 Hello everybody and welcome to another PMP end of month review. So what is this? Well, this is where we sit down and we spend some time going over all those folks who submitted work into the PMP, that's our Painters Motivating Painters, for review specifically in the December review event. So if you want to join us in the PMP, the Painters Motivating Painters Facebook group, the link is down in the description, feel free to click that. You have to answer all of the questions. If you do not answer all of the questions, we will not let you in. It doesn't matter if you answer two out of the three, or one out of the three, it's three out of three, or you don't get in. That's how it goes. But every month we invite our members to post, if they would like, a finished project, finished project into the end of month review event. You can access those through the events item over here on the side where you see those. It'll then take you to the monthly reviews. You can post in the current month's review and at the end of the month I go through and try to answer everybody's questions. As usual, like just give feedback on the piece. Now as usual I ask that when you post this it's not only finished but you ask for specific direction. It helps me a lot. If I can know what you're going for and so actually provide feedback in the direction of what you're trying to answer so I don't go down a rabbit hole that you're not interested in feedback on. If it was a speed paint and you want to know how you can do things better, faster, that's I'm going to be a much different feedback than I'm painting a golden demon piece and I'm trying to take this to the absolute highest level. The more information you give me, the better the information I can give you. So also down in the description you will find a link to a previous video that has an introduction of common things I give feedback on. So if I say more tonal variation or nonmetallic metal or referencing gems or more contrast in your true metallic metal stuff like that. All of that is explained in detail in the video linked below so I don't have to keep re-explaining it over and over again here. I do try to move through these things quickly. I really enjoy doing this but at the same time there's a lot of submissions and I have to move through them rather quickly otherwise I'll be here until we get together next month to do this again. So at any rate, like I said, link to the description if you want to join us whether you're a newbie in the hobby or a master, it doesn't matter. We'd love to have you along. We welcome people of all skill levels. But with that being said let's go ahead and get into this month's review. So on screen we've got Chris Lang. He's got a second ever finished diorama and he wanted to focus on the balancing the direction of the piece. Sure. As well as just kind of overall impression. So let's take a look here. I'm just kind of clicking through all the photos. I think direction of the piece, you're certainly in the right place. Everybody's moving together. So I think that works. As far as the actual, I mean on the whole the piece is good. I will say one thing you want to focus on when you're doing something big like this is things to draw attention. So let me see if I can explain what I mean. If you go and watch my video on composition of dioramas, you'll see a lot of what I'm talking about. So it's not just the line. Like yes, there's a line here and you've kind of balanced it with this tree here to kind of move everything this direction. But also we want to make sure that the attention is tightly focused on our figures. One of the ways we can do that is often with lighting. When you put more bright stuff up here on the top and as well on his face, like ultimately this thing, this piece comes down to two pieces of information. His face and Johann's face, right? That's where we need to be looking. And so, and then this guy I suppose as well, but it's really like these two seem that the action of the piece. So we want to make sure this is the area that's brightest that has no color that draws the eye. So popping up the non-metallic metal here and things like that, having more bright colors on the ground here and then deepening the shadows down here. So like all of your earth is relatively samey colored. Casting some of this earth on the side in deeper shadows would help to draw the eye up here to the brighter spot. Beyond that, the only thing that jumps out at me looking through the photos is just, you know, I mean it's a big piece so it's hard to say. But one of the things that jumps out at me is we want to make sure we smooth out some of those bigger pieces, especially on some of the larger models like some of the NMM stuff like that. You want to bring some more glazing into that to kind of get it smoothed out. But it's certainly a very creative, original, you know, crazy piece. So I dig it. It's got a lot of motion. It's got a lot of movement. I do feel you captured all that well. So hope that helps. Great stuff. All right. Howard Kyle wants some tips on glazing and things like that. And, you know, talks about how kind of sometimes it was pulling off some paint. So one of the keys with glazing. Let's go to this guy because this is a nice friend. One of the keys with glazing is you always want to make sure that the other layers are dry. The other thing I notice here is we've got a very glossy finish and that's because you used a lot of glazes when you go super medium heavy. It's going to get shiny. So you want to make sure you mat that back down. And one of the ways you can do that is by varnishing in between. So as you're working with glazes, you can apply some. You have your initial paint, you have whatever. Just go over, give it a coat of some nice varnish. I prefer an AK interactive ultra matte varnish, but you can even use satin in the middle and who cares because it'll let you it'll let you like who cares if the shine comes up a little in the middle. If at the end you just varnish over everything. Think of the varnish like a safe point. Once you put a good layer of like a satin or a matte varnish over it, you're not going to have any it'll and let that dry completely. It'll really prevent that peeling effect and the glazes will travel more smoothly over the newly varnished surface. So it'll help you both have smooth applications of your glazes and it will help you make sure you don't affect any other layers of paint. So there you go. I hope that helps beyond that. I would say keep pushing the glazes, things like his stomach is a little tum-tum is still a little too singular mono colored. I want to make sure we have some nice variation in that. It'd be great to push into maybe like the purple tones you have up here on the bottom of his belly. That way we establish a nice color triangle. So just things like that jump out of you. But overall, I love the colors. You really established a nice bright eye catching piece. So I think it's really cool. OK, Alexandru, both entries in different categories in a local painting competition, more interested in general composition and basing and making them pop more, what can be improved? OK, sure. So I would say you can you can push your true metallics a little farther. So the first thing that jumps out at me is some of this can get pushed farther, especially deepening shadows on the true metallics. That's the first item that comes out of me, especially with all that metal. You really want to get some nice soft glazes of a black ink or a black blue ink or a blue ink or something like that in there. You got a lot of blue in these pieces. So having some blue reflections in the metal from things like his robe is popping way out. He's summoning a bunch of blue magic. There should be some like blue colors in the steel to help pop it up. As far as the other things that jump out of me that we could do, more tonal variation, especially on the bird. The bird is boring. We didn't focus enough attention on the big bird. So like more where he's color shifting more, have him branch out into some different tones. If you look at how a lot of people handle this sort of griff charger thing, they'll often have him switching color tones, especially as you go up his head, his face, these little tail feather for things he's got down here. The feathers down here on his arm, like these are all good opportunities to work alternative colors in. They can be in red and blue, so it works with the rest of your scheme. Having it pop some more of that blue and spread it around the monster would help the storm cast and the monster feel more integrated. So I do think you have the tonal variation on the cloaks. I think that looks really nice. I think your blues and reds are really, really strong here. So I think that's the right place. You want to glaze some of this some more with some mid blue. As usual, the challenge with blue is when you start adding lighter blues, it becomes very hard to to blend because a blue gets lighter by the addition of white. So as it goes up the tint scale, it becomes much more opaque and that sudden shock and change in opaqueness means that you have often have to go back in with your very thin layers. If you're darker blue lays to get that nice and smooth. Those are really the big items that jump out of me. So I hope that helps. But awesome stuff. I like the I like the colors. I like the magic. They feel very magical. You definitely captured all that. All right, Corey, he brings us a couple armatures. And his question is some feedback on the chipping and rusting effects and also what tips should you do to create better looking desert bases? Sure. So, you know, on the chipping and rusting effects, I mean, my first thing I think is we can go farther. Also, I'm always I'm always hesitant about green airbrush stuff like that. Let me just point that out. Like if I'm going to do a big section of green on here, I put green other places in the miniature, like have some of these tubes or, you know, something showing green, something glowing green somewhere else. Like that should be spread around a little more rather than just one bright, overwhelming spot. Like this image looks a lot better than this image because this is so overwhelming and just airbrush OSL. Right? Like it doesn't doesn't sell super well because it's just like, why is this much? Why is this color green as much? Like, where is the light hitting this part of it so strongly? So I'd be careful about stuff like that. Now, onto the chipping and weathering. I think you could go farther, honestly. Like I think the little chips look good. You could focus a little more on some of the edges. And then I think what we want to see is streaking. A little more streaking where things have collected and ran down. Now, if he's in a more desert environment, there's probably not a lot of rain, but there is no moisture, humidity, things that gather. So you could have just some very light streaks, stuff like that. You could also go for if he's on in the desert, he's getting sandblasted. So you could go for a little bit more of like a sand type weathering where you're stippling around some light white