 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we are going to talk about fluorescent paints. Oh goodness, there's so many of them out there. Some AK Interactive Third Gen and some Vallejo and Scale 75 and Green Stuff World and War Colors, and there's so many of them. And I get a lot of questions about how to use these because they are a very tricky paint to use. They don't cover at all, they're very, very thin, but they're a wonderful thing you can add to your painting to get some really, really bright pop and colors, the key is we have to apply them in the right way. So to do that, we're going to bring back in our little necron friend here. He's actually in the middle of the last video that I made while I'm waiting on the oil to dry. I thought we would do this. So you can see how in between the, in between these little, I don't know, sections or whatever, if it's gauss, gauss, however you say it, gun, I took some very thin white ink that I mixed with a bunch of Flow Improver, and that's right here. And then this is some pure white ink. And what I did is I just dropped that very thin white right down in there in between those layers. I also went ahead and prepped up the areas of the blade itself also. To show you just what that looks like, we'll do this back part of the gun here. So for example, if I want to go ahead and get some white down in the, in between the areas of this thing, I take that nice thin white, and just because it's so wet, I can just wipe it off and you see how it just flows right in there. The advantage of the Flow 8 is it means it just comes right off your brush. Super simple, super easy. If you've got other elements that you're going to make fairly bright, like say we want to also light up that tube, the key is never try to put your fluorescent paint just over black or something like that. That's never going to work. So here I just have like a light sort of ivory color. What you always want to make sure you do is start by getting some nice solid coverage of a bright color under that, that you're going to eventually have under the fluorescent. Now this is the most important single lesson I can share with you about working with fluorescent paints is that because they're so thin, because they show the color underneath so strongly, you have to start by making sure that whatever you're working over is very bright. So this means don't try to run them over black. Don't try to run them over another version, a dark version of even the same color. Okay, and we can go ahead and hit some of those little high parts there too with that slightly dimmer one. So once you've got a nice solid coat of that down, you're in the right place. So under shading is the first step. So now I'm going to go ahead and switch some things around on my palette, get the fluorescence ready, and be right back. So we're back, all of our white is dry, now obviously in the end I'll probably put some more in other places on this guy like within his chest and stuff like that. We're going to go for the traditional green glow for this because it's fun. And so here I've got my palette prepared. So right here I have my Warcolors Fluorescent Green. Over here I have my Scale 75 Techno Green, which I really like the tone of. Down here I've got the Green Stuff World Lime Fluorescent, and you notice theirs are very much a wash consistency, it's real liquidy. And then right here I have some Scale 75 Green Skin Flesh, not a fluorescent color. That's another key to working with fluorescence. Don't work in only fluorescence. So for example, let's just go ahead and take this, we'll do the tube and we'll do the blade. So when we're working on something like the tube, you don't want to try to do the whole thing in fluorescence. They're quite overwhelming when you use them in that strong of a capacity. So instead, what we're going to do is we're going to take part of this and make it this Green Skin Flesh. I'm not going to worry about painting both sides, I'm just going to paint the side facing toward camera right now. Then what I'm going to do is start integrating some of that fluorescent into the other paint. And by mixing in a little of this existing paint, we can help improve the overall coverage of it because we have some paint that still covers worth anything on there, but we're amping up our amount of fluorescence. And we're just layering it right over the top. And then finally, we can go straight into the pure fluorescent and we just take that in one small area. And one of the ways you want to work with the fluorescent is you want to put a dab of it down, right? So I'm actually putting like a literal chunk of it on there, then I wipe my brush and then I just kind of smooth it out with a moist brush into the other paint, okay? So and you see how much of that under color is showing through there and that's all right. A little bit of a line there, we can fix that, we let that all dry. If you've got something that's really small, like these areas in the gun here, something like the fluorescent color from Green Stuff World is actually really nice because it is so liquidy, it's basically a wash and I can just run it straight over there and because it's so thin, it doesn't even touch the black, like I'm not being