 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today it's time to get grimdark. We're going to talk about Blanchitsu, what that style means, and how I execute on it. Let's get into it. So we begin our journey looking at the absolutely beautiful art of John Blanche. Now this art has set the tone for Warhammer for more than 30 years at this point. As we look at it, what I want you to pay attention to are several things. First, the simplicity of it. It uses a limited color palette, we'll talk about exactly what in a moment. Reds are used to pop, to be this exciting color. It's these striking, grimy images. It's what gave birth to grimdark, of course. But really what it is, is the Zorn palette. It's these four colors. And it's putting these to the best possible use to create something larger than the sum of the four colors. So here's the four we're going to use. That's going to be our Zorn palette, Chimera, Red and Black, Proacryl Ivory, and some Scale Yellow Ochre. From these we'll mix everything we need to do this whole project. You can see I've just got four big globs here on my palette. So let's start with the flesh tone, and you can see the exact mix on the screen. It's actually quite fun to mix flesh tones from this palette. They just feel very earthy and natural. It's easy and quick. And flesh figures into a lot of John Blanche's art, though it doesn't feature very heavily on this particular figure. But when you mix your flesh tones, the key is you're really using all four colors. That mostly yellow with some red mix and then white added into the mix gives you your base flesh. The more white you add, the more you get a highlight. And black becomes your natural shadows, adding somewhat of a blue and green tone into it. You can then go back and glaze in things like the reds to add more tones and visual interest of the skin. Let's talk about the whites. So the whites as you saw is mixed from obviously the base ivory, but then also importantly mixing in a little bit of the black and the yellow ochre to cut that. So we're not just making a neutral gray. We're using the yellow ochre, primarily then it's sort of a 50-50 with the yellow ochre and black mix to get more of a shadowed grimy color. Again, everything feels sort of dirty, sort of grimy. And this then gets us into how we're going to paint the majority of this thing. Which as you see here, I'm just using web blending a lot. So I pre-created my colors on the palette there and now we're going to get into it. I've got a big old brush. It's a synthetic brush. It's a cheap brush. And notice how fast I'm working, right? We're just getting that color on there, mixing it all together. I wipey, wipey, wipey my brush over on a paper towel. I'm not putting in water or anything like that. I'm just wiping it off and establishing some base contrast. Everything here needs to be fast and we're using these darker grittier colors because it makes it feel like it's more in-world, lived. These are characters that have experienced something that are out there, that are on a campaign that are part of this grimy gritty world. There's my red mix. It's basically red into the black and then we mix in a little bit of a mix of the yellow, ochre, and white to get a highlight. So we didn't just get a straight pink. Now here I start by applying the deepest color, but the technique remains much the same. We're going to work fast. We're going to work wet. You'll notice that I'm using a pretty healthy amount of paint. These are somewhat thinned just because of their presence on the wet palette, but I'm not really thinning them anymore. I'm just relying on the brush, mixing it all together, smoothing it out to do the work. And then I work my way up from my heavily black influenced red up into a little more 50-50 mix, and then finally into the pure Camara red. Truly my favorite red around there. It's called the red, and I really love that name. It's absolutely wonderful. Now often what I'll do after I get all the colors applied is get a little wipey, wipey on the brush, just clean the brush off on a paper towel, moist paper towel, something like that. Go back in and then just smooth all those colors together. Pull them together. Do a little basically dry smoothing of the still very wet paint. We're working fast, and you can see not perfect blends, but they're good enough. We'll bring it all together in a later stage. So now it's time for the black. This is usually the easiest part of it. This is sort of almost like the negative color, right? It's the opposite of color in our Grim Dark Blanchetsu style. We're not pushing a huge amount of contrast into the black. We're going to let the color palette itself do a lot of work for us, but I am still working in, you know, it's just some of that ivory right into the top of the black there, and then I'm going to get some more of that black gray on my palette and just again work it together. So there's still contrast, and it's a very important step. We push up the highlights more than we're worried about the shadows. So I'm not trying to establish the full run of contrast with things like the white or even the red right here in step one, because I know that later I'm going to be adding my greasy grimy step that's going to be adding a lot of depth to everything we're doing. So here with the black, I'm focusing mainly on just straight black then with additions of both the yellow ochre and ivory, trying to get something that's a little more, again, warm as a highlight, feeling like it's very much in that same environment as everything else. This sort of warm, lived in dusty, dirty world, all right. Okay, the other thing I'm going to do before we get on is go ahead and hit some of the metallics. So I'm just going to get those all nice and base coated. We don't need to go too much farther, though I'll show you as usual in a later step. We are going to focus on some highlights, not just that. This is actually a mixture I've come to really like that is Vallejo metal color gold and copper mixed three to two, then with a very small amount of Green Stuff World pure metal antique gold pigment mixed into it. It's just the combination is magic. It presents a wonderful pop and gold. Then we're going to get the steel parts of base coat. This is Vallejo metal color steel, nothing too exciting here. The key is, again, I'm not going crazy trying to get every single little detail in something. So for example, I'm going to paint the little grenade on her waist in the same metal, right. It's not going to be a different bright color. It's not going to be a different material. It's just metal. The barrel of the gun, the plasma gun metal, right, we're sticking to these base materials because the other notable thing about John Blanche's art is that the detail is all there. But again, the color palette is simplistic. There's not 50 different colors going on in all these details. The world itself has brought all of the elements together through the color palette. We're expressing something about what's going on in the world. Here I'm taking some silver and just running some quick highlights over both the steel and the gold, hitting those important parts that I want to be highlighted. Again, I'm focusing on the highlights only because we're going to get into the shadows in just a moment when we get to the exciting part of how we get truly grim dark. All right, we've got a nice pig. It's perfectly fine. