 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today, GW was nice enough to send me Scabic's Plague Pack, and you know there's nothing I love more than some Skaven, so we're gonna paint these dirty little rats up and get them for ready to go out and spread some plague. Let's get into it. Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci Vee. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci Vee style. I truly love painting Skaven. It's something I do that just, I don't know, it's cathartic for me. I've painted just a ton. I have thousands and thousands of points of the army I've assembled over time. And honestly at this point, I don't really worry anymore about having them look similar or identical or color schemes or anything like that, because I just have enough it doesn't really matter. So today, we're gonna actually paint up the plague pack, and we're gonna make them look really, really grungy and gritty and grim-dark. And we're gonna try to like really lean in to that, uh, filthy aesthetic that nervel units have. Let's head over to the desk, let's get painting. Alright, I've primed in black and I just want to show you the preparation step here. Now I promise this is the only one with the airbrush, don't leave, it's okay. Don't worry, from here we're gonna be brush, and I'm just doing this because I want to be quick. I'm hitting them with a reddish gray, this is gonna be the base for my white color. It's a very nice color. It's got a little bit of, as obviously as the name implies, red tone to it. It's very sort of like milk chocolatey. It'll be a really nice base and warm for the eventual cold white I'm going to end up in. It's also a nice base for the skin as well. Reddish gray is just a great color all around. Then we get to the actual sort of base coating. And here we're gonna use vampiric flesh. And so again, I'm still staying warm for my lower colors, and we're gonna transition up into things that are a little more cold. Now with this stage, my goal, especially with this first base coat, which will still be quite transparent, is really to cover everything. So I'm just trying to really get paint on the whole robe. I'm not leaving anything untouched, but you can see, look at the difference there. When white dries, any kind of white infused color, it fades a lot. So we're going to need multiple thin layers of this to lay down as a base to establish a nice strong base of it. And this is probably the most time consuming step, because from here it actually gets quite easy. Now, one of the big advantages of going sort of grim dark as we're going to do later with weathering and dirt is that if our base coat isn't perfect, it's not going to matter. We're going to lay a lot of other gross things on top. So don't worry, don't spend a ton of time getting a perfect base coat. Just get the color down to three thin layers and then move on with your life. As we move up into the dark ivory and then eventually we'll be moving up into bright ivory, you can see how it's becoming more cold in the overall tone as we drift toward more of a true dead center white color, which the human eye will read as a fairly cold color if it's not infused with a lot of yellow or brown. Now this time I am only hitting sort of the upper and most exposed areas. So in the center of his back, he has this big hump and this thing sticking out. So it's a sticky outty bit. So again, as with all highlights, we focus on the top and the sticky outty bit. So you see with the underrobe here, I push the highlight right toward the top and then obviously on top of him itself. When I go up to bright ivory, then we're going to do the same thing. Just again, focusing up on those top spots, we will then come back and mix the bright ivory together with the dark ivory to kind of like blend these two together and create a bit of a mid-tone step. So we want a little bit of the bright ivory plus a little bit of the dark ivory after we've just hit the very high highlights with bright ivory. I'm kind of doing both here. With the robe basically in place, the lower areas still look pretty dirty. That's intentional. We're going to use that to our advantage. So those lower areas that stay a little patchy, don't worry. That's intentional. You want that effect. It'll look kind of weird and bad right now. But trust me, as always, sometimes we've got to make things look bad before we make them look good. Now we go to just some base coating for the flesh. We're going to start with some Bugman's Glow, really a fantastic color for base coating the flesh. And this is just going to set us up to begin working on the other parts of the model. And so it's just again, two thin coats of Bugman's overall of the skin put you in the right place. Remember, the key with these guys is I'm doing them in white. And so that requires all these additional steps to build up. But the reason I started with the robes and not the skin, even though we often start with the innermost layer, is because this is the most dominant feature on the model. One of the advantages to going with this grimmer and grittier paint