 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video, and today we're going to talk about the color purple, not the movie, although it's a classic. This is a continuation of our ongoing series, Exploring Colors, and today we're going to talk about purple. Purple is a fascinating color. Purple is something that I think a lot of people don't think about just how unique and strange the color purple is. So the first thing we need to do is just kind of talk about its basic properties and things like that. So purple obviously has lots of different exact shades, but it does exist within a rather narrow spectrum, okay? The first and most important thing to understand about purple as a color is that purple as a color of paint is a fabrication. Purple as a color in the traditional sense, like that is to say as a wavelength of light doesn't actually exist, that would be violet. So here are some violet colors, let's move our purples out of the way. These would all be violets, okay? And violet is actually on, it's a spectral color, it actually exists on the wavelength of light, you know, Roy G. Bibb, we all remember that, right? So all of these types of colors are violet, and you can see how cold they look, sort of how kind of, I don't know, almost pastel they can look when they get bright, right? The brighter they get, the more blue they tend to look. That's just sort of the nature of violet. That's not the same, however, for purple. Purple is made on sort of the traditional RGB color wheel by combining red and blue. And so you can make it as a derivative of magenta, and you'll see how much more red this looks than violet. So in paint colors, since we're not talking about, since we don't paint with spectral light, the real difference between these two is usually just that violet colors have a lot more blue and purple colors as they're labeled in paint tend to have a lot more red, okay? So but all of them we can broadly call purple just for our purposes today, even though I understand they are actually very different colors with very different scientific properties. Purple doesn't tend to increase in sort of luminosity when you brighten it directly. It changes very much, and we'll explore that later when we get painting on the miniature and we talk about exactly what it is. Purple is probably the most common color I use. There is, I love this color, it's my favorite color. And it's the color of royalty of piety. It shows up in a lot of different religious garbs around the world. It shows up in a lot of different sort of the outfits of royalty and things like that. Color of kings, color of emperors in Roman times. So it has a long tradition of being associated with the elite with royalty with grueling. Now, interestingly, purple used to, purple's very old color, unlike blue, which we talked about last time, where it didn't even really potentially exist as a thing we recognized as a separate color for quite a while. Purple has been around for a long, long time, and our oldest records of it are around the Mediterranean. The most common use of it started out of the Phoenicians, what's modern day Lebanon basically. And they basically made a purple dye out of a snail shell and sold it around the Mediterranean at exorbitant amounts of money, making it so rare and expensive that it became associated with wealth and with people of power. The other interesting thing about the color purple is that it's very culturally variant. So here in the US, something like this is what I would think of as purple, and what most people if I showed them this color would probably associate as the color purple. However, if you look at, and that's probably true in the UK and things like that as well, but there are lots of cultural differences. If you go into maybe more French or German countries or even more south around the Mediterranean itself, this is more what people would identify as purple, which is why, by the way, this paint which is made in Crete Cypress, I can never remember, one of those two, I'm sorry to confuse the two, has this tone, it's labeled purple four, and yet to me this doesn't feel very purple, but there's a lot of cultural differences in exactly what people recognize as purple, because it doesn't come out of light, because it's made simply by the mixing of two different colors, you know, it's basically somewhere between, if we think of it on like an RGB color wheel, it's sort of between crimson and violet, right? So, there we go. Purple can classically be kind of a tough color to paint. I watch a lot of people paint the color purple, and they have a real rough time with it. I've seen a lot of paint jobs where somebody will start and they'll paint something purple. So here on my palette, I have a little bit of our purple hex from Nocturna, which by the way, if you're looking for a great purple paint set, lots of paint sets don't have many purples because they are always sort of mixed out of red and blue, and so there's just often not as much people feel like they can do with them when mixing the paints together. If you're looking for a really great purple paint set, I would highly recommend the Nocturna purple set. A lot of it is violet, not purple, and dips a lot more into the blue spectrum, but I quite like that. It gives you a wonderful range of options. So one of the things I'll classically see with especially newer painters when they're painting purple is they use a lighter purple, so they start with something that's quite red-blue mixed, a traditional purple like this, and then they do one of two things. Either they go to a light violet color to highlight it, so something like a blue violet from Vallejo here, or the orchid light from Nocturna Vallejo. By the way, violet itself is named after a flower, so it's appropriate. The violet flower is what gives us the name for the color. And they'll go to something like this, and when you apply something like that straight away, you get these really, really, really hard lines, because suddenly you shifted from red-blue and quite red to this very light pastel blue favorite color. So you'll see a highlight