this would be a great thing to share with people so lightning I see a lot of people freehand lightning often it doesn't look great uh but the key to lightning is to be one extremely thin so I'm using some uh white and blue paint mixed with flow improver to keep it moving and moving nice and thin off the tip of a very sharp brush the next thing you want to think about with your lightning is it needs to be directional it always travels in one direction it's striking to somewhere but it does not take the shortest path to get there it is circuitous it has squiggles and wiggles and double backs and so you want to be shaking your brush almost as you're doing this the next thing you want to think about is that lightning branches so it doesn't have just one bolt it often has little tiny streaks that'll come off of it little extra things that'll be attracted uh to other you know things it's wanting to strike against and so you need to squiggle the brush and then make little branches think like a tree of it coming off of there and just squiggling and wiggling and doubling back in other directions the final and most important part about lightning is you want to make sure that you vary the pressure of your brush slightly as you're doing the squiggle wiggle that is to say some parts of the bolt will be thicker than others and so we do that in multiple ways the first thing we do is we push down on the brush more and then lift up and push down and lift up as we're squiggling and wiggling to create different thicknesses of the brush stroke but also then we're going to go back at the end you'll see here in just a moment and we're going to start filling in the areas and what I tend to focus is wherever there is a branch so wherever the bolt is breaking off into other smaller bolts that's where we're going to then go in and fill it in you can also put secondary bolt lines that are very thin next to the actual one it sort of has this feeling of breaking out everywhere now here I'm using a light blue green and I'm just giving this nice glaze I am not glazing over the bolt directly sometimes I go under it sometimes I go over it sometimes I go above it in any case though I'm just trying to add a very slight I mean this is a filter this is almost having no effect and that's because I just want to add the concept of the blue here not to turn the thing blue it's about capturing the ionization in the air now it's time to start making up for mistakes because I have all this open space on the sides I thought cool let's do some banners now doing a little banner and making it look three-dimensional is actually very easy it's effectively just copying what's modeled onto a lot of things in 40k and stuff like that but you roughly make a shape have it fold back on itself and then go the opposite direction and you can see the shape here notice the first time I painted it it was almost invisible to the underlying colors that's because I was using a very thin very neutral watered down paint to just block in the rough shape then if I need to make adjustments I can do so and covering that paint up is easy to make it three-dimensional we're going to need to create shadow underneath it an occlusion shadow effectively so here on the lower sides I'm taking some dark sea blue but you can use any dark color and just tracing a shadow underneath to oppose the shadow we have to have a light so on the top sides I'm taking basically a pure white and I'm edge highlighting the top edges of all of the banners this makes it feel as though it's three-dimensional your brain resolves this as a three-dimensional shape because there's light hitting the top and a shadow underneath for bonus points you can actually take some very thin to down color of whatever your shadow is and glaze them underneath underneath the the lower area I'm then just adding a little bit of contrast and tonal variation over the piece where in the upper areas have a little more brightness never going up to pure white but being a little brighter and the lower areas having a little darkness never going down to the same black that's underneath it but just being a deeper tone that then creates the variation of both hue and value that we would expect across this surface now the next thing I'm doing is just making sure that the top has some very thin line that shows it separate and I'm using a light warm brown color just extremely razor thin on the top side because there's no shadow there it's just a little bit of a difference we almost want to communicate the concept that it's lifted off of the thing but we want to be very thin seeing there was still too much negative space I decided to make some gems and at this point I'm really stretching because what I should have thought is oh this is wrong and started doing a border or something but I didn't these gems are done in the exact same method as the original gem in the center of the thing but again it was just about filling the space and trying to make more visual elements that were interesting to the viewer right here I'm going to jump in to say I'm breaking several of my own cardinal rules on freehand I've talked about in previous videos which is use the negative space but because I had these different color tones a couple of which I don't need I ended up shrinking things down smaller than they should have been this is a mistake but I don't really catch it until the end when I take in the whole piece and realize it's not quite living up to where it should be and I should have made some different choices but again that's okay because sometimes you've got a sticky finger in the light socket to learn so what should I have done differently well I should have had a border around it that was my start most historical banners have some kind of border because again it frames it against the negative space of the rest of the world and against the banner itself I also should have expanded the size of the central icon from there honestly I should have planned a little better I kind of went into this with a different idea ended up scrapping it and then I was going on the fly and what I should have done was stop slow down and make a new plan so let's talk about the most important element of this when do you decide to stop and accept and when do you keep pushing in this case I'm making an army for a tournament and I'm really up against it on time so I have to accept this and move on and that's the reality a lot of us have many things we're trying to paint for various reasons we have to move on we have to accept it and that's okay if you have as the other problem is sometimes you just get frustrated you're done with a piece and you want to move on there's nothing wrong with that either put it to the side and work on something new but take in those learnings if you do want to keep pushing though then keep pushing the point of this is to say neither of these is a hundred percent correct there's no one answer the point is to do what's right for you at that moment is it right for you to keep working to keep pushing to bang your head against the wall if it's a competition piece that's probably the right answer if however you want to get the rest of your army painted if you've got a tournament if you want to just keep learning and painting new stuff then put it to the side it's fine the goal is to be satisfied but never happy to look at the mistakes you made take them in understand what you could have done differently and not make those mistakes again in the future so as I finish up this banner let's go back to the table and see what kind of summary thoughts we have for everything so what did I do right well I think the lightning looks good I think the change on the icon actually works and it really there are elements of it that I enjoy and then I think are cool what don't I like well it doesn't fill up enough of the space and it has too many colors it really doesn't need the yellow in the end I should have brought that all to red that also would have made the lightning more visible so oftentimes our projects that we're not happy with don't be beaten down by that it's okay we're all going to have them I've been hobbying for years and years 20 years I've painted thousands of figures and still this happens to me so when it happens to you don't get down don't let yourself get beaten up think what did I do wrong or what don't I like and what can I do in the future so I'm going to show you some pictures of it of the final model it's still fun and I'm still proud to have it in my army and most importantly I'm happy that I learned the lessons that I can carry forward to the next time so thank you very much for watching this final shots like I said are coming up give this a like if you liked it subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future if you've got questions drop those down below I always answer every question and comment all right thank you for watching this one and we'll see you next time