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not really grim dark yet. When we look at Blanche's art, there's a lot of grittiness to it. So here I've got some shadow brown oil paint. I made a very thin wash. I also have just the paint and then you'll notice a little pool of just regular old paint spirits there too. Now I'm actually going to work mostly with the paint itself just being kind of liquidy. I want it to be somewhat thick like I'm not holding back here. Do not hold back on the oils. Slop that stuff on in the areas you know are going to have some shadows in it. So as I push it all around the gold in the blood chain or whatever it is, even though that's not a real thing of the sword, all the deep recesses of the cloak up and under on her robe, right? Then I sort of thin it way down with a little bit of wash and get it into the staff. So it picks out those letters that are on the staff. Do you want to work a little bit thinner if you have very, very thin recessed? In other words, areas where you'd use a more traditional wash. And then I touch some of the edges of my thick oil paint with some of the more white spirits influenced stuff just to get the edges thin. Then we let it sit. Let it sit for about five minutes. Then we get out my makeup sponges. These are big makeup sponges that you can get them from Amazon or a dollar store or anywhere you want. They're just literally little triangle sponges for pulling off makeup. And I'm just sweeping at the miniature. Now you'll notice I often turn the little makeup sponge and use a different side of the thing. The longer you let it sit, the more you will influence and the harder it will be to just pull off. The more it will tint and filter the colors underneath it regardless of what you want. But you notice I added a little more there where I pulled off too much. Go back to a new clean section of my makeup sponge and again I work it off. I'm often working directionally pulling the gritty grime in the direction that I want it to be sort of streaked. You don't have to use oil paints for this. You could also use streaking grime or something like that of course. Now after I wiped a bunch off, now it's time to do the final smoothing and cleaning of this oil. And to do that I'm going to grab a nice bone dry brush. This method is ultimately a subtractive method of painting. Most painting we do is additive. We add more paints, we add more layers, we add more colors. Oil paints often use a traditional subtractive method where you're removing paint instead that you don't want and that's exactly what we're doing here. With my bone dry brush I wipe away at it, smooth it out, pull the paint thin, blend it into the underlying surface and then take my brush and wipe it off on a dry paper towel. Dry brush, dry paper towel. Just whisking it around the figure over and over again, slowly removing, smoothing the oil shadow brown color. It's really getting it so it's more of an influence, a filter on our colors than it is a new layer. Now to really get it clean though we're going to need a little bit of white spirit. So I go back to my original brush with my white spirits. You saw me test it on my hand there and you could see how absolutely just there was the hint of moisture. You really've got to work the brush on the paper towel, wipe it on the paper towel until you cannot believe there's any more white spirits in there. There's still white spirits in there. Then you repeatedly just wipe away the area and wipe it on a paper towel. Wipe away the area, wipe it on a paper towel. Wipe away the area and you get it, right? And when you do this it's completely destructive to the oil paint. It will instantly remove those layers. Now on things like whites or very bright colors you're still going to get a little bit of that filter there. You could never pull it all the way completely off. So it just gives you this nice little color. And then I let that sit for a second and I go back to my bone dry brush to again just make sure I've removed all of the various elements, cleaned it all up and created nice bright areas where it's still showing through, where I've still got that true color reading and where I can still see that this is a nice white robe, or at least it probably was at one time before this long campaign began. So remember, smooth and remove. It's a subtractive method of painting. So there we go. Now we've got this nice gritty dark figure. She looks like she lives in the world. Now if you've got things too dark, sometimes the reds and blanches were really, they really popped as you saw from some of that earlier art. And sometimes your reds will get a bit too deep. It never hurts if you want, if you're using literally this limited palette to go back in, pop stuff back out, make it bright again just a little bit with the red. Part of what Blanche was doing and using that Zorn palette was really creating contrast not just with the grittiness and the grime-ness, but also by having this one vibrant color that happens to be the color of blood being the only real color that ever read completely true that wasn't super dirty or dingy in every way that didn't look like it had rolled around in the mud. So I just go in, add a little bit of the red back on and we're good to go. My final steps that I do off camera are finishing up the base and then adding a little bit of pigment to the bottom of the robe to make it look like it's picked up some dirt as she's walked completely finishing the grim-dark aesthetic. So that's it. This whole fig was maybe two hours to paint. It was very fast for being a character model and I think it came out looking pretty darn good. This is exactly the kind of thing you could do a whole army painting scheme in. It's fun, it's fast and it really works. By the way, I did not varnish this fig one time throughout the entire process. I'll head off that question right now. There was zero varnish used in this process. So there you go. If you like that, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, drop them down below. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.