scheme is first it'll show really well against the white. So if you're going to go for something like this, you don't have to do this in white, but use something that's a relatively bright color. So the dirt that we're going to do in the future is going to show better against something like a bright green or a yellow or a bright orange, than it will against some dark robes. So if you go for a very dark green or something like that, it's really not going to show as well or feel as resonant or look as cool on the table. So these bright colors that I'm spending a lot of time building up, I'm doing that because it's going to pay off later on when we get to really just grim dark and fill thing the heck out of these guys. All right, now we come to a bit of a strange mix. Scaven skin to me always needs to be more pinky, but we still want a little bit of that brown tone in there. So I'm actually using a mix of beige, red and cork, but you can really use any kind of lighter skin or pinky skin tone. It doesn't have to be these exact colors. That's true for every paint I always show you in a video, but this is going on again, most of the surface. So I'm only leaving the deepest shadows recessed with the Bugman's Glow here. So like in between the fingers and you know, stuff like that is staying there. But for the most part, I'm going to cover a lot of the space of this guy with this Bugman's Glow and cork, or sorry with this beige, red plus cork. And you know, the very, very deep recesses, the lower areas and the creases and the feet, stuff like that. But I like this mix because the sort of soft brown tone really gives you a very nice scaven skin tone, which should always feel like a little bit of a pinky, naked rat, I don't know. There's something about it that I enjoy and find it to be quite natural. Now from here, I'm going to start slowly adding more and more dark ivory into my previous mix. So into that beige, red plus cork mix, I'm going to basically over the course of this do three highlight steps. So plus a little bit of dark ivory, plus like, so a 25% mix, a 50% mix and a 75% mix, if you want to think about it that way. Although again, all those are just guest ratios. Nothing's exactly correct. And every time it's just, you know, it's just shingles on a roof. I'm covering less and less and less, especially on places like the tail here, where I'm going to always focus the light toward the top. And by doing so and then trying to really get a nice band of light across the tail, we can make the tail feel a little bit shiny and reflective because rat tails have a little bit of a sort of sad nature to them sometimes, especially if they're not hairy or furry. I don't know, you know what I mean. But yes, we're just continuing and each time I cover less and less. And I'm really focusing a lot on the face since he's got that little exposed bit of his face peeking out from under the robe. That's a major area of focus for me. I want that nose to be nice and highlighted. I want the tops of his little cheekies to be nice and highlighted and so on. Then I'm going to quickly hit just the lower side with this berserker blood shade and then thin it down with some water and cover the whole thing. I also hit the very tippy tip of his nose with that berserker blood shade as well. Just give him a little pinky nose. With all of the skin done, it's time to turn to some of the other elements. I really like these figures. They're not overdone. They're very simple. This was really a very fun, pleasurable paint. It's true for most of them. A couple of them have smoke on it, which is annoying, but this is a really, really nice pack overall. Rhinox Hide is one of my favorite base tones for browns. It's a really nice color. One of my few Citadel paints I really, really like. It's just a wonderful purpley infused chocolatey brown, sort of dark chocolate in this case. For someone who doesn't eat chocolate, I sure talk about it a lot. But at any rate, all of these sort of bags and ropes and bone pieces get base coated in that. And then what I'm going to do is just use the various and sundry bright whites I have on the different elements of this thing to highlight it up. One thing I'll say is this is a very simple paint job. The primary colors on this guy is about eight, nine paints, something like that. So there's a couple of washes in the mix and things you'll see along the way, but for the most part, we're keeping this really, really simple. These are dirty little, scrabby rats. I don't want a whole bunch of different colors. I want it to feel very simple, very grim dark. And so we're sticking to a simplified color scheme. You shouldn't have to feel like you can do that. If you want to branch out, if you want to make the robes as bright green as I talked about earlier, hey, that's fine. But then to distinguish slightly these various elements, like when I worked with the bag, I used the dark ivory to bring it up. Here on the horns, I'm going to use the bright ivory and slowly increasing amounts as I do these little striations on the bones. This is one of the most annoying