 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. I apologize in advance for the clickbaity title, but I promise I'm going to do my best to make it worth it. I wanted to make sure people saw this video, and if I called it Watch Vince Paint a Shoulder Pad for 20 minutes, I just don't think as many people would watch it. Now, I'm standing here in front of these cases. These hold a lot of the display pieces I've painted over the years and entered into competitions. Throughout that time, I've learned that there's one secret above all else to painting a great display piece or entering something you're proud of in competition. That one secret is futzing. What does that mean? Well, I'll show you. The strict techno-mancer that is VinCV. Let us get into the technique and learn it VinCV style. So before we get into talking about what futzing is and why it's the secret to display painting, it's probably a good idea to define display painting and talk about what the heck I'm even doing here. So what I'm doing here is painting a single shoulder pad. And yes, this whole video is going to be painting this shoulder pad. This shoulder pad probably took me about 45 minutes to an hour to do completely something in that range. And it is doing red non-metallic metal, which is a very complicated color scheme. So this video is also going to teach you how to do red non-metallic metal at the same time. It's a two for one. I really had to make it worth it for the clickbait title. The paints will roll up on the screen so you can see exactly what I'm doing and what I'm painting with. But notice that my recipe here is very simple. I have three colors. Everything else is a mixture. Display painting is effectively prioritizing quality over time. Now I have a whole video that talks about the different types of painting, tabletop and display and competition. You can find that linked up in the corner right now. But the basic idea of prioritizing quality over time means I will keep working on an area or on this miniature or on any particular blend or technique or effect whatever I'm doing until it looks the way I want it to, regardless of the amount of time it takes. And this is actually very different than how most of us normally paint. Certainly it's different than how I normally paint. Because we all have lives and things going on, partners, children, jobs, things that demand our time and we want to feel the reward of a completed project. So the general idea of simply continuing to work on something endlessly until it looks exactly how we want is often very foreign. And I will say it isn't the way you should paint most of the time. It's a bad way to paint most of the time. It's stressful and it is slow. And honestly, it isn't how most things need to look. If you're painting your models for an army or something similar or just to get them done, or if you haven't developed your muscles, your painting muscles up to the level, then there's a certain limited response you can get. There's a limited value you can get out of putting more time into things. But in short, it's about pushing every element of the miniature to its absolute limit. And when I say the secret is fuzzing, which I know I have yet to define, don't worry, we're almost there, that doesn't mean you don't need to know all of the fundamentals, lighting the properties of your paint, brush control, color, you do. You do need to know all that stuff. But those are all table stakes. Those are all things you should learn over time. And my honest answer is if you don't know those things, you are not capable of display painting because those are simply the cost for entry. But once you do know those things, how do you actually then do display painting? What is the secret? This is where fuzzing comes in. Notice that this entire video up to this point, I was just layering progressively lighter colors on. Now it's time for the fuzzing. That was effectively base coating. Now it's time to begin the careful process of refining and repeating. Fuzzing in the end is just reacting to what you paint and what you have painted and continuing to repeat and refine until everything looks the way you want it to. It's often working in smaller and smaller and smaller areas. Focusing on little tiny blends. Working on individual reflections, shapes, things like that. Focusing on not just the whole shoulder pad, but each reflection, each reflection point, the edges, and so on. And so you notice I began there by laying down a glaze over everything to start bringing all of those layers back together. Now I'm using a slightly thicker glaze and creating, still with that same technique, more of an edge to the light. Isn't it fascinating, by the way, how early in the video when I was laying down the dark red, it looked like I had covered almost all of the shoulder pad and yet when I put on the light colored paint, it looked like everything else was black. Colors aren't colors in and of themselves. They don't act in a vacuum. They act next to the other colors. That's why you have to fucks with them. Because even though I built very careful layers, the brighter white pink was so bright, it made even the deep red look indistinguishable from the black. So hence I have to go back in, build out the highlights, broaden them out a little more, expand the red. Finally focusing in on the areas that need attention and then repeating, repeating, repeating. Display painting means often working the same areas two times, three times, five times, ten times. Again, whatever's necessary to achieve the quality level because we're prioritizing quality over time. As I do this, I constantly move the miniature around. I move it in and out of my painting light and view it under different lighting conditions. I view it under different angles. All of that is futzing with it. Because I need to understand how it looks not just in the perfect scenario there, but in different lighting scenarios that it's going to be under. Does it look smooth from one angle, but then when I turn it, you notice there's a blend that's not quite