 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and it's time for another installment in our Exploring Colors series. And today, why you guessed it, today's color is brown. All of the colors you see here before me on the table are different kinds of brown. Now, brown is obviously a very easy to recognize color. It's all around us, obviously, brown hair, brown eyes, both very common, the color of dirt and the earth. It's a very common color we see. So it's very comfortable to our eyes. However, there is of course the question of how in paint do we get the color brown? Well, it's a good question. So color mixing off of the traditional spectrum, this is actually how you get brown. Now your television doesn't use this exact thing, it uses actually more red and green, but traditionally you use red and yellow to make orange and then add black to get brown. So in essence, all browns are derivative of something in this spectrum of red, yellow, or orange. Effectively being because of the black, highly desaturated or shaded oranges. Now if you have a lot more red in the mix, you get a more red brown. If you have a lot more yellow, you get a more yellow brown, less black, so on and so forth. That's how we get a lot of different tones. So when we're talking about mixing these for paints, oftentimes those are the kinds of pigments we tend to be mixing. But of course there are also brown pigments that exist in the world and brown pigment has a long and storied history. So we're not necessarily mixing them on a computer by using red and yellow and black. In paints we oftentimes have real brown pigments. Some of the oldest in the world are umbers and so in fact raw umber dates back something like to 40,000, 45,000 years people were using raw umber pigment and indeed it has remained popular to this day. Burnt umber is of course just literally raw umber that has been heated and quite literally burnt. So it dehydrates the iron oxides and changes them to partially at least to the more reddish hematite. Both oil and watercolor paints use burnt umbers of all kind and umber is named for umbria where the pigment was originally sourced. And lots of pigments are named like that. Brown, so sienna you might have seen at a lot of colors or sepia a lot of these things are named off of the either regions that the pigment was found in or their original users. So things like van dyke brown for example is named after the artist who popularized that particular brown pigment. In its original mixture it actually contained a lot of raw earth, real organic material being mixed into the paint. That's where we got van dyke brown. If you're a fan of Bob Ross you've undoubtedly heard of a paint like that. But there are lots of sources where we get brown paints now these days. For our miniature paints we tend to use a more simple range of pigments. Oil paints and things like that will use a wider and more expensive range of pigments. But in either case the important part about the brown is how it's tinted, right? So is there more red influencing the color in which case you get a red brown? Is there much more yellow or maybe even white influencing the color? Buff is technically a shade of brown. I know that seems strange most of us would probably call this white or at least something like that but this is in fact a shade of brown. And so on and so forth. The more orange browns, right? So here this brown glaze from Warcolors very clearly still heavily influenced by the orange. And understanding the true color of your brown can help a lot when you're deploying it in your painting. And indeed it has been used as painting and just as a general color for a long time. One of the challenges with brown is that it kind of has this association of being boring. And that's mainly because visually it, you know, as a paint it kind of is. Now there's nothing of course wrong with using the color in your painting. Lots of Renaissance artists used brown to create contrast and create really striking visual imagery. So there's certainly nothing at all wrong with deploying brown as a color in your projects. You do need to understand that it is neutral and so because it's a fairly neutral color just like white or gray or any of those neutralish tones when I say I'm using the word color here a bit incorrectly I understand it doesn't occur on this thing, right? It's not a color in this sense. But anytime you're using those neutral tones you need to understand that you're going to need to contrast that in some way. You're going to need to create visual interest by having either high contrast and that's how a lot of classic artists like Caravaggio and Van Dyke used it. They used the brown to set shadows and then they would use brighter colors to then create bright contrast. So oftentimes bright cream colors or things like that. One of the challenges with brown is that it continues to be kind of unpopular as far as paint colors go. Only about one percent of the population in some surveys lists brown as their favorite color so it doesn't rank very highly in that regard. And a lot of people said it was their least favorite color. So it's just a rough color to it that can often be to paint with because it tends to fall into the background. That being said certainly if it's good enough for Caravaggio and Van Dyke and other you know true old masters well then it's probably good enough for us as well. So how do we use brown well happily our brown tones are actually some of the easiest colors to paint with. That's what's really nice about brown. It looks really good. It's easy to blend and so it's actually a great color to deploy whenever you need to have areas of a miniature that are you know that have visual contrast and that have some kind of visual interest but you don't want to overwhelm the piece. That's really the power of a lot of these neutral tones in general but brown first and foremost. That's why we often like to have belts and boots and things like that in the color brown not just because of course in real life that's often their color being leather but also because it's just harmonious with the rest of the piece if you have green leather you could just as easily have green or blue leather belts or something like that but that's obviously going to be much more disruptive to the overall color palette. So brown becomes a go to in your work whenever you need a color that isn't going to disrupt everything else that you've already chosen you know you've chosen some blues and maybe some purples and things like that you don't want to pick another color something like brown can be your ultimate go to because it feels very natural and that's the last part I'll leave here before we get over to the painting. Putting browns into practice for your miniatures is actually very simple unlike many of the colors we've covered browns don't require any kind of special pre shading or under coating work they just basically cover light browns especially have a high level of opacity but many dark browns in your standard miniature paint lines things like ryan oxide they cover quite well also so they're very friendly to the newbie who might not be as confident yet with thinning paints at the same time darker browns because they're often derivative of pigments that have either some orange influence or something like that thin down to glazes or washes really well and we all know this instinctively because one of the first things we discover in our miniature painting is usually agrax earthshade and we've all put a little bit of liquid talent on our miniature and then been amazed at how the whole thing suddenly snaps into focus you can do a lot of work with just a few browns this painting that I'm doing here is just as a way of example but I have basically four types of browns on my palate covering a wide range of colors and different influences and as I said previously in the leather video which you can find linked up at the top right now if you're going to use a lot of brown in your work you want to make sure that you use browns that are influenced by different tones as I mentioned earlier you can have browns that are red influenced purple influenced orange yellow etc and in the wide world of miniature painting there's even some that are crazier than that green influenced and so on and you want to make sure that you use these to create contrast both dark and light but also of hue and so as you can see here when I put the paints around I made his skin a fairly light colored brown brown sand to be specific whereas I'm using the Wildwood contrast for the hair and the fur now I could have inverted those I could have made the fur quite bright and the skin quite dark but if you want to make sure that the piece stays visually interesting you still want to be maintaining that movement from light to dark here I'm using buff on the horns and then I'm just going to pull some of the brown from that wet Wildwood down into them to shade them just quick wet blending nice and easy and that's another great part about browns they actually blend especially wet blend really really well so if that's something you're trying to learn if you're working on building up your wet blending muscle consider doing it with various shades of brown they're very forgiving they blend into each other well and oftentimes will give a very smooth outcome that feels again very natural so when you're working with brown paint the key is you can kind of go nuts it doesn't require much in the way of special work it covers well it covers smoothly the challenge is actually in keeping the piece visually interesting and as long as you remember to mix your browns to create a total piece that has the variation of both hue i.e. color and value i.e. the amount of light you can do really interesting things with just browns much like you saw from the paintings of Caravaggio and others earlier in this video so with that i'll leave you with our little beast man here getting finished up and say i hope you enjoyed this exploring colors brown it is really a great color and very fun to paint with i hope that this gave you some new ideas for how to use it in your pieces but as always i very much appreciate you watching this if you've got any comments leave them down below i always answer every comment give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future and as always we'll see you next time