 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video, and today we are going to discuss, uh, you know, doing horses. Doing horse fur texture. I'm sure I'll have a clever title for this by the time I make whatever thumbnail it is. But, uh, this is something that's actually been requested and made on my list for a long time, and with some elves coming out that have new ponies, I thought, what a great opportunity. So I went and found, uh, if you're looking through, you know, old discarded miniatures that I own, this very old elvish horse. I have no idea what he's from originally, but he's from something. I think he was an elvish horse. He's missing his little tail. That got lost in time, but that's alright. He'll serve just fine for our purposes today. We're going to talk about how we do very fine texture of fur when there's not actually fur sculpted. So these are obviously completely smooth. You know, this up here, his mane has sculpted texture. This does not. So, uh, that's what we're going to do. Let's talk about the paints we're going to use. So, very simple process. Today, I'm just going to use four paints, uh, some dark umber from Proacryl, some sunny skin tone, from AK Interactive Third Gen Acrylics, some bright ivory, uh, from Proacryl, and then I'm going to use some Flow Improver from Warcolors. Now, as a point of fact, none of those paints matter at all. I'm just telling you that so that you know what I'm using. But you can do this with any selection of colors like that in any kind of combination. If you're doing a black horse, then you would use maybe like a dark black gray, and then a middle gray, and then some ivory. Or if you were doing a very light colored sandy horse, maybe you'd use like a mid-tone brown, and then, uh, or a rust or something, and then maybe the sunny skin tone still, and then some ivory. You could integrate yellow ochres and stuff into it. You could do 100 different things. It doesn't matter. We're just creating a gradient from darker to lighter. It literally doesn't matter. Paint range, paint selection, any paint, any brand. Just get three colors that create some kind of rough spectrum. Okay? Of value. Fantastic. All right. Now that we're all on the page, let's get our little boy over here on a holder, and we're going to go to, we're going to do some work. We're going to specifically hit his sort of back haunches here because this is just going to be the easiest place to show you what's up. So, let's go ahead and get our horse all attached to there, and we'll get going. So, the first thing we want to do is we want to make sure that we have all of our paints flowing very well. That's why the flow improver is a quite essential thing for this. You can see I've got my three paints out here on the palette. This is the umber, the sunny skin tone, the ivory, and then my flow improver. So, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go into the flow improver, grab a little bit of that umber because that's what he's base coated with. He's base coated with just some of that umber over his zenithal. I'm going to take some of that. We'll put it over here. We want to start with one step up from whatever our low tone is. So, in this case we'll do something like that. That's probably good enough. If we need to go darker we can always go darker. Not a big deal. Okay, the point is mix yourself something that's kind of a step up, and then all we're going to do from this point on is just keep slightly evolving those steps. Okay, but once we've got that nice and flowing smoothly, which looks like we are, and of course we'll test on the back of our hand there, looking good. Okay, then what we're going to do is we're going to come in and we're just going to make a bunch of very small strokes. Just, just lots and lots of strokes. And you want to give them some directionality, so they kind of go with the muscle structure of the horse. Just light touches, light touches. You're not trying to get the whole thing at once. You can have multiple different sections. You see, this is about three different sections of little slashes that I did, and that's fine. And you want to basically be starting the slash, a little combination of slashes, whatever you eventually want the highlight to be. Your first one's going to cover more or less the whole muscle structure. The only thing you'll leave out is kind of the very bottom of wherever there's a little recessed shadow, because you wouldn't see the individual hairs when there's no light directly in there to really bounce that, that the reflections back to your eye. Where you're going to see these, these individual hairs catch the light is where there's a reflection. So we'll go up onto the top of his butt here. And again, you just kind of want to think about like hair on top of the head. It should be flowing in a particular direction. Now sometimes you might get a stroke that's a little too thick. Sometimes you might get a stroke that's a little bit out of place. That's all right. It's fine. One of the nice parts about painting like this, about doing these kinds of like stippling or or hashing type of paint jobs is that you end up doing so many little strokes that if you make one mistake here or there, nobody really notices. So there's our first one. Oh my gosh, horse, you are going to kill me. Okay. So there he is. Now we're just going to add in a little bit more of that sunny skin tone into our mix. So now we've got a lighter color, but not a huge jump. And this time, what we're going to do is we're going to just start from the top, but we're not going to go as far down. Okay. You can see just really, really light touches. Not trying to specifically like cover anything I did before, anything like