or something like that around those edges. Look at like Google images of cars that have sat in the desert and you'll see what I'm talking about, where they get sort of blasted over time and fade a lot. So that's kind of my my thought on that one. But overall, I mean, I think it's a cool piece. I like the color. I'd love to see it popped out a little more with, you know, something to spruce up, especially this big flat open area here. Like just, you know, a vertical line, a decal, you know, something to give me some more visual interest in those large areas. Now, as to the desert base itself, more verticality changes. So start, you know, build some hills, put your sand over top. Skulls, you know, you've got a lot of good stuff there. Deserts are kind of a boring biome as far if they're a very sandy desert, but you have lots of little rocks moving to wastelands, cracked riverbeds, all sorts of stuff like that. So there's just just think of, I mean, really my best advice as always with basing is just Google the real images of the thing. Just, you know, Google images of desert landscapes and just see what all you see there. There's really beautiful stuff out there. You can have lots of different sized plants, rocks, verticality changes, dried riverbeds, you know, because deserts aren't rainless. They just it rains very little. And so there'll be these like little riverbeds that collect and rivulets and stuff like that where things get real cracked and salt choked and dry. So stuff like that is kind of what I would explore. So hope that helps. Great stuff. OK, Ben Gom, first submission, probably the first many painted he's happy with, just general steps and next thing to aim for. Yeah, sure. So I mean, I think this is really, really nice. I like this. I like the texture on your your leather. I like the the color you used here. I mean, it is a really good mini. You should be proud of it. I really like the color blends on the cloak. I think that looks absolutely wonderful. So let's talk about where we've got room to improve. So I think with the transition on some of the armor, we could smooth with a little blue tone. See previous comment I made about smoothing out your transitions. So just like sharpening up some of these lines and getting some nice mid tone transitions there. Also on things like this big helm, having this framework be a different color slightly than the or more different than the fin in between is a nice way to make it pop and draw more attention to the head. Like right now, it's very samey colored. So I'd say push that a little farther. You like your cloaks and, you know, these things have such great contrast and this is rather flat. Same for the underwater creature here. He's very kind of not visually interesting. Like he's a major component of the the piece here. And yet he's not doing much. He's sort of this middle tone gray flesh color. And that's kind of all, you know, he could have some stripes that integrate the colors of this. He could have like some blue stripes going down. And if he had like horizontal blue stripes, ironically, it would draw the eye back up here because you've created a big arrow pointing at the face of the miniature where we want the attention. So if you had like a going here, it would draw your eye when you sweep around to go, oh, I go down the staff and I'm right back up to the face. So just think about lines like that. The other thing is when you get to your base, you know, more stuff on the base, it's just a gray rock. Rocks aren't gray, especially underwater rocks, moss, flora, fauna, all that kind of stuff. You've got a little bit of all that keep pushing more colors, more greens, more purples, more browns, things of that nature. Finally, make sure when you've got fingers like this, little fingies that they have darker lines separating them. You really want them to be nice and dark. Like you can see my hand held up here. Look at how dark the lines are in between my fingers, right? Like you can really see the separation there. So make sure you want to have those, you know, nice and well separated. But overall it looks great. So I think that would be my next steps. Okay, Ewan doing some old school chaos warriors. So he's given them sort of the hot weapons and eyes. Just general feedback is appreciated, but a focus on capes and weapons. So let's take a look at these hot, hot weapons. There we go, that's a nice image for him. I think you want to shrink the white a little bit. It looks better on the hammer here than it does in the axe. You want to be careful with your volumes on this kind of stuff. Heated things like that don't have equal volumes. Like it doesn't go X percentage of white and then the same percent and then X percentage of yellow and then X percentage of orange and so on. So you want to make sure that it's much more tilted towards the orange spectrum to the orange, deep red spectrum. So like I would have just a light, thin line of white and then mostly yellow here and then this goes into heavy orange like from here out and then deeper and then make more of this red black, honestly. Like I said, it feels better on the hammer because that's kind of what you ended up with on the hammer. So I think there you might need to pop up the whites a little more and have that nice, thin line. That being said, I do very much appreciate the look of the armor, the metal. I think that all works great. As far as the, you know, as far as the bases go, obviously I assume these probably were still working on that one. But overall, the glowing eyes, the weapons, that all works. The armor and stuff like that I think looks really nice. I like the little lines and sort of scratches in there. I like the color change on the armor. Yes, I think all that sells. Let's take a look back at the capes. I think the capes are fine. Yeah, I don't really have any issue with them. You could, like if you're going for this more dirty ragged cape look, I would honestly pop up the bottom a little bit, little more highlights on the bottom, maybe some dirt or something like that on the bottom. All that could be a great way to go to kind of, you know, reinforce what they're walking through if they're in snow, you know, maybe a little bit of snow sticking to the bottom of the cape. You know, just something like that to make it feel like the cape is very long. If he leans his head back at all, it's gonna drag, right? So it would catch detritus and snow and mud and things like that. So that's kind of what I would, where I would go. But overall, you know, real cool stuff. I think it's looking good. All right, so let's keep going. Okay, so next up we've got Carl Hooten, who's, you know, says basically he's trying some, throwing some advanced techniques and just wants to know where he should go next. So let's take a look. Okay, so looking over the model, I mean, I think it looks really nice. You've got a lot of good stuff going on here. So my basic advice to you is going to be to, one, keep pushing that tonal variation and two, work on really defining your various elements. And thank you for including a black and white pic. This is always a great thing to do if you're gonna include a submission. A black and white pic is awesome because right here tells the whole story of the tonal variation I'm talking about, right? Like she's mostly in the same gray tone, right? The natural light, like we haven't created any additional reinforcement of the light really through the shadows. So like when we go back to this one, having these striations in her wings picked out, having more colors integrated in here to the wings, having brighter spots, the bottoms of these ripped holes, same with her face. Like her face should be the most interesting part where we're drawing our attention to and yet it's pretty much a flat, even color, right? So we wanna push that, have a big difference between that and the hair she's got on her head. Same with like the area around her chest here where we'd wanna draw in some more shadows at the center. Really be separating these elements strongly and then creating a tonal variation, a contrast without it. Something you can, so go reference the video, but then even working in other colors, so not just the variation in contrast of, value but also of hue, right? So working in some red shadows and stuff like that with some glazes would be a great way to push this bright red that you've got with the intestines up around the model into other places. That would really be my focus for you. It's just like a lot of it is still, we've gotta go farther on that tonal variation. It's hard. You really gotta train yourself on that contrast. You gotta push, push, push so hard to make sure that those elements are all popping out and separated and run that gamut of something. But there you go. Overall, very cool model. I dig it. Keep going, man. All right, Caspian gives us the big beholder boy here. Looking really nice. He talked about the big eye. So one thing about the big eye that I would say, so let's go back to his eye, it feels like it's not round enough, like his iris. I like the blood shot. It could be a little, the lines could be a little thinner, so you may wanna work on thinning that down or going back in with your sort of white, red and kind of thinning them out there a little bit. And then beyond that, I like the OSL Glow. I think that works fine. I think the green coming up on him looks nice. Could smooth a little bit out on the teeth. It's a little stark to where it goes down, but overall it sells. But yeah, I think the biggest thing I would focus on is making is the shape of the eye. When you have this huge eye, you have a lot of room to play with for like a lot of detail. So you wanna make sure you're capturing the difference between the outer area of the iris and how there's a dark and then a light and then a dark again and the striations in the eye and the light reflection and the pupil and even a reflection in the pupil. Like you really have got the space to play here. So it's time to like go nuts and go all the way up on that eye game. Overall, I think though that would be my main piece of focus for you there. All right, but good stuff, Caspian. Okay, Jason Ho with contorted epitome, looking for specifically feedback on the skin tones and the mirror surface blends. Sure, so the skin tones, I think you have a nice smooth color, but again, the advice is pretty similar. More tonal variation. Push me into like some deep purples, maybe a bit of red shades, pink shades, something like that to really break that out more, create more muscle structure and definition and things of that nature. Now, as to the person in the mirror, I think you did a nice job with it. Obviously, this is something I'm very familiar with. One of the things you wanna do is create a little more light in the blue to stand out from the shadow. So like it's the shadow really sells when it's against the light surface. Without an airbrush, I understand. So what you wanna work on there is a little more fade. So some light gray glazes right around here, especially on the part that's faded back, like the hand is more solid because he's touching