things to film and I really wish they wouldn't put these stupid little bones sticking out. It's dumb and I don't like it. It's the only part of this figure I don't like. Otherwise I think he is really a banger figure. But these little dumb bones that you have to try to highlight 360 degrees around and do these little dumb striations is really hard, especially when you're filming it, fun times. But just quickly hit them with that and do those. And then we're going to wash it back down with a little Sera from Sepia, just to create some natural transition in the horns. We don't have to focus on it too much. It's a minor element. So again, spend your time on things that matter. The things that matter on this figure are his little face and the robe. That's what people are going to notice. They're not going to notice the little tiny bone horns. If it's not a perfect blend or if it doesn't look quite right, who cares? It's your army after all. All right, now let's get him dirty. So I mentioned that spottiness from earlier. We're going to accentuate that. I'm going to start with some very thin rinoxide, effectively turning it into a wash. And I'm going to hit the lower areas of both levels of his robe. You can do this on sort of all of them. The reason I'm hitting both levels is because I'm assuming he is a forward hunched creature. Like rats tend to walk very low to the ground and they tend to hunch over if you look at how a lot of the models are, well, like how they're standing. He's rearing up right now, but oftentimes as they move, they're leaning forward. So I'm assuming those ridiculously long rags he's got hanging off of his arms will basically drag in the mud the same as the lower part of the robe. If you have tight sleeves, you only do the lower part of the figure. But we're just establishing it as to get that dark tone. Now, it'll have a clear line. That's okay. Let there be a clear line of dirt where it's soaked up. We want that. Then we're going to come in with Sarah from CPF, but we're going to use it in a very unusual way. We're going to just stipple the living crap out of all of that. So we're going to cover all of the previous rhinoxide and we're going to go up into the white. And I'm going to stipple around this whole figure on the lower areas multiple times and I'll keep spreading it out and it'll clump back together and run and then I'll hit it again. And I'm going to do all that basically twice. I work my way around the whole figure just stippling over all of that space with the Sarah from CPF. You notice I go straight from the bottle and then just stipple, stipple, stipple. And I keep moving it from where it is on there, on to him. It should look irregular. It should look spotty. It should look uneven. That's the goal. That's what makes it look realistic as dirt. Then with that Sarah from CPF still in my brush, I take a tiny bit of the dark ivory, wipe off the, some of the excess liquid and then stipple the very edge. This is how we, it's sort of a rough stippling wet blending. It's just jabbing the figure repeatedly. This is very easy to do. And you notice how it suddenly smooths the transition of that dirt that's assumingly deposited as muddy water is like soaked up into his white robe. And then so you would get less and less of the dirt because the capillary action will draw it up. So that last step is how we smooth out that transition. These guys have wonderful sculpted bases for all of the underworlds guys. And I really like these, you know, classic skaven sort of sewery infused mentality. I really like all the sculpted bases they do for skaven. So just a quick reddish gray. And the reason I did that first and then go back to the robe is because then I'm going to grab some pigment. In this case, I'm just using some brown pigment. And this is really a fun step because again, you get to just go nuts. I'm just jabbing a bunch of this pigment on to the figure in all the lower areas covering all of the dirt that I had soaking up into his robe previously. Not a lot of it will stick to the figure. A bunch of it will fall down onto the stone. Don't worry, that's intentional. That's what we want. That's why I base coated the stone in between there. And I'm just jabbing a bunch of dirt onto his legs, onto his robes, on the lower areas basically everywhere where I had previously stippled the wash. This will have two effects. One, it will smooth out your previous effect a little but still make it somewhat spotty and dry. It will kill any shine, which is nice. And then we're going to shove it all over the dirt. And then my favorite trick, I'm going to grab just a big brush with just water in it. Nothing else. There is nothing else in that brush but water. And I'm going to sweep all of that pigment around on the base. What this will do is make it run down into the recesses. Not much will be left on top. I can even go back to my pigment and shove a little more into the cracks here and there if I want. And then sweep more water around. It will make it look like the dirt has deposited into the cracks in a very natural way. Once I do that