that. Sometimes I'll cover up my previous strokes. Sometimes I won't. That's perfectly fine. Again, for this second one, we'll be fairly heavy handed still covering a lot of the space. Just keep throwing these nice thin little hashes on to keep hitting the area. You'll notice when we work like this as well, the more little strokes we do, the more intense the color gets. So you don't even necessarily need to change paint super often. You can actually just let one layer dry, go back in with the exact same paint because paint is naturally translucent and this is quite thin and we're leaving quite little amounts of it deposited on the miniature. Even doing a second or a third layer will continue to strengthen the effect. Okay. Now, in case it comes up at some point, I'm using a, the brush I'm using is a size one from the, from Monument, from their Sable line, the Bombwick igniters. You can use any brush you want. It just does have to have a very sharp tip. That's the only thing I'll say. Now, so let's go and add in just a little bit more of that sunny skin tone. Let's get something a little bit brighter yet again. Not tremendously much. We're not jumping up in huge amounts. We're just going with these nice short hops. So here now, same thing again. We start at the top. We want that reflection to be the brightest. But you notice that's where I'm stopping. I'm not going down any further. So for him, it'd be kind of in the middle of the haunch here is where we're going to reflect. Coming from that edge and around, that's going to be sort of like our light line on a, on somebody's head. How they have this sort of halo of light. His butt is kind of like that same shape, his haunch, whatever you want to say. So in other words here, our light is going to trace across to this line. On this muscle, it's going to be up top here. On this muscle, here, here and here. You just keep finding those spaces. Okay. Yet again, I'll let it dry. And then we'll do another one of the same consistency, just little strokes. Okay. So even though we're not onto pure sunny skin tone yet, which I actually don't want to get to just pure sunny skin tone, what worked because I always want to keep some of that brown in the mix. You can see over here, we bring my palette back on camera. You can see this is where I'm operating right now. This is what I got up to, which is still darker than this. But instead of just mixing straight to here, this is going to feel strange as a horse color because it's if I go straight here, because it's going to be completely devoid of that base brown. So instead, what I'm going to do is grab a little bit of that ivory and work some of that in. So now we're getting to the real like strong light reflections. And once again, nice thin hashes. This time we're only going to hit very, very small area. So even though the first step of this feels like it takes a while, because you are just drawing these little lines all over your horse, as you keep going, it gets a lot faster. Okay, think of before, do a couple coats of this new color. Great. Let's pull just a little bit more ivory into that guy. Just basically trying to actually catch that specific point or the fur or the way that the hair is reflecting the light. Okay. Now, if when you get to this point, you sort of don't like any of the lines you've got, like I'm looking, I'm going, that's a little too harsh of a blend there. You know, that is to say we're jumping too much. We can always grab some of our original colors we were using, go over some of our old work, and by moving more stipples back and forth, all you actually do is sell the illusion more. Because then this starts to, again, more and more translucent layers of this stuff makes it look like more and more natural real hair. So again, very difficult method to actually screw up, because even if you don't have the steadiest hand, even if you can't make a little thin line all the time, it's okay. It's perfectly all right. You don't need to make it every time. You just need to make it some of the times. There's so much visual confusion here that happens over the course of doing this technique that it just basically all gets lost in the mix. This is a really fun method to paint with. It's a little time consuming, not going to lie, but it is very fun. Okay, now I'm just balancing some colors around, drawing some more hashes, because it's fun to make little hashes. Okay, there we go. Now it's a little more, sort of a smoothed out section on his haunch there. Okay, cool. Okay, so you could certainly stop there, and that would be fine. But I think that ultimately, it's going to look a lot better if we just do one more step. It's not always how I trick you, I always get you to do just one more step. But this time, I really do mean it. There's only one more thing we've got to do, maybe two. So you'll notice that I'm much lighter where I ended up than my initial base coat. And that's the important first lesson. We do want to make sure that whatever color you start with, whatever color your base tone is, it needs to be quite dark, because you're going to be coming up from that color, all right, with all your highlighting. So you want to start with something dark enough you can work into. So for example, if I were trying to do like a gray horse, I would use a near black base coat. And I would come up into my gray. If I were trying to do something a near white horse, I would start with a gray and come up into my near white. All right. Okay. So the next thing we want to do is we're going to use our, look at our old friends, Sarah, Fim, Sepia, and Agrax Earthshade. By the way, you could also use contrast paints for this. Lots of different options. You could get out your skeleton horde