the surface, right? So you wanna make sure you fade the edges of the person who's back farther away from the mirror. So those would be my main two areas I'd tell you to focus on. Now, obviously this is done, so I don't know if you're gonna go back to it, but if you're gonna do additional daemonettes, that would be kind of the area that I would tell you to focus on. But overall, I think you did a great job with this. I think it's a great epitome and it looks really nice. Okay, Robert Snyder. So giving us a big Nagash conversion. So let's take a look at this bad boy. As we can see, we've got a great conversion of him on the throne, lots of sculpted cape and stuff like that. So overall very cool stuff. Here we go. If we go into this shot, I think it's, where's the one I want? There we go. That'll be a nice one to look at. That's a good angle. So Robert, my main piece of feedback for you is gonna be the same thing, more contrast, more tonal variation. So like a light reflections across his chest. You can look at lots of examples of this, like you can look at super high-end examples of this, like that land did or that Richard Gray is working on right now. So like that, you'll see how they draw the armor out and create these light spots across the chest. So more variation of value there. Same with the purple cloak, you know, deeper shadows up near him, lighter colors down on the bottom. Same with the bone. Like one of the problems you have right now is everything's kind of flat. So we wanna make sure we're really pushing that contrast, especially on a model of this size. So that would kind of, I mean, the conversion is amazing. That's where I would tell you to go. Same thing, by the way, and most importantly perhaps with the stone of his throne, it's all just very flat gray stone. What I would wanna see is more color worked in there. So like, you know, go in the video, I talk about weathering stone and stuff, but I talk about this a lot. You wanna make sure that when you're dealing with stone, you have lots of different colors in it. Browns and reds and, you know, greens and stuff like that. Work all that in, have purple glazes in there, things like that. You can go nuts with stone. Stone has every color in the rainbow in it. Additional cracks, contrast, make sure those lines are real sharp, those edges are real sharp. Do some stippling and texture and stuff like that to make it feel more naturalistic. All sorts of ways you can go. I have a video on doing realistic stone, so I would give that a watch, but those would be my main piece of advice. Fantastic conversion, super cool. And gosh, I dig the living heck out of it. Okay, Sergey brings us a villain from Kingdom Death, looking for basically feedback on the leathery things of different colors, the vest, boots, gloves and on the cape, which he says he doesn't like and doesn't know why. So, sure. So let's talk about the cape first actually, because this one's, I think maybe, you know, you don't like the cape because I don't know if you feel it's just not smooth enough or maybe we're not running enough of a smoothness to the contrast. But like honestly, I feel like you wanna spread it out a little bit. Your light is very directional here on the cape. Like you've told me that there is a hard light coming in from this side and no light coming back up here, all right? That is to say if the light was coming directly from above, there would be some light on this side of the folds. And whereas the rest of the figure, you haven't told the same story in light. That's probably why it's not jiving with your brain because your cape is telling a different light story than the figure. When we look at the figure, you've lit it from above, center, noon, right? But when we look at the cloak, you've lit it from like, you know, 10 o'clock, right? Because there's just not enough color down here on these sides. So spreading out that color a little bit, I think could help. It's also quite shiny. You might wanna matte it out. That might also help some in your general feeling. Now, as to the leather. Yeah, I mean, I think the leather and the boots and stuff like that are fine. I think we could add more texture, more variation there. Especially, you know, leather's a fun chance to get the edges, to get some texture in there. You just do little tiny hashes with a sharp brush down on the edge of the leather then glaze over it to make it look like it's got a little character. That's kind of, I think, the thing that jumps out at me. But, you know, overall, it's a really nice piece. Like you capture everything. Your elements are well separated. Your paint's really clean. So I think it's on a really good road. I think we just need a little more texture in the various leathers. I also feel like you might wanna, like it felt like you were really trying to separate the colors of the leather. Like the straps are different than the boots are different than the gloves. When really we could probably do some of those in the same color. And it doesn't feel like she got three completely different sets of leather out. You know, like the straps and the gloves could be the same leather, for example, or something like that. And just a thought. In general, there's not, you don't need to push it that hard. I would also say with the blue, it's very another reason that the blue is challenging because it only exists on the cloak. I mean, you have blue cold tones in the mask, but like you could also have made the gloves the same blue as the cape. And that would create a much better triangle. So just some thoughts there. It's a very standalone color and that always makes it tough, especially when it's bright blue. Hopefully some of that helped. Okay, Luke Willoughby, basically talking about coming back to the hobby, looking for his general, which is the tree lord. Basically looking for feedback on the model details, especially the blue areas, some general advice in making the model and paint appear more neat and tidy. Okay, so let's take a look. Yeah, I mean, we do have some roughness here. And the way we're gonna get away from that kind of roughness is you've gotta, if you're doing your dry brushing, you've gotta then go back in and smooth out with glazes. Feels like we wanna thin our paints more, nice black and white shot. The black and white shot tells a nice story. It shows where we have some deep contrast in the body, but on the big wood pieces, we still need to push that a little farther. So when we look in here, especially the blue areas, yeah, you're working with a very light colored blue that's gonna be a naturally very chalky color. So you wanna make sure that you're smoothing that out. I would work on your glazing and stuff like that. That's basically the answer. Because when we look here at the one that's a close up, you can see how we can still see the texture. There's a lot of paint that broke here. You know, washes that are still showing their coffee staining, that kind of thing. We wanna go back in with those controlled glazes and really smooth that out. Now, as to how to get the sort of cleaner with the whole thing, you know, my answer is that's a lot of finishing. You can be smoother initially. And texture isn't always a bad thing. It's just gotta be intentional texture. It can't look like rough paint. It's gotta look like the texture of the surface it should be. But a lot of it's just brush control and time. Separation of the elements is also really important. So like having the face be here and different than the beard, you wanna run this up darker right next to the face, right? Have a nice dark line separating it and have your light out here. Same with on the chest. This should all be cast in more darkness. This should be a little light. What makes something look clean is when we have this clean alternation between dark, light, dark, light, dark, light. You can see it on the fingies here as well, where we don't really have a sharp line of a shadow in between how he's holding it and the rock. We want that to be a stronger separation, that kind of element. Final thing I would say is be careful when you're using these kinds of free fabricated tree elements with your trees. Like you just, this is just basing block glued on like tree flock or whatever. Be careful with that kind of stuff because you did a lot like non-painted elements don't work on a painted thing. They stand out and this does here. So if you're gonna do this, which is fine, like I don't, the tree flock is cool. I did this myself on some stuff, but you have to paint it, right? It has to get painted just like everything else. We can't just say, well, with the rest of the model I painted it, but this will just be green and that's good enough. That makes it stick out like a sore thumb. So go back in there, hit that with washes, do some dry brushes on that foliage, make it stand out and have texture in the same way that he does, okay? All right, hopefully that all helps. But cool stuff, man. Welcome back to painting. Glad to have you along. Can't wait to see more tree people. Okay, Matthew Bamit with some questions about basically skin tones. Looking for other general advice, but basically skin tones. So this is a nice model from Camara. So this is a good shot. I mean, it's ironic on the angle, but it's good for what I want to talk about. So this is a big scale model. And when we're working here, you know, you mentioned this is all brush-only, no airbrush. That's fine, I'll talk in brush-only. A lot of this stuff gets way easier with an airbrush. Let me just say that, especially on large scale models. But the thing I said earlier about finger separation couldn't be more strong here. Like this is a big scale model and there's like no finger separation here. Again, look at the dark lines in my hand, right? That's the kind of level it needs to be at. Like use those real-life references. Same with the skin, I need more of every tone in here. Much, much, much more tonal variation. And that means soft glazing of red tones, of sepia tones to show tan. I need higher highlights too. She's out in the wilderness. She's a sort of forest elf-y scout thing. She's gonna be sweaty, right? So her skin's gonna need to come up to like high-pop reflections. Look how much, look at my, look at my head up here. You know, my sweaty head, right? Sitting in the basement. See this light reflection right here? Look at how insanely hot that spot is, right? Same with like my nose. Look at my knuckles and my hand when I make a fist. Like see how bright that stuff gets? That's, you wanna make sure you're popping that up all the way. So it's just a lot more tonal variation in contrast. I have a couple of videos on painting skin and I show you how to do it. There's one where I do a detailed skin tone video. I would recommend you go, I would reference you back to that. Look at how much of the gamut I run between really dark and really bright, right? And that's kind of where you wanna aim, all right? So beyond that, I mean, I think that's, this piece is mainly skinned. That would be the major honest thing I would tell you to focus on. Because the difference between this having like a