careful and it literally couldn't matter less, right? Because it's so weak, it can't actually affect the black color other than to create a slight glow, which is actually kind of a cool effect, right? So that kind of stuff is really easy. When you've got a small space like that, we can do the same thing here on the, whatever this piece is back here, it doesn't have both sides. I guess the back of the gun, I don't know. I don't know what these things are called, okay? So when we've got that kind of a situation and it just flows really easy, we don't have to be careful, we can just wipe it right over. Now when we're dealing with a situation like a blade, because this is the other very common thing on a lot of these Necron weapons, people want to have like a fluorescent touch to their blade. The key there is we're going to take the fluorescent color itself and I'm going to start as weak as I can. So I'm actually going to start with my one that's like a wash and I'm just going to run it over the whole blade surface. Now once again, because these colors are so weak, we're going to use that to our advantage. Instead of it being a disadvantage that these colors don't cover for anything, we're going to turn that around because we're going to just immediately treat it like a glaze where I can just paint over the black all day, don't care, and nothing changes, okay? Because the black still remains black, but all the white or the lighter colors that I painted on there, those get tinted immediately, right? Including all the edges that I did. Now back to my middle thing as that's dry over here. So we're going to keep, just apply our second coat. You can also mix a little flow improver with these or something like that. That can help sometime. But I'm just going to do it with water here to show you that you can do it with even if you don't have any other tools, right? But you see how I was moving my brush? Notice how I was almost scraping the brush down, right? And that's because I'm trying to pull all that pigment. It's so pigment light. I'm trying to pull it all forward, okay? All right, one of our final, so that kind of covers a lot of different situations, but there's one important final one left. Let's talk about fluorescent eyes and glowy eyes. I've talked about glowing eyes before and on these Necrons, they're really small. But the key with glowing eyes remains the same. To make something feel like it's glowing, there has to be darkness around the glow. One of the things I often see people do with like skeletons or stuff, you know, with this kind of a shape is they'll just put a bunch of brightness in the eye and then bright around the eye and then it doesn't look like it's glowing. That's because there needs to be bright, dark, bright. And that's what we've, so I put a little dab of white on each of his eyeballs. These things do have very well constructed eyeballs, these new Necrons, right? So now that white's there, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in, get some of my fluorescent, in this case I'm using the war colors, and I'm just going to take a little dab of it and I'm just going to dab that eye. Then I'm going to take that same thing and I'm going to trace and mix in a little bit of the actual wash here just to get things flowing nice and easy, thin it down a little bit and I'm going to trace the bottom of this sort of eyelid. Still not to let it run down into the dark spot, right? And once we get that glow caught on the edge, you can see because we go bright, dark, bright, it feels like the eye is still the brightest because it's showing the white underneath. I didn't put the other color there on the lower part. I'm just going to touch that eye just a little more. This is a real fun thing to do on camera, I want to tell you that. Okay, now look at that, nice glowing standout eyes, you can always reinforce it of course if you want to pop it up. The key is the glow on the underside of the eye is not as bright as the glow in the eye and there is a nice dark, dark separation between them, okay? Alright, so now that all the rest of our stuff is dry, let's go back over here. You can always keep reinforcing, you can just pull a little bit of the fluorescent if you want, you'll notice how that breaks down as soon as you thin it, I mean this stuff is so, so, so, so, so non-covering, it's kind of one of the reasons I like the work colors, the work colors fluorescence really excel here, they're some of my favorites. When I've done my whole slanesh army and stuff like that, I've used their pink fluorescence. But you notice the more I reinforce that, the brighter it gets. For something like back here in the gun, if I want to reinforce any of that, once everything's dry I can kind of take a look at how it all worked out, I could always come back in with a second layer of the wash, just shove it down in there. To me, if you were going to buy just two of these, it would be the green stuff world one because of its wash consistency and the work colors one because of its ease of coverage. Those are the two that sort of work out the best for me, okay. Now let's return back to the blade. So what we can do here is, much like we did before, like you could stop there of course, but if we want