or your agraros dunes or any of those that are going to work. But we want to put out, you could also use inks, stuff like that. In this case, we're going to use our little washes because they're perfectly fine for this. So we're going to start with the Sarah from Sepia, but we're not going to wash it like we would traditionally apply a wash. I think when people, I think people see washes, this is sort of unidimensional tool that's just like, well, I take the thing and I dip my paintbrush in there and then I go, and I throw it on the model and call it a day, right? That's all this stuff's good for. No, no. Mr. Superman is not home. No, there's a lot more things we can do with it. Okay. So we're going to take a little bit of that Sepia, and I actually went ahead and I grabbed a different size brush, and you notice I'm going to wick off a lot of the excess into my brush. And what I'm going to do is just in the direction of the muscle structure, I'm just going to apply that, that wash, much like a very thin glaze. Again, I would do the same thing with contrast paint. I could do the same thing with thin dink. I could do the same thing with anything like that. But what that's going to do is help bring everything together all into one. Okay. And then we just let that dry. If when you're doing this later, you notice that there are some spots he didn't quite get the texture right on. It's okay. You can fix it super easy later. It's not a problem. Again, don't worry. So then you're going to let your wash dry. The only question is, do you need to reinforce any of your shadows anymore? All right. So I think on this guy, he's probably in about the right place. Like what I might want to fix here is just a little bit more of sort of this back area here around his, uh, this muscle feels a little too sharp and how it drops off. No big deal. That's an easy fix. See, just like that. Boom. Now we have a much more rounded muscle. Easy. You do want to make sure that the wash is spread evenly over the area because if you take this, you know, these Citadel shade colors and you actually just apply them nice and thinly and smoothly over an area, by the way, like I said, same with the contrast or anything else, you won't get that coffee staining effect. You'll just get a filtering effect where it'll take all the colors underneath, let them show through perfectly fine, and then give you a nice filter. If you decide you do need a little more definition in your muscles, and that can happen depending on sort of, you know, the shape of what you're working on or whatever, then you would just grab something like a darker wash like an Agrax or something like that. And instead of, uh, instead of grabbing the whole area, what we would do is we would use it to reinforce the shadow. So once again, I'd go into my Agrax and then I would make sure all the excess is off of there. And then I would just kind of swoop that down into those darker areas of the muscles. Again, we're not simply washing the area. We're not globbing it on in any way. Nothing like that. Okay. That can help give you a little more darkness. If you don't quite like the tone, you can do, you know, multiple thin coats of the Seraphim or the Agrax all the same. But there you go. That's really all there is to it. This one's pretty easy. You can see how what it lets you get is a really nice naturalistic fur color. The sharper you are and the more repeated you are with your tiny lines, the more natural it will look. So it is something you want to actually take your time on. You want a nice really sharp brush and you're going to want to get in there and just really start hitting those little thin lines. Because if it's, you know, if there's only five lines in this space, it's not going to look realistic. It's not going, it's not going to sell and it'll just look like your horse is in jail or something. But if you really get in there through multiple layers like you saw me do here, and you just start like just layer after layer of doing those thin hashing lines, what you'll get is this really nice effect, especially as you see as the wash is drying, how it then sort of all comes together. It makes it look like you did this really complicated blending effect when in fact you didn't. You just drew a bunch of tiny thin lines, right? So there you go. That's it. That's how you paint a fur texture. You can carry that out through the rest of the horsey and he would then have that very nice naturalistic look of horse hair. You can use the same technique by the way on any kind of creature that would have this type of very fine hair or fur, right? So if you have little dog miniatures, little dogs that might be smooth, but actually like I think of things like Griffhounds or stuff like that where they're actually smooth, but they seem to be implied to have fur in those areas, this technique will work great. You can use this technique for good old-fashioned hair. Sometimes we get models that are supposed to have hair on their heads, but somehow I guess the hair gets formed as just one solid piece. Sisters of Battle are pretty famous for this with their bowl cuts and just having like a little solid piece of hair on there. You can use this same technique to add a lot of texture and additional information into your painting to make it look much more interesting and varied. So there you go. That's how you paint natural fur. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, hey give it a like. If you've got suggestions for future videos, feel free to drop those down in the comments. Always appreciate that. If they're subscribed for additional hobby cheating in the future. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one, and we'll see you next time.