really varied skin tone showing lots of blood and red and sepia tones for tan and lines for, you know, a little coming up to like an ivory for sweat and stuff like that and reflections. It would, it's night and day, the difference you'd feel. The rest of it's all, you know, more or less dressing on that. So, but it's good. Like your colors, like the war paint across the face. That kind of stuff's all going in the right direction. So it's really just the skin, I agree with you. Okay. Marco, first post in the group. Well, welcome. New painter and trying to gradually improve your skills based on this mini, what technique or aspect should I focus on? Well, you know, for new painters, I always say that the main thing you wanna focus on is brush control and contrast. Now, you're starting in a nice place here. We've got some good variation. I like this blue. I love how that runs from like a dark all the way to here. Same with the shoulders. That looks really nice. Yeah, I mean, I think you've got a really good basis starting here. What I would tell you to focus on is some smoothness, especially with the metals. So work on that a little more, like here in your parts here, you wanna make sure you're smoothened that out. I would also work on your tonal variations on white. White is a really tricky color because it has these elements, like it's just, it's rough to paint in. Like that's just the simple fact of it. Also, if you're gonna introduce a red element like this, you wanna make sure it's also some other places. You've got it here on the hilt and here, but like think of having some red filigree down here. Like instead of this being gold, you painted this gold reflexively because it looked like little metal hammers, but the gold is almost invisible against the white. If this had been that crimson color you're using up here, oh, it would have pop, pop, pop, right? And then you would have had a nice balance of a triangle on the model. So I would focus a little more on soft glazing of color on the whites, add some more variation into that. And then from there, it's really just brush control and cleanliness. Like I see some spaces around here where we've got some work we could clean up, but overall this looks really, really nice, man. For a new painter, I think you're doing great. You're in a good place. Just keep pushing that cleanliness, push that variation on your other tones more. It looks great on the blue. Give me some similar interest on the white and then work on your glazes and smoothing things out. And I think you're in a great place, but you're really kicking it. You're really kicking butt there, Marco. Great stuff. Okay. Rednax, winning submission for his LGS's painting competition last weekend, struggled with attaching the spider in a way that conveyed the idea of the spider dropping down the hero. The time we were judging the spider had dropped to where it was touching the table. Considering I was using Widskid's minis, how would you have handled it? Beyond that, I'm working on this true metallic metal and skin tone. Okay, sure. So let's take a look here. Yeah, I mean, you know, well, we gotta get some better photos. So let's start there. Okay, so let's start back here. Satin effect on the cloth, dig it. Looks nice, good lines, good work. I enjoy that. I enjoy that very much. So that looks nice. Skin tone, see previous comments, right? Like everything I said before. Stuff on the shield. Watch out for true metallic metal, like free handing with it. We need to get, I need a better photo of this like in thing and not fuzzy. Like I need this shot, but not that. Like, but not fuzzy like this. So pictures are important if I'm gonna review. But like watch out for using like metals in your freehand. It's always gonna look strange. I think the biggest aspect I would give you is, you know, clean up your freehand and make sure it's nice and smooth and well applied. Make sure the hair and make sure your elements are separated. So what I talked about more, you know, before with having all the elements like nice and separated and stuff like that. You're right, these sculpts are soft. It's tough, you know, stuff like the sword looks so, this just looks hinky, but that's not your fault. That's the sculpts fault. Like these just let you down. I mean, they really do. Cause it's just a little rubber stick. It's not a sword. You know, one of the things you can do is go in with your exact knife and like actually try to cut the blade, like sharpen it directly. Like you just scrape it like you're, as though you're literally sharpening the thing. That can be a good way to go. Beyond that with the metals. It's hard for me to tell exactly. Yeah, I mean, I'd say with the spider maybe a little more texture or stuff like that. Just kind of pop out this belly. He's, he's light around the outside, but he would need a light spot here on his back, like a symbol or a pattern or a texture would make it look really good and make that pop and balance out. So I hope all that helps. You know, give me a shot like this that's really smooth. Good pictures are very important. But very cool. I mean, it's a cool idea for sure. So and congrats on the win. All right, Chris, click. First large model and third project painting exclusively with glazing over Xenothal. Ready for the table, but being such a large model and centerpiece, you still think something's lacking. Okay, sure. So the answer when you're doing your, your glazing over Xenothals, which I think you executed really well here is on the areas where you can't do that, you want to make sure you work in additional colors. So I've said it a hundred times, I'll say it again, tonal variation, especially in the whites and the flats are important here. So like this thing around his head is just doing nothing. Like if that had some colors to it to set things off, honestly, I would have it be the same orange, yellow peach combination you've got down here on the shell. That should be the, that should be the color his thing is running up top. It would bring him in line with the mount. It'd be really great. More variation and work on the metals is definitely called for here. Like some of the metals are very flat. Like all these are just silver, you know, just metal. We want to see more happening there, same with the gold. With the, I think the turtle is very successful. I think you could work some darker parts on separating some of these. So like when you're doing this kind of glazing, you can also come in with a heavier glaze and pull parts of the shadow, especially up here. You can get these lines a little darker or something quite thin, you know, stuff like that and then wipe the, you can lay it in and then wipe the top with like a paper towel or something real quick. That's a good way to go. But the chassis here or whatever they're like the part that the thing that they're writing on is one of the things that stands out to me the most because the rest of your model has this great variation in color. The orange to green, you've got a teal look. I really like that. But then this is just basically green, right? So I need more color and more variation worked in here. Softer tones of either in the white or I would also accept, excuse me, I would also accept just like working in an alternative color into the shadows. Like bring us, bring a, bring us off purple aid. Excuse me, or bring us off blue in or something like that, right? You could do a lot of work there. But overall, this looks really good. So yeah, those would be my advice. Hope that helps, Chris. Very cool turtle. And I think you, you know, you made something real eye-catching, but yes, I think those would be your next steps. All right. Pekka, Dwarf boy from the zealot miniatures, feedback on the red beard and the non-metallic metal parts. Once again, so let's start with the, well, this is going to tell the whole story. I could do it all from here. You could tell me the beard was red and I could do it all from here. It is a red beard with no heat to it, no fire, no light, no variation. Red hair is very reflective. It's very bright. It's very satiny. You look at like, again, Google like a Pantene Pro V hair dye bottle of red dye. And it's just going to be like, you know, light lines everywhere. And this isn't like, when I flip over, I'm going to see it just being basically red with like a soft amount of orange. We need to kick that up, right? Because when we look to the black and white, it's all basically the same. That tells you, you haven't actually established a real true color. So more darker parts fading into like a deep red, red, black, red, purple, something like that. Even green tones down in the shadows. And then catching more of those light spots, like pushing up that contrast. As to the NMM, it's a good start. It needs to be smoother. So like we jump way too strong from like here to here. Again, we can see that in the black and white, right? Like this is white and it goes straight to this gray. I need more transition throughout to smooth that color change, right? Same with the gold and stuff like that. So more of that smoothing of transition and that's all that's play in the glazing game, right? So hope that helps. Okay, oh, Alexander, okay, you posted twice. Well, we already gave you some feedback. So same thing I said before. Okay, 610, just got back into Warhammer Fantasy. Started a little vampire army working on a zombie. Okay, so looking for tonal variation. Glad to hear you're on the right page already. And so, you know, he said he found it easier with the skin than with the red pants. Let's take a look. Let's go to the black and white. I love that everybody's including these black and whites. Keep doing this. Okay, so with red, red is an interesting color because bright red, if it's true red, is just bright red. It doesn't go white. It doesn't go orange. It just goes really bright red, which means we work in the shadows. So go back and look at my Exploring Colors red video. I talk a lot about how to influence the shadows. You also wanna think about adding a little bit of ivory and then glazing over it with red, and that's how you pop it up. Now on the skin, let's go back to the color shot. I think we're in a better place here. We can go farther. Give me more. You know, like you're going the right direction. I need more. Push that skin really up into a flesh tone. So what I would be working in with my highlight on this is just Caucasian flesh tone. Just good old fashioned sunny skin from Vallejo or something like that, right? Where that's gonna bring in the more human-esque feeling to it if you use any kind of skin tone, be it any Caucasian or African skin tone, anything like that. You can work in anything like that, but it'll make it feel more alive like it was a zombie. That's one of the challenges we have right now is he's very green, and we need to push that highlight up even farther, okay? So the bright side of painting zombies is it's okay. They all look dead, and you can always, they can be messy, and they can be dingy, and they can be all sorts of things, and you gotta paint a lot of them. So you'll get a lot more chances to keep working