 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about a different way to highlight all of your colors. Specifically we're going to talk about using flesh tone as your highlights. So here I have two different flesh tones, a sunny skin tone which is a little bit darker and light flesh. There are many different brands, these are just the two I picked. You can use similar colors in any brand and you'll get the same effects. So let's talk about the basic properties of what is Caucasian flesh tone. What is this actually? So in general Caucasian flesh tones are in fact a sort of red leaning orange that is integrated with white. And the reason I tend to like something like sunny skin tones is because it doesn't really have a lot of colors in there. Now Caucasian flesh tones and other flesh tones often have other colors mixed in. Could be blues, could be additional reds or pinks or additional magenta colors basically. Could be browns or umbers, sienas, those kinds of things. But this one stays pretty much just orange plus white. Light flesh is just this plus more white. You get this. Okay? Kind of the easiest way to think about it. Now the reason I like using these over something like white is twofold. One, orange is a naturally transparent color. We all know that if you've ever tried to paint orange you know that it's incredibly transparent and hard to get a good layer of. White is generally quite opaque. It looks like that is to say it's often hard to get a good layer of it but that's more to do with the pigment. White as a color in the world is opaque as obviously it reflects all of the spectrum of the light that bounces off of it. So when you mix something that's very transparent with something with a decent opacity, what you get is a nice mid-tone, a softer highlight. Something that works in more naturalistic ways. The other thing I like about using flesh tones is that it works with any color. Sometimes something like a cold dead white can have problems when it works with certain colors. Together with purple or with blue if you ever have you'll notice that suddenly those colors become very very very opaque very fast and you get these really hard lines. I've talked about it in my exploring color series. Flesh tones are much softer. Now there's a wide world of highlight colors we can explore and as we go on over time we will but I wanted to start here because this is a nice universal warm highlight. And on figures that have lots of different colors in play, say space marines with a bisected scheme or your old school empire models or free people's models, anything like that where you have lots of colors in play using a single highlight tone like flesh tone can be a great way to make them look uniform and as though they're under the same light. So with that being said let's take a look at exactly what I mean. So here I have a couple of shields and what we're going to do is we're going to show you exactly how we can mix flesh tone. Now we're going to rely primarily on sunny skin tone here but let's go ahead and the paints I'm using are just a straight red orange etc. As a point of fact I'm using the Camara tones but you know whatever you can use whatever color you want. So we've got a nice red tone there, fantastic, okay great. And there's already a little bit of under shading going on but now what we're going to do is we're going to mix red with a little bit of our sunny skin tone. And what you get is still something in the pink tone but it actually trends a little bit more toward peach. And so what you get is something that's a lot softer, something that still feels pretty red. It just feels like a nice soft red warm highlight. It's another way you can go about it without pushing into orange. By using a sunny skin tone you're getting the benefits of the orange because that's again part of what makes up the flesh tone but you're not having to over rely on it to where suddenly your highlight of red is just a pure orange which oftentimes feels strange, okay. So red can be a great color to use sunny skin tone on. It really does make it pop and again it's the perfect sort of mix in my experience between making it a little too pink when you use white. If you ever use white to highlight red and suddenly it feels really pink and you're like oh that's not really the highlight I wanted. Or using a bright orange where it's like oh well I didn't really want this, I wanted this cloak to be red, not orange, right. Okay, speak of the devil, let's talk about orange. Okay, we're going to make some ugly, ugly shields. So orange works really, really well with your sunny skin tone. I truly do love this color mixed with this, I think it's such an easy slam dunk. If you go back and watch my Exploring Colors Orange video I talk about in there using skin tone as a highlight for it because it just makes, you can see how much more I get a nice, first of all I get a nice brighter orange color but it's not too extreme. Now I do have some light flesh there which I showed you as well. If I mix some of that in, okay, then we do get something even brighter than that but still feels pretty orange, okay. Now of course I'm not, I'm working these pretty fast and all this paint is pretty wet. You know normally I would do a little bit more wet