to reinforce some of that, we'll get into our pure fluorescent, and if you want to have it have some coverage, then you mix in something else bright, okay. So here on my palette, I have basically a bright white, okay, so we'll bring some of that over, sorry, it's off camera, you can't really see that, but I bring some of that white, I can mix that fluorescent in with a little bit of white, and then I get like a really, really bright, bright, bright version of the color, and I can come back in, re-hit those edges, right, I could hit the middle of this guy, so I still get the fluorescent in there, but now with that white mixed in, it's really popping. I can reinforce my highlight some, just thin that down a little bit, and then I can use the same mix I had earlier of the normal color plus the fluorescent, since it has some coverage to it, thin it down just a little bit, and then I can kind of pull on the edge and just smooth that right down. I can even go to the just non-florescent color, just a straight normal paint, to finish it off with a nice thin glaze into my black, and finish off all my transitions there, okay. And I get that nice effect on the blade without too much work. Now of course, if I was painting some glowing thing for competition, I'm sure I'd spend a lot more time on this, you know, carefully refining everything, making it glow, but this is like one silly Necron guy amongst a horde of these dudes. He's probably going to die a violent death, probably, and I don't care, so something like this is a nice, fast method, but it'll get those fluorescent paints covering. So just again, to cover the key basics for you when you're working with these paints, one, you have to start over a bright undercoat. It is the thing I cannot impress upon you enough. These paints will not cover, they, you know, they don't really work over black. Let's flip that around and use that to our advantage, not our disadvantage, right. So we always start with a good under shading. Effectively, you want to paint the area you want, first in a bright color, there's a little dot here that's driving me crazy, so I'm going to paint it white real quick just to fix it. Anyways, so you start with that, just like you saw me do with the tube. Mix in a normal color, something like I used here with a deeper, non fluorescent green, and slowly work your way up into fluorescent. If you don't get a good enough coverage on the first time, you can always lay another layer of white over the top. Like instead of just trying to lay layer after layer after layer after layer after layer after layer of fluorescence, which is what I see a lot of people doing, they're like, I put on 52 coats and it just won't cover. Okay, come back in with your, you know, come back in with your near white, okay, or whatever, lay down a nice line, maybe you can even feather the edge a little bit so it's not quite so harsh, right? And then once that's dry, then go back over it with the other green, okay? When it comes to glowing eyes, make sure the eye itself is brightly dotted with something white before you apply it. You don't want to then put the same white under the actual, on the ridge under the eyeballs of the skull, because then you'll have the outside here glowing with the same intensity as the eyeball here. And how it needs to look is brightest, dark, bright, okay? So that's the easiest way to think about this. If we had one being the brightest and three being the darkest, it goes one, three, two. Okay? For thin areas like this, just make sure you use a nice thin white, like a white ink or something like that with flow improver to get everything moving. And then you can just run a wash right over it. It won't hurt anything. The black will never change color, easy peasy lemon squeezy there. That's nice and simple. In addition, if you want to go ahead and make even more contrast, one thing I will say, fix this real quick now that that's good to go, if you want to make even more contrast like let's take a look at the back of the gun, one of the keys is once you're done, you come back in with your dark color, okay, and we're going to go ahead and black out those things, okay? Because in the end, bright shows up the brightest when it's against something dark. So we can make it look like it's really glowing inside of there a lot more if we have something dark against it. And again, nice easy step and we're good to go. So now our scary little sci-fi skeleton. He's got a bunch of glowing stuff. He's ready to go. I'm sure I'll make some more things glow on him as I move along, but that shows you a lot of different situations of how to work with the fluorescent paints. Again, part of the key with working with them is often to dab them on, dab, dab, dab. Wipe your brush and then kind of smooth it around. You're kind of pushing the paint on the mini. And that can help you to really get a nice good coverage out of it and achieve what you're looking for. So with that, our little guy is ready to fire Gauss at the enemies of his dynasty, but I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop those down below. Same with suggestions for future topics, I always enjoy that. But as always, I do thank you for watching this one, and we'll see you next time.