with the pigment, I want to smooth that out again. So with some of that still active pigment, I grab just a little bit of dark ivory and then start doing that stipple blending into there again. As I stipple, it will mix and muddle with the pigment that's on the figure and actually achieve a pretty nice smooth transition of the mud up into the regular robe while making it look like a very natural stain. So it's really a cool effect. You kind of put on the dry pigment into place and then you just stipple the real paint on there and let that real paint activate, mix and muddle with that pigment to cool effect. It's very random, which is great for things like weathering because you want them to be pretty random. Now we're just going to give the stone some extra life on the edges to make it stand out from the dirt that washed into the crevices. This is just mixing a little of that ivory in there. I just do some little scratches and little edge highlights on the stone, stuff like that. Just bringing it up a little bit. We want the base to be somewhat interesting. It doesn't need to be anything special. Just make it look like the stone has some texture, has some edge to it, stuff like that. Then it's just time to finish up all the last tiny details. These are a lot of fun. We want them to be consistent. Of course, we start with some Vallejo metal color steel for his rusty blades, but don't worry, we are going to turn them rusty. This first step is kind of very hard to see just because this steel color is so dark, but we're just going to turn them metal. We're going to go back to our Rhinoxide. Again, keeping the color palette, the number of paints very limited. We want to really hit those pits. When you've got blades that are modeled with pits and stuff in them, those should be very deep rust. Those get the full Rhinoxide. Then I just touched my brush into water, thinned it way down into a glaze, and I'm just going to hit the rest of, especially the flat of the blade, where he would not be actively stabbing and swinging, so it would accumulate more rust. Once that's dry, some Seraphimcipia, more or less over the whole blade, I leave some parts not covered because I want it to be, you know, there's still, he's been swinging these things around, assuming he's just a little crazy chopping rat monster. And so, you know, enemy bones and shields and armor will somewhat, clean the rust away. It'll knock the rust off. Speaking of having some shine to the edge, we still hit the edges with a nice silver color, because again, those are, we want those cutting edges and stuff to look really sharp. We want there to be that transition. One of the problems I see people often do when they make rusty weapons is not have any kind of thin contrast. We want that light, dark contrast. So a few sharp edges, a few quick cuts in and sharp lines on the cutting edge itself will really sell the effect that these things have been sharpened by enemy bone and steel and sinew. Then we take some bright orange, really, and you'll do, I think this is Vallejo game effects rust, but any bright orange will do. And we're just going to go ahead and drop that into the deep, deep, deep pits. And then we can just thin it down like I did with the Rhinoxide. You can glaze a little bit of orange glaze onto the blade itself. Last step, boy is it, it's rewarding for me. It's rewarding when I paint the fig. It's rewarding when I am done because it's also signal sort of one of the last things I do in editing is edit this particular footage. But yeah, just getting that classic Abaddon black to black that base rim. And man, he is all good to go. This guy was really a lot of fun to paint. And I hope this was helpful for having you do your own dirty rats. There we go. The first one's all done. Now I will be honest, I've got more to do. I didn't get them all done in time for this video, but I thought you'd enjoy seeing the process for this one. That really covers most everything you need to keep going on the rest of the models. I do hope you enjoyed this and you like how my little plague rat came out. He was really fun to paint and I can't wait to get the rest of them painted up. So thank you so much for watching this. If you liked it, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. Remember, we have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got any questions, drop those down in the comments below. I always answer every question asked. If you want to support the channel, there are a couple of ways you can do that. First, there's a Patreon link down below focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey. I also make games along with Uncle Adam from Tabletop Minions. And we have three games that we've put out, Rain and Hell, Space Station Zero and our newest game, Majestic 13. You can find all of those awesome, fun skirmish games linked down below. Maybe your dirty little rats are your version of demons and they can run around in hell trying to conquer the place. Whatever the case, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. And as always, we'll see you next time.