blending, smooth it out, etc. Okay, but you get the idea. Returning to our red real quick, we can see how just a couple layers we can really build that up, get a nice highlight color but we can always go back to the red and when we put those two together, whether as an under shade or as a mix, we just get a really nice tone, okay, right. Something that feels really natural and smooth, okay, so, but we don't have to stop there. We can also go to colors like green. Now in this case I'm using a phthalo green, we're going to just go right over here on the side of this so we can split our neck shield, okay. Now when we mix phthalo green with some sunny skin tone, what we get is this really nice sort of naturally feeling bright green, like look at how wonderful that is, right. Wonderful wonderful highlight color for green. My goal here by the way is not to show you a smooth blend, my goal here is to show you these colors work together, okay. Like that's a wonderful green for orkskin or for, you know, if you've got green armor or something like that. Again, here I'm using a phthalo which is a rather cold green but you could use any color green and mix in flesh tone. If you use a very warm base green and you add in flesh tone, you get a really nice pop and warm highlight, okay. As we continue our journey around the color wheel, all right, of course we've got to talk about blue, good old blue, you're my boy blue, all right, so there's our blue. And what's really fun about mixing sunny skin tone with blue, this in these last two colors I think is where you get the most payback because if you've ever highlighted blue with white or with sky blue, like a lighter color blue, you get this really harsh, really sudden transition. It's actually really hard and you'll find if you mix some light flesh with it, that's kind of where you end up in the same place. This is light flesh here I mixed in, all right. But you can see how you just get a much softer transition using something like that sunny skin tone to where it gives you a nice warm, soft blue. Great color transition in my book. This is one of my favorite go-to highlights for the color blue. If you see me painting with the color blue, I'm often either using this if I want it to be a nice warm blue, like this is great for things like ultramarines and stuff like that if you want them to feel like they're out in the sun. The reason warm highlights tend to be pretty good on our gaming miniatures is because we tend to use something like black or cold black as our shadows because that's how we prime or zenithal and that makes that contrast really well against a warm highlight. So next up, let's talk purple, final color. So here I just have a violet, really, really dark violet from Camara. Love their violet. Okay. It's got real punch to it, this violet. Purple is famously really, really challenging to highlight because you just get really bad blends everywhere. But of course, mixing in warm, sunny skin tone into it, we get a nice, smooth, look at how wonderfully soft that purple is. And that's just a little bit mixed in there, right? We can keep going. And just playing with your mixture here of sunny skin tone with purple, I wanted to end on this one because this is truly one of my favorite, favorite recipes. If you ever want to make a cloak or something look really soft and satin, just slowly integrating amounts of sunny skin tone as your highlight color will make it feel so much more warm and soft. It just has this really wonderful effect. That's how I did all the stuff on my Tomb Kings, actually, was integrating this color. So and it's just, it creates such a nice, you can see transition there. And again, we're only like one glaze away from just snapping all that back in because our transitions are so much softer than where they were if we were using white or mixing in something like that. So there you go. That's using flesh tone to highlight any color. Please ignore my very messy blends here. I just wanted to show you that all this is possible. But there you go. It's a great color. It's useful for like flesh tones work for highlighting any of the colors you see here. I suck to make basically like primaries and secondaries. The one thing you want to stay away from is yellow. For that, you have to use the pale flesh or a light flesh or something like that. You can't use sunny skin tone, but that sunny skin tone can darken yellow. So that's an interesting option because yellow is brighter than your sunny skin tone. Can you use it with browns or blacks or things like that? Yes, you can. Absolutely. And they look great. They'll give you naturalistic looking leathers. It's a wonderful soft highlight from black because it's not as stark as going straight from black to white. Check it out. Give it a try. It seems counterintuitive, but something like a Caucasian skin tone, a sunny skin tone, a pale flesh, a light flesh as your highlights can be a great change away from your traditional whites or pale grays for your highlights. So with that, I hope you enjoyed this. Give it a like if you did. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, feel free to drop those down below. I always answer every comment. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one. And we'll see you next time.