on this. So that would be my best advice for you there, 610. Hope that helps. Okay, Alan Thomas. So basically it says couldn't normally make the Saturday Q&As, but this is a bit of a review request as well as a chance to suggest a hobby-cheating, unsculpted, smooth plastic fur texture. Yeah, that's been on my list forever, Alan. I really do wanna do it. I'll find a mini at some point. Maybe if there's some exposed flesh on like a knife that I'm painting soon, like a cast knife or something, I'll do it there. Looking for review on the general contrast and color as well as some feedback for painting fur on smooth, soft areas such as on the horse bits. Okay, let's take a look. So first of all, obviously I love the color. You're in pure synth wave tones here. So, you know, I dig it. Pink, green, electric blue. I'm in like Flynn. You're selling me. Yeah, I mean, I think overall looks good. I would push the purple shadow on the pink a little farther. So I'd bring that, I'd increase the volume of that purple shadow just slightly. It really shows on him where like, imagine if this purple just ran up a little bit more, it was a little bit darker down here. I think that would really sell me kind of all the hair. And you can see it here, especially like on the cat, on his hair, like it's still kind of flat. So a little more of that I think would be good. Going back to this guy. Again, look for places to hide that pink around a little more like it's just up in the hair here. And we could work that into some other places like make this pony have pinky, like maybe you did a little, but it could have gone farther. I try to tell, hard to see. Maybe like pinky socks, you know, that kind of thing. Love the blue, I think that works fantastic. That came out great. Weapons look great. More pop on the helmet though. The helmet looks a little flat. So I'd say a little bit more on that. Now, as far as texture on the horse bits go, yeah, I mean, let's go back to the horse. It's okay, you've got the right idea. It's all a game of hashes and slashes and stuff like that. So just more of that, I think is the answer. Like you want lots of little thin things, then you glaze it over the top. I will add it to my tutorials, but overall I'd say push the horse a little farther, some bit with some lighter bits, things like that. The blue looks stunningly good and just push a little more contrast into the hair. I think that's what I would tell you there. Okay. Next up, Shawn. Self-challenge to this piece was going to be a sketch style and color glaze, but halfway through decided to go with a full Grazeo style as I love the overall look. Sure, so we're going black and white with just a little bit of red. Yeah, it's always, it's one of the toughest things to paint. It's an interesting look and I think this is great. It's fun to switch it from this to black and white. Ostensibly, if you're nailing it, you should see very little change, right? Because in a mono picture, it lives in the Graze, right? So the basic thing I would tell you here is I think you're in a nice place. Good texture capture, stuff like that. I like the red. I would pop, like I would pop, that red needs to be shockingly bright and you may want to think about two catches of it somewhere. So like, yeah, I like the headband alone. You might want to think about a second red catch or really popping that one if you bright. Like maybe it could be, you know, the headband and like something, and like the hilt on his sword or something, you know, just a couple of spots that way we have a little bit more visual interest. The other thing I would say is just it's more, it's a glazing and smoothing game on things like the sword, his armor. You're good, we could go farther. But I love the exploration of the piece. It's super fun to paint in black and white and I think you caught something here. Little bit sharper edges, keep pushing the whites up to even brighter. Like make sure we're catching all these edges here on Mr. Cyber Samurai. I think that'll really help, okay? But overall, I mean, I think you're good. You're living in the grays, that's where you want to go. Little bit more contrast, push it just a little bit farther and I think you'll be in a good place. Overall, cool stuff, man. I dig this, I dig this kind of experimentation. It's wonderful. All right, Frank, bringing us big Catacross himself. Says he wanted to go for the, you know, him as the main focus, which it does. Look at the picture right now. Boom, you can see Catacross clearly. So he is the focus of the thing. You made him bright, that's good. So I think that honestly worked. First step, using a white ink and zenithaline with our airbrush. Yeah, I mean, I think overall, this looks really good. Again, your real key here is gonna be just tonal variation. The rest of the piece from a composition perspective, I think it works. His little servants are all kind of dark, but things like the black is very flat. We'd want to pop that up. I would also say with Catacross, this belt piece should have been red just because that would actually balance him and draw even more attention. Red draws the eye a great deal. You're wasting an opportunity here by making this black. It could, if it's red, it's giving me much more visual interest. And by the way, creating a full line around him of the red. I would also pop his red to be brighter. So give me some nice, really strong, intense reds around his shoulder, the edge here, and this part here. So he's framed in that red intensity. So it's the bright, he should have the brightest red right now, Mr. Samurai does. And it should be him. Cause again, everything should be drawing me to him. But in general, beyond that, it's tonal variation across like the base in the weapon, just stuff like that I think is where you'd want to be. Okay. But overall, very cool. Looking great. Okay. Juan Francisco Gonzalez Hidalgo, the best name in the PMP, showing up with another Evie Metal Contrast Marine series where he's using all contrast paints to paint all the Evie Metal style Marines. It's a really awesome project. He's doing a great job. Yeah. I mean, my honest advice for you here, man, you know, I said, want to, you know, focus on the edge highlighting here. It's, you know, he says he pushed himself. It feels like he did. It really feels like he did. And it really worked out. I mean, man, these edges are crisp, son. Yeah. I mean, you know, maybe a little there. Couple, I mean, like it's always tough. Edges are never perfect. I mean, for what you're aiming at, I would call this a tremendous success. You could push your deep shadows a little more. Maybe think about a little black Templar mixed in with some of your blue here you're using for that part of the contrast and creating some really nice deep shadows in the low part here, up under here. Just pushing that a little more. So it's a contrasty contrast marine. But I mean, on the whole, I think he's a freaking great looking ultramarine, man. I think you nailed it. And good choice for the green plasma to set aside from the blue marine so it didn't all blend together. That's a solid choice. It's a solid choice right there. Clean, crisp. Yeah. I dig it, man. This has been an ultra success for you. Okay. Sergei, happy holidays to you as well. Want to step outside of your comfort zone. So you're trying to use all non-metallic metal. Some feedback on that for the armor and sword. Also tried to make a better face with more subtle colors. Okay. So let's take a look. And then of course on the base. So we can go farther with the skin. More, more tones, more reds, more purples in general. I think the non-metallic metal is good. You're running some nice contrast. Yeah. It looks like we're going far enough from light to dark. So I think that's all in the correct place. I think we just need to, it's just a smoothing game. It's the glazing game to smooth it all out. But overall, you've got nice from like white to black. The edges are good. Make sure you clean up some of those edges because they're all kind of stippled. And like some of them should have a little bit more of a line aspect to it where it's really catching a sharp reflection. But overall, yeah, I think it's just glazing to smooth it out. I think you've really got the colors down. They look nice. They got a good blue infusion in them. Ties together with the water. That all works really well. So yeah, that's how I'd push. Also with eyes, make sure you've got a nice dark line around the eye. He still looks like there's no, my eyes have very dark circles on them. Human eyes have very dark and I just mean because I'm getting up asleep. That's true. But I mean like the actual eyeball. So make sure you've got, you want darkness around the eyeball in there. So shouldn't just go from like skin to, you know, white gray. All right, Mark Tan, also happy holidays. A lot of people are getting some work down around Christmas. What could you do better with the base and do the purples and oranges work in the scheme? Lastly, is there anything, and then highlight placement? Is there anything better you could do with the face? Okay. All right, so does the, let's start with the question. Oh, is this hand up, say down? That's a weird placement, but okay, sure, why not? Does the orange and blue work? Yes, 100% they're complimentary colors. They are two of the most rich eye catching colors you can use together. Now, that being said, the hand going totally into the bright red, orange thing, probably a little too much there. Okay, just relax your eyes. Where are your eyes drawn? Don't look at anything in particular. Let your eyes unfocus. Where do your eyes look? I mean, it's the hand. I can only see the hand, right? So we need to like, don't ever make the bright, it's red eye catching. Very, brain naturally draws to red areas. It's yellow, brightest lumosity or whatever of a color. So like, it's a double tap of making me pay attention to only one thing. If that hand was just blue, here, this would be a much stronger piece because the orange and yellow works fine. You just wanna make sure it's set against, it's the minor element. Whenever you're using completely complimentary colors with ultra contrast, one of them needs to be in recess. So like, you can use orange and blue, but then he has to be dominant blue with hints of orange or whatever, or strike it reverse it, you know, whatever, right? If it's a mostly orange venture, you want very light touches of blue. The eyes look really good. Yes, you can go higher, both higher and lower. The abs look pretty good. I think those are in the right place, but the face needs more general shadows cast, pop those highlights up a little more, especially along like the eye ridges, things like that, the nose, the nose might actually be bright enough, but like the rest of his eye ridges, the top of his head, we can go farther. Okay. But yeah, overall, I mean, I think it's good. You can do a little more texture with the wings, stuff like that. Make sure you get those nice and smooth, but like when I say texture, I mean like bringing thin lines down to capture that momentum in the wings, but overall I like it. I like the burnt ground into that. I think that looks nice. Yeah, there's my advice. Hope that helps, Mark. Very cool submission, man. All right, Tristan, first submission, paying this up for the Christmas Advent Challenge. Furthest he's taken Miles paint job before, I'm really happy with the progress. So here are some things. Freehand, first attempt, realistic basing, first attempt, rusted metals, overall composition, snow. Okay, so many things. All right, so let's kind of move around here. Snow, snow, snow, snow. All right. Yeah, snow looks fine. Branch it out a little more. Have a little more light dusting in places. It's a little too minimal right now to have those kind of piles, so we could spread it out a little more. Okay. Freehand, like on the candy can and stuff, it's a tough one to do because you gotta do an even pattern. More work to get it balanced to make sure you go back with your initial color, kind of smooth that all out. I mean, it sells, but you wanna make sure it's nice, even layers, which means you're gonna draw it on. It's gonna be wrong. You go back with your white, you correct, you go back with your red, you correct. It's a lot, a lot, a lot of back and forth. Okay. I think the metals are fine. I think you wanna just kind of push it a little farther. Careful with having, so like his sack, let's see if I can, yeah, there you go. It's got a little bit of too much of a shine to it, like that's light reflections. We wanna make sure that's nice and matte down. Some more stippling and texture and stuff in there could also help. I think with the metal, if we're gonna go rust it, it's gotta be a little more brown tones. Rust gathers toward the edges. So, you know, kinda go watch them. If you've watched, you've probably watched them already, but re-watch some of the rusted metal videos. I think you'll see that difference there. The skin looks good. I like all the red in his cheeks and his nose, his lip. That's A plus. I dig that. That looks good. The horns are okay. We could go a little darker on the part near his body, but overall it's good. The beard that you sculpted there looks good. We could push a little more gray tones, kinda darken that up a little bit, so we have a little bit more shadow. Keep the white up near his face so it really pops up here. You have it come into darkness and then get bright again. Kinda that movement will also then draw attention up to the face where you want the attention. I like the free end on the banner. I think that works fine. Yeah, overall I think it's good. So those would be my main piece of advice. I hope that helps. All right, so now we have some of my favorite stuff. Namely, it's time to slanesh it up in here. So Chad is mainly looking for feedback on the skin. Doesn't think it's alien enough. I'm not too sure about the flowers in the base. So let's take a look at the skin. You can push the skin again, more purples and stuff like that, more tones. You can also work in some blue into the shadows. That will make it feel very alien and cold, which is what you're going for here because this is guys on like a snowy area. Light glazes. I mean like I'm talking super light, like make it a blue purple, something like that. Get that in there and I think you'll really pop that up. Now that's the flowers. The only reason they feel weird is because they're set apart from the snow, right? It's cool to use the flowers, that's fine. You know, this weird model has, there's flowers in this alien world that bloom in the winter. There are flowers that bloom in the winter. A little bit of dash of snow on top of them where it's gathered on them, I think is mainly what you'd want to do. So that's my piece of advice. I would also look at, I mean, you can see the sort of the contrast I'm talking about if we had more blue and purple shadows in there, that would really help. As to the, I would also look at making the claws go into a darker color because they still feel kind of same as the skin. So if you push the color of them, it'll also frame the model a little more. So there you go. Hope that helps. Reinhardt bringing us an interesting comparison. The last model he painted after many months of working on this and the first one next to each other. So let's take a look and we're going to jump, I want to look at this in sort of two stages. So here we've got, this is the new one, this is the old one, which I think works a lot better. The addition of the blue into the power elements and stuff like that, I think works really nice. Let's go down to the one where we fix is the engine coil. So they're also blue. This is great. I like this really makes the marble feel more like marble. Like let's look back here real quick. This green doesn't feel as dark here as it does here. That's a trick of the eye because you've worked this high contrast in. I think that really sells. So I think, like I like that a lot. I like the blue in here. The blade has a much nicer pattern of random variation in highlights. So I dig that. One of the things I notice is we still want to make sure the edges of the metal are nice and sharp. So like make sure you're picking out the edges here, here, the Akila or whatever on his shoulder. Make sure we're still getting those edges nice and crisp with like a fine silver or something like that to really show that they're catching and reflecting the light. The edges of metal very much catch the light and reflect them. So, but overall, it's great to see this transition. The shadows, the variation on this metal looks so good. You've really come along. I mean, it's obvious the journey here and I think it's looking really wonderful, man. All right, next up, Johannes brings us Mac tonight. I always love this guy, Mr. Moon Face. So looking for mainly feedback on like the face and stuff like that. So I think it's good. I think we can go farther, especially on the tongue. So like one of the fun things you do here is you take these back tendrils into red, but then we just leave the tongue yellow. If this tongue went into red, it would actually contrast much better against the green complimentary colors and all that. But in addition, it would help it pop out and define the face more. Same with the teeth. They should have a little more variation in them from top to bottom. Make sure you have bone always, should have a journey it's running on. So you wanna make sure you do that. As to the blends, I think you did a good job with it. I have no issue with any of that. I would bring this down into an even deeper green and this out into a pink. And I think there you go. Now, it really make your, the focus is already on the face. We don't have a problem with that. This guy, you're definitely looking at his big bright moon head. But I think that would definitely help as far as that goes. So there's my feedback on the targeted sort of area that you were asking about. All right, Paul talking about our big doom bull here. And he's, this is his first time in the monthly review. So awesome. You know, he's thinking about competition in the future and he wants to know what are the things that you need to improve the most. Sure. So let's talk about it. This is a, first of all, I would never do this piece or something like for competition. He's too closed and too kind of same me in the materials. You want, you know, like good competition makes tend to be more open and tend to have lots of different materials to experiment on, you know, like stuff like that. But let's get into it. So I would, first of all, blood effects should be used exceedingly sparingly on anything in competition. I don't know why you would do this for your army because it's fun and it's cool to make it like a doom bull who chopped through stuff. But just be really careful with that stuff. It's, it has to be very purposefully applied. Now onto the real painting of it. It's, it's the same story of like variation. So the bone here and here, very flat, very samey throughout, right? So push that farther. Same down here with his toes. We got a nice thing, more striations to really pull that all out. With the skin tone, more color, more tone in the skin. So again, more additions of like reds and purples will make him more visibly interesting. Same with his face, where we're really want to pop that out, right? So here you can see on his back how it's, it's much more kind of flat in the colors we would want. We want to work in more of those mid-tone transitions, bring more hue into this, right? He's, you have these bright red straps on him and that's kind of the only color. So on the, on the shots where we can see it, it's all we can see because it kills everything else. As far as the basing goes, again, you know, just making sure things are smooth. Like every, every part of a competition miniature has to be at the highest level. So like the basing, just being kind of some dry brush and some skulls, that's not going to fly. We got to have that up at the same level. We got to have color in that dirt. We got to have the, the skeletons on the, the skulls are already down there being like smooth. If there's texture, it needs to be intentional texture, stuff like that. That would be kind of my main advice. More hue, push it more as far as that goes and more just tonal variation, especially throughout things like the skin, the hair, like that black hair needs a color in it, right? Where it's catching something. That would be my sort of main feedback for you. But, but overall it's good. It gets definitely really nice piece. I would, I think this piece would honestly work better with dark horns going to light because it would frame the face better. The tips of the horns being dark, they just get lost. Whereas if this was black, it would actually contrast the horns would contrast really well against the ear. Right now, his back, his horn, his ear, his face are all like the same color all the way down. Whereas if this were nice and dark, it would break up that space really well. And if this came to light, it would show against the face really well and frame the face, right? So that's the kind of stuff you want to focus on. All right, Sang, going for a higher highlight on all your colors. Let's take a look. We're definitely getting there. I think that's good. I think your highlights at the right place. I think we need more soft shadows. So again, Sang, so like the gold still seems flat. We need more color in that. I think your highlights are kicking. I think they're in the right place. I think we need more variation on the low point. So some more soft, subtle grays in the white. Some more deeper colors in the reds and definitely more sepia shading in general in the golds. Also, drill out them gun barrels. You thought I wasn't gonna notice. I'm always gonna notice. Drill out your gun barrels and make sure we scrape that flash off of right here, like that we've got around the side. Always drill your gun barrels. A, B, D, always B drilling. G, B, gun barrels, okay. But yeah, real cool. I like them. They're very striking. It's a great color scheme. I've seen it before. And I think your highlights, you've pushed them into a really nice place. I dig them. They have a real good pop to them. All right, Benjamin. So what he's mainly looking for here is feedback on the face and hair as well as the general contrast of color. Sure. So let's talk about the general contrast of color. Yeah, I mean, I think this is good. I think the hair is great. Very chibi, very bright. You've got nice striations in there. A little bit of it, especially around the top of her head, like right here, you might be able to push it up even a little bit farther into an ivory scheme to really show where it's reflecting around her face. Maybe the same with like these two top parts, the braids here. It's very evenly highlighted throughout. And you may want to try to create a little more directionality in the light. As far as the face goes, I dig it. The eyes look real chibi. We need a little bit more darker area around them. So like more separation of the eye from the face. The iris looks fantastic, but I need more color around here. Like deeper, your eyes have a lot of color change that happens toward the center of your nose. So bringing more shadows down there, a little more red tones, stuff like that. Purple tones, things of that nature. Soft, subtle gray on the underside to represent the orbital, the orb-like, whatever. The orbish nature of eyes, the Ray Orbison nature, the Roy Orbison nature of eyes. As far as the cheeks go, she looks very nice, very cold. She's wearing a parka because it's chilly out and she's got her little mittens on. So I think that all works well. You gave her that nice cold skin tone. The glazes in there and the cheeks are nice. Think we could pull a little more red subtly back here. And I think that would be good. Same with maybe a little more in here as well on the underside. That's kind of the stuff that jumps out at me, but overall it's a really cool mini. And the hair is fantastic. You really did a great job with that, Ben. So I think that's great. All right, Cole, giving us Nurgle with a dark, gory, horror-esque theme. Okay, all right. So let's take a look. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely gross. No doubt about that. Again, with the blood effects, like I get it, he wanted really a lot of blood. Okay, that's fine. I get what you're going for. This picture tells the story. The skin and the armor need to be farther apart to create more interesting separation. Stippling of black green into there. So oxidized stuff will often have deep blacks and deep black browns in it as well. And that's the problem. When we flip to the black and white, there's not enough travel between the skin and the armor to make it really stand out. That's what we're seeing here. Like when you just kind of relax your eyes, it's very hard to see the difference between the skin and the armor because of the color that they have in them. So I'd say push that farther, more stippling, more rusty, crusty, dark brown, black goodness in the armor will actually help and work. And it's like, copper doesn't just oxidize green. It also, if you go look at old statues, there's lots of like black spots and things like that to get in there. So really sharpen those, more bruising around the edge of the armor, pull that skin into a deep purple right around the edge of where this old beaten gross armor is. And that'll really, that'll help, again, sell the contrast difference between the two sections, right? So there you go. But overall, I mean, it's a super cool guy. I mean, it's obviously, this fig is just amazing from CreatureCaster. So that's what I would recommend. Did a great job. Okay, Joshua says he's beginning to intermediate painter, looking to move up, not happy with the skin and it was the first time doing armor like that. So let's, yeah, sure. So let's talk about this. So my best advice on the armor is, it feels like you were using just like the contrast paint there. I think we could go either farther into a true non-metallic metal or just use the basic metals would be my advice. Now, as far as the skin goes, we need more variation and it needs to be not, it's too much pink in here that doesn't balance and doesn't have enough travel, right? Like you've got this nice dark purple, but we need it to be smoother. So my basic advice for you, Josh, to move up to your next level is work more on that tonal variation through glazing, okay? You may also want to think about more texture. Like he has little dots on him, go farther with that. Make your own dots. Like don't let the sculptor just tell you where the dots have to be, do it with paint. Now, I would stay away from the green on the skin. That doesn't sell as much when like what we really need is the blue pulled down more because we have this, one of the reasons the skin is challenging is because you have this like hyper bright, intense saturated blue and it goes straight into this hyper intense pinky flesh and they're completely separated, right? Whereas if the dots were blue and you went in and added your own demon dots as well, just which just means you really take a paint brush and stipple some dots on, you know, easiest, easiest free hand in the universe. And you pulled those two together. If you use the skin tone as the highlight color in your blue, now we've got a meshing of the two sides. Okay? So that's my advice. Work on pushing your contrast farther, more value contrast throughout and then bring up that total variation through some smoother glazes and that'll help you mute out some of those very saturated colors. All right. Wonder woman. So, Tygo says he painted this as a gift for his sister. Last month, they got the feedback to push the skin shadows farther. How are we doing? So let's take a look. We're getting there more basic answer farther. Like keep, keep pushing, you know, and with the eyes and stuff, what could you have done in 30 minutes? More highlight and tonal variation in the hair, light, a couple of some light glazes in the skin, especially around the legs in this area here, up under her arms and her muscle structure. Like she's, you know, she's very fit. So like having those muscles well defined, saying within between the fingies, never forget fingies and most importantly in the face. Like paint those eyes, have more shadows. The face tells the story of the miniature. That's where we're looking. That's where our eyes should be drawn to. We need much more tonal variation on the face. So if I had 30, if I had 30 minutes to spend on this, if you asked me like I had 30 more minutes to spend, I would spend every minute on the face, period. Because that's the story of the miniature, right? That's where I would live. So that's my best advice for you. All right, Alberto, greetings from Italy. Well, hello, greetings from the homeland. First submission with this model tried is first NMM. Any help is appreciated. Sure. So I have videos on NMM. I would highly recommend you go watch them. I mean, the basic story here with the NMM is it doesn't travel far enough. Go reference either my videos I've done on non-metallic metal or the linked video below because we need much, much, much, much further contrast. Like we've got to run a higher distance here. Also, I would be, again, as always careful with the blood effects, like they can just be, so I did a recent video on blood splatter might have come out after you posted this. So go check that out. It'll show you how to get a more realistic kind of blood spatter pattern. But with the non-metallic metal, more deeper browns, more higher highlights, more sharp edges. We just, right now you're living, if one is the brightest and five is the darkest, you're living completely in like three and four. We need to go way, way, way out, okay? So that's my basic advice. I do like the skin tone a lot. I think that looks nice. We could go a little farther, but overall we've got a nice run there. You got a nice push to highlights. His face needs the same level of variation and detail you did with the abs here. So always make sure the face is the most interesting part of the model. All right, Daniel Rodriguez. So this guy, this big giant monster, he's not really a monster, he's a machine, but yeah, this guy's awesome. First time doing so much metal, first big mech armor, bases, airbrush, TMM, Vallejo, metal color, but I trade various kinds of metals with glazes of inks and paints over it. At the end, the TMM effect is very subtle. Questions are, what's the priority to work on fix, improve or change? What should I do really well so I can validate some improvement? And sure, absolutely. And thank you for putting together a wonderful picture here of the combination. Okay, so let's take a look at this guy. I think this is really nice. I think this guy looks great. He has a lot of good variation. I love all the inks over top of the metals. I think you're rocking with that here. That hard purple tone really works for me. Using the variation of the metal but with the purple over it, I'm digging the heck out of it. So number one thing I would do to pop this up, like are we making progress? Yes, we have wonderful variation in the real metals that are still showing too, by the by. Like look at how dark we get here up to this light. Great. What we need to do is pop them high highlights up a little higher. Let me point out a couple areas to you. The edges need to be sharper catches. So we need to go back and catch those edges with some really, really crisp thin paint. We just didn't catch enough edges here far enough. Secondly, the gun barrels. Having the center point of these, where they'd be heating up and sort of plasma-y would be a great place to catch it with like a bright, like you did here on the gun. Let's go back to the gun real quick. This like edge you did on the gun, that looks great. I'd love it if in the barrel, we had the same high highlight, okay? The central figure being in red is good. It draws the attention there. I have no issue with that. That being said, you may wanna place a couple other spots of red around the miniature, like hide things with a striped red design or something or these lights on the shield can be red or something. Like just so there's a little bit more minor, minor elements of the red, that way it doesn't feel so stark. It's good to draw attention, but we generally wanna get a little bit more of it than that. It's okay to have it for a strong pop element that draws the eye, but you wanna focus in a little bit more on your compositional balance. So that's my suggestion. That and like your popped edges I think are the highest spot. But no, I think you did that. The colors really well, the inks nice, it shifts well. You caught your good highlights with the variation in the metal and then worked over it with the inks. So I think that all sells great. I really dig that. Yeah, I think that looks good. I think the guns look really awesome too. I like the way you captured the like energy feeling of the sort of gun there. So I think that really works out well. Okay, Ryan says first time posting here, more to come in the future, we'll welcome. So some feedback, sword handle. White may have been a bad color choice. I don't even need to go in the picture. It was, it's too bright. Yep, yep, should have been