right or whatever the case. Notice how little paint I get on my brush every time I'm working here, I'll often put just the very tip in and just slowly work tiny, tiny, tiny edges. Notice that I edge highlight this thing multiple times over the course of this video. Why? Well, because I need to build in the edges to see how they're going to then show against the rest of the colors. So when I put on the edges, I see other things that then need adjustment. I go back and adjust those, and then I have to refine the edge highlights again. Futsing is just simply reacting. Reacting to what you've already painted, to what it looks like in different angles, to what it looks like in different light, and to what you ultimately wanted it to look like and how the paint dried. And this is another really critical element of futzing. Your paint will look quite different when it is wet than when it is dry. If you've ever painted, I'm working in reds here, if you've ever painted a nice, vibrant red on something, and then you let it sit for a minute and you look at it five minutes later and you're like, oh man, why does that red suddenly look so dull and boring? Well it's because red, when it's glossy and fresh, that glossy tone that's in red makes it really look super red, but when it dries and mattes out, it looks quite dull. So understanding how your paints are going to look differently, when they're wet versus when they're dry, understanding how transparent they are once they're dry, bright colors are especially bad for this, you'll put the paint on, it'll look quite opaque, it will then dry and you'll say, wait a minute, I can see right through that paint. Because part of what was making it look opaque was the reflectiveness of the wet, the wetness reflecting light. The other thing that futzing brings to the table for display painting is just, you notice how much paint I'm putting on here. Now all of this is of course very thin layers, I'm working thin, there's a lot of water in the paint. Notice how many times I glaze this project, basically every time you see me putting on this very wet, thin red, it's yet another glaze. And I probably glaze this shoulder pad, I don't know, ten or a dozen times at least, at least probably more. And my glazes were getting progressively thinner as I was working, oftentimes becoming little more than a filter. You'll see me test it on the back of my hand a few times throughout the video, where it's barely leaving any color behind. And part of what I'm trying to do there is increase the amount of visual information. Futsing around means increasing the visual information that the viewer's eye perceives subconsciously when they look at the piece. The real world is full of all sorts of very detailed, complex visual information. When you look at shirts that have very complicated patterns or unusual lighting schemes, you don't consciously think about all that stuff, but your brain catches all of it, and when you look at something that doesn't have those elements, it appears as unreality. The most classic example of this is of course the human gulf, right? The idea that digitally generated people are sort of lacking a sort of je ne sais quoi over their real world counterparts. And even if you can't identify what it is that's missing, they're so creepy because they're almost human, but there's something just wrong. That's visual information, right? You're not even consciously aware of it, but it's there. Transparent paint builds up layer after layer after layer. I could not get this effect solely through layering alone. It just wouldn't be possible because I have to put the red on the black and then brighter reds on top of those reds and then white reds on top of those and then whites on top of that. Then I have to glaze over, which creates another layer, then more layers of the transparent white red and then more glazes and so on and so forth. By repeating the process, you're not just fixing what you're doing, although that's certainly part of it. Correction is absolutely something that I do throughout this. There's a couple of times where I make small errors. See if you can find them, put them in the comments below if you caught the small errors I made that I had to correct. I'm honestly curious if anybody else notices them. But it's doing more than just correcting errors. Every time I lay down another very thin transparent layer, it's a new effect. It's new visual information that your brain can take in. It makes the layer of paint underneath it look slightly different. And I'm not just repeating those layers over the exact same area. Sometimes I glaze the whole area, sometimes just a small part, sometimes just an edge. Sometimes I work it down to a filter and cover a little more. But because I keep laying down all these different layers in slightly different places, it makes the final product much more complex and visually compelling. We don't add all of this just for our own sake. We do it because it makes it more interesting, more compelling. And it seems to give the eye more interest in actually continuing to look at the thing. Your brain is very good at understanding what's interesting to look at and what's boring to look at. And whether you're consciously aware of it, you'll turn off pretty fast from things that are boring. So what is futzing? It's repeating. It's refining. And it's adding additional tiny corrections and additional layers, zoning in, constantly tightening your focus over and over again, working smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, prioritizing quality over time. In the end, that endurance and that focus is the real secret to display painting. So there you go. I hope you liked. I hope you liked that. If you did, give it a like. I hope this was also helpful in case you wanted to know how to do red non-metallic metal. You got that too. Give me a comment down below if you've got any questions. I certainly appreciate you watching. Subscribe if you haven't already. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one, and we'll see you next time.