like this, and it will just look so gray and so stark on the miniature. The other thing I'll often see people do is they go straight into white, so they just take some white. Okay, I want to make it lighter. I'm going to grab some purple. I'll mix it with some white. So here over on my palette, there we go, you can see I've got some, that's my purple, and here is some other colors we'll talk about in a moment. You can see the big difference there, right? So here is your orchid light, very blue. Here's what happens when I add straight white to a traditional purple color. You see how much more red that still stays. Regardless, when I then apply that highlight, what happens is, oh gosh, I get a real strong line, right? Okay. Now, I'm jumping really far in my mix. I mean, if you're a fan of layering, you would be screaming right now at me through the computer screen to say, yes, Vince, that's all very nice, but I would never make that kind of a jump, right? Super fair. But I was being extreme to sort of point out just how stark it can be, because the reality is, when you work with colors like red, or oranges, or something like that, you don't see that same jump, okay? There I did something a little more halfway as a glaze, but even then you can still quite strongly see that differentiation line. It can just be a tough color to blend. So I'm going to reset both of these back to purple itself, and we're going to talk about the ways that I like to highlight my purple, and I think tricks and things for how you work with the color purple for maximum efficacy. And like I said, I've used a lot of purple over the years. It's my favorite color to paint with, so it's not, it's something I've played around with quite a lot. Okay. So now we're back to more or less purple. Well that's drying. Let's talk about what we're going to utilize. Set that off to the side. So if we're going to use white, then you have to be very, very careful with it, because it will suddenly get quite stark. In general, I don't like using white, highlight purple. All it does is really desaturate the color. Purple, because it's a mix of red and blue, and has a fairly high saturation of two intense colors, tends to be quite strong when you mix something that's saturated and is strong with something that, by its nature, desaturates color. It's very difficult to get a smooth blend. Violet, by its nature, is quite desaturated. It looks quite pastel. This kind of a tone you can more easily mix with white. But even so, my preference is not to use something like this. My preference is to use something like this. So this is arctic blue from scale color. You could also use something like Glacier Blue from Vallejo. If you want a cold highlight, going to a gray or a gray blue will generally give you a much better result, because it's going to be increasing the blue content at the same time, instead of in a more controlled way. If you want to go for a warm highlight on purple, and this is actually one of my favorite things to highlight purple with. Then you go for a flesh tone. In this case I have some scale 75 pale skin and Vallejo model color light flesh. You could use a sunny skin tone. You could use anything like that. They'll all work. They'll all provide you, all of those can give you a highlight. One of the keys to working with purple is the glaze. That's right, our old dreaded friend, the glaze. So I've got a little bit of that gray and a little bit of that flesh tone over here on my palette. So I'm going to take some of that purple and I'm going to mix it in with some of this flesh tone. Now because flesh tone has a little bit of pink in it, as well as some white, it tends to work super well with purple because it's increasing the red at the same time it's increasing the white. So when I put that on, what I get is something that generally feels much more soft, right? And as always, still there's a little bit of separation there, of course, like I can still see the lines after one level. Let's add some more flesh in, let's go even farther. If you ever want your purple to really feel like rich, lustrous silk, then using the flesh tone is such a nicer way to do that because in the end, it's going to provide you with such a more rich, complex, visually compelling highlight. Now, one of the other tricks when you're working with purple, that feels much more natural to me, but we're not done yet. One of the other tricks when working with purple is that purple as its base is quite transparent, can often in most colors because it's quite a rich, saturated color, be thinned with just water down into a glaze. And when we do that, we can then smooth the edge of our lines quite easily without without causing any problems, still leaving a great amount of our previous work visible. And that can really help enrich the color further. You notice how much more lustrous that suddenly looks, right? Just after one glaze. So purple is a great color to glaze with because it is so naturally transparent. My best recommendation is if you're working on purple troops, make sure you factor in a glaze as part of your final effort. And that can just even one quick glaze over the mini can really smooth everything out. Okay. Now, if I were going to go more gray, let's say this side has more of a blue light to it, then ostensibly, we want to actually start with more of a violet color since it already has more blue to it. But we can still use gray with drake purple. It will cool it out. It's increasing the blue side and what you're naturally doing is pushing it toward more of a violet. So you are going to have a little bit more of that pastel feel whenever you start adding gray into the mix. It's going to feel a lot colder. Violet in general will feel a lot colder because of that, uh, because of that addition of that blue color that's happening in there. And we can go quite far with this. You can see how eventually we get to quite cold colors. Now, nonetheless, I'm working with a base quite warm purple. So it's got a ways to go before it gets real cold, but it's one of the great things is that purple can act either quite warm or quite cold to spending, depending on your blue content. And yet again, the same rule applies where I can take my purple. I can make a nice glaze out of it. And in this case, if I want to create some warm mid tones, I can come back in, apply a couple of nice glazes of that purple. And what that does is it helps to re saturate the color. Because violet tends to be quite desaturated and feel quite desaturated. When you bring back in those purple glazes, it really adds the color itself back in. Okay. So now let's talk about how we shade this color. Oh, the shading of purple. So obviously your easiest way is you can go get yourself a darker purple. Uh, part of the problem is there aren't that many super dark purples on the market. So something like ellendil violet, uh, from, uh, scale 75, something like royal purple, uh, from Vallejo, those are pretty dark, but they're still not like really shadow color dark. So my traditional shading, I like warm highlights on purple. Alpha and I like them to feel lustrous. So I'll push more into pink tones, red tones, flesh tones. You, by the way, can also, of course, use pink to highlight it, but that is going to change the color profile. You're not really highlighting purple. Then you're just making a pink purple. Um, my traditional favorite is something like your, your FW Payne's gray ink. This is blue black. It gives us a nice cold shadow. Okay. Uh, I prefer this over the standard black. I do not really like to shade purple with black. I see that used a lot. Um, people often recommend something like a nulnoil for purple. I find that that just takes all the luster out of it. Uh, something like a blue black is going to do you much better. So even if you only have, let's say you're a painter and you're like Vince, that's super great. I like that. But look, ma'am, I don't have 50 million paints and inks, dude. Uh, I've only got, you know, my, my washes and shades. Okay. Cool. No problem. Just take yourself some traditional, uh, nulnoil or something and mix it with the, uh, blue shade. Right. Uh, so mix it with your, uh, your drag off. What that, what's it called, uh, drag off night shade or whatever it is, mix it with something like that, you know, just put it out on your palette and get a nice 50, 50 mix and you're good to go. There is, however, a tricky way to shade purple. And that's with this color. And this is going to be that, that sounds insane. Yellow is normally how we brighten everything. Right. Uh, but yellow interacts with purple in a fascinating way because it is, it's complimentary color. So let's, uh, let's actually bring the palette on here a moment. If I take my purple and I mix it with some of my blue, black, right, I get fairly obvious results. I get a nice deep purple color. Kind of exactly what we would expect. Perfectly fine shadow color for, uh, for this. So if I wanted to come in, place some of those shadows, maybe feather that out a little bit, right? Great way to add a shadow. Nothing wrong with that. It's rich. It's got blue tones in it. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Okay. Absolutely nothing wrong with that kind of a strategy. However, let's take some of that purple and let's grab some of that yellow. This is, uh, some Camara cold yellow. Now we're going to want to mix, it has to be very, very purple. Okay. With just a little bit of that yellow in there, because it is still quite a bright color, but you'll notice what we get is this sort of dark, uh, this sort of dark brown color as we mix toward that, toward the, the, the two complimentary colors together. It's actually in, in depending on your purple, it may or may not be darker, but what it is going to give you is a really interesting brown tone that you can hide in these mid shadows to give yourself warm shadows. You can then take that new color and start introducing a little bit of the darker black, but you don't, you won't need as much of it then. And what that gives you is actually this really interesting transition down into the shadows. Okay. So what happens is, if I don't know if that's going to show up on camera or not, but you get this much richer, we think again, as always, I state, think of the, the highlight to shadow as a sort of one, two, three, four, five, that's more to it than that, but let's just keep it simple. Now your highest color is a one, your deepest shadow is a five. When we mix in a little bit of that blue black, we get our, or sorry, of that, yeah, to that blue black into this, we get our five. But to help our four to be more visually interesting and to hide more fascinating colors in there, we can use this dark purple yellow. Okay. And by the way, if you use like an ochre or I used quite a bright yellow, just to really stand out and have something interesting happen here, but you can use something like an ochre or something and have it be really sort of interesting, the effects you get. What I love about mixing yellow into my purple shadows is you get this really cool low tone, right? I hope that's showing up, but it's so much richer than just adding black. Okay. It's super easy to just add black to things. And it's super boring to your eye. Your eye finds nothing fascinating about not color mixing in some yellow like that and making that your sort of four, your lowest low tone. You're never going to get to like the darkest dark with it, even if you use like a deep ochre, because the complimentary wants to mix toward brown. But you will get a deep shade. And this is also a great trick if you want to use purple in a limited way on a miniature because purple is so intense and so powerful. If you put purple on a mini, it's got to be balanced. So for example, on this girl, I couldn't just make this part of her dress purple and then that's it. And everything else on her was a different color. If I did, it would look totally out of balance. Okay. With the exception that if you operate from a purple with a lot of yellow in something like this, where it's way, way, way desaturated down toward the complimentary, okay, it will feel much less powerful. And you can then just