the same red as everything else. Like you already had a bunch of red cloth it just should have been that red. It would have balanced the figure more. Sword blade, tried to make it look like a blade. Serrated, it's very straight. So I wasn't sure what else to do with it. Yeah, sure. We can talk about that. Red ribbon on top, it blends in with the neck. So tried to black line, does it make it stand out too much? Overall, what to focus on, sure. So overall, the story is the same as much as anything. More tonal variation, especially on the green. It's kind of flat there, but as well, here would be my other thing. The shell is a big offender of this. It's really samey, right? I need more high highlights, more directional highlights. Make sure the elements of the miniature are better separated. Like the black line might be a bit far. You could use a, I like, you can use a softer line. You could use a really dark green black. So it looks like it's the skin and kind of push some shadows near it. But like the fingies here, like we've talked about many times there needs to be a hard separation between the bone and the skin. So one of the things I would tell you is just harder areas and shadows separating everything. Same with the eyes. We go, we don't have a nice hard line around the eyes. What you generally wanna do is, the way, one of the ways I start is I create the almost the hard line of the areas I'm separating. So like I start with a pretty intense dark, purple, brown, black ink and like, we'll come in here and create this edge. And then I'll push shadows toward it of a slightly lighter color and then slightly lighter, right? And so it ends up feeling like this natural transition to the dark, deepest part. That's the way you can avoid this. So you could start with a black line but then you push some deep green right up to it. So it feels like you're just hitting the wall of a natural shadow. Same with between the shell. So that would be kind of my main piece of advice for you there. Just better separation of the elements and keep pushing that contrast, especially on the face. Here on his nose, above his eyes, some more like skin tone and or yellow type stuff in there to really push that contrast up, okay? As far as bone texture goes, I have a section on bone in the related video. So yeah, go watch that. Oh, the blade. Yeah, the serrate is fine. I think that works. You could push even some sharper highlights, get yourself some nice thin metal, you know, Vallejo metal color silver and a couple more serrations. Run, it does have a center line so you can run shadows up on one side, you know, or something and push a highlight like here. You can have a high highlight next to a shadow here and here you can have a little bit of a light reflection where it's catching light directly off the ground. That kind of NMM tricks in TMM is the other way you can really push. Okay, Bob brings us a CryptoBrain conversion, Space Marine with Flesh Eater and other bits. First time creating a competition model, looking to bring the LVO and would love feedback on what I could do to improve. Sure, so I looked this guy over and the general advice I have for you would be much the same, like on the paint cleanliness part. It's a lot of different pieces going on. It certainly is a strange figure with the big monstrous arms coming out of him. I would be concerned about proportion. Like I understand you're going for a nightmare creature, but like he's really out of proportion, probably too much. Now, that being said, if you like the nightmare thing, I'm cool with it, keep it no issue. Where are you, let's go to this one because let's go to your black and white. It's gonna tell the whole story. Notice that the skin and the face and all this, like again, we just don't run the variation as much as we need to, right? It all looks very similar in color tone. I need deeper shadows in the arms. Maybe some texture since that's flesh. Same with this pumpkin head. Should come down and go darker, right? Really get into some nice brownish type colors in the bottom of there. And then finally just cleanliness. The best advice I can give you on a model for competition is cleanliness and smoothness. So like here we've got paint kind of out of place. Here we got paint out of place, right? Where this yellow is on here, it's not on here. Everything needs to be clean, clean, clean. The number one story for competition is cleanliness in your painting application. So go through, push some of that tonal variation out and then really make sure those elements are nice and separated. All the paint is cleanly applied. That we have dark to light, dark to light, nice shadow to light line separation. I think that's where you wanna go to really push it up. Okay? But best of luck at LVO, man. It's a great convention and there's some really good people who'll be there. So I wish you all the best, my friend and look forward to seeing more. It's a really awesome, crazy conversion. I do love, you know, you are just making a true nightmare creature here and I dig the heck out of it. All right. Tebow brings us the last piece of his iron jaw army, his big mega boss on Mawcrusher. Push the paint job a little, the goal was to get it to the table quickly to a decent result. What other quick tricks could have been done? Well, let's talk about it. Quick tricks. Okay, so other quick tricks that could be done. I think some quick, soft feathered glazes on the underside of the wing, like bringing them down into a blue-purple and then you literally just feather it out one, two applications and you're rock and roll to create some of the same variation you have up here over here. Maybe a little bit more on the skin of him and then a little bit of the highlight up here on like the bone, pushing these big bones up higher and then a little bit of light, more light on his face to really draw the attention up to the mega boss. Cause he's the star of the show. The Mawcrusher is his mount. He's the star. You wanna make sure you got the light really, really focused up there. And that's where it is. If I was gonna offer you some quick tips, I think that'd be probably what it is. Everything else would be pretty time consuming, like the bone striations could be more God in heaven are the bone striations on this model, infuriating and annoying and endless. So that would be kind of my main focus. Little higher highlights here and on the bone to frame him. I like the back of the armor. That has a nice hit on it. So I think that's good cause that draws, that's good light there. Maybe even push these two bones up really, really high. That way we create a nice complete circle around. This is the point we wanna look at, you know, that kind of thing. But overall, I love it man. This has been a great journey for you with the I.J. Army and I love to see it come to a close with a beautiful, beautiful final piece. Love the blue, love the sort of Martian tinted base. It's great. All right, Alex Weir. Curious how to make his green skin better. Mixed in flesh tone for the highlights, but he didn't really give the contrast you were looking for. Yeah, so let's take a look. He's a little far away from me to really tell, but the answer is in shadow, not in highlight. So first of all, a little bit of pinky flesh tone into the nose will really help in around the lips. That will help contrast the face. My other advice would be take some whole red or something like that, mix it into your green and bring your shadows down. I think the flesh tone works well, but we need a deeper, more organic, richer green on the bottom to pull it down. So that's my best advice for your skin tone. Other than that, just quick other notes I notice when you're doing the candy cane gun, make sure you go back with your white and smooth out your lines. Candy cane needs to be very, people love candy canes around Christmas time, but it will really be obvious. It's a very geometric recognizable pattern. If it's off, people will notice. So that's just the other thing that jumps out of me. Red looks good, love the fur. You know, all that stuff looks great. So yeah, overall really cool. Hope that helps, Alex. All right, Bartos brings us some piggies. And he says he's using these as razor gourds and frost-savers. He said he's going for a tabletop standard. I'll be completely honest, man. There's not much I would really change here for a tabletop standard. Now, what would I say? A little more darker separation between the fur here and his Mohawk. So bring that a little darker so there's a nice line of separation. And then a little bit of more interesting color variation in the actual piggy face. So work some pinks, purples, down to his nose and here on the shadows. Those are the two big things that stick out to me. So a little darker, dark here and here. And then a little bit more pinky tonal variation into the nosey section, where it gets a little more pink, a little red, a little purple. You know, something to make it really pop out. So there you go. Okay. And finally, Oliver just trying to get back into painting. Well, welcome back. Glad to have you back. Welcome any advice or tips. Definitely struggled with the skin could have made the base more interesting. So you got some good color in the base, but I agree. Like some tough, some other elements of nature would really sell here. The skin does, as I've said many times, needs a little more. Now I like the soft, subtle red tones. I think that's good. We can push it a little farther, but you've got some good reds. You've got some good purples. Let's go a little farther on that and let's pop those highlights up a little more. Again, thingy separation, very important. Still notice that's not as dark as it could be. And then the other thing is just on the green of the cloth. And so like that, that feels a little flat. We could really pop that out by having a nice light edge to that green. I think that would be a good way to go. Same with her little bone knife. She's holding just a little more like striations variation color in that, I think would really help. Cause right now it feels kind of samey, but yeah, more variation in the skin, more reds, more purples, especially here toward her arm. You know, your hand has a lot of color in it, right? Like especially in between your knuckles. Like I'm very pale and I'm sitting under like a very bright daylight bulb. You can see how all the reds are in my hands, right? Like that's the kind of stuff you wanna work in there. She's like gripping stuff, right? And so we should see those colors in the skin. So there you go, Oliver. Hope that all helps. That brings us to the end of the month. Fantastic month overall. Beautiful submissions from everybody. Thank you to everyone who submitted. I really, really appreciate it. Wonderful stuff. I hope all the advice was helpful. I hope to see more from everybody in the months to come. So great job, everyone. If you're interested in joining us, again, link down in the description would love to have you along. Answer all the questions if you wanna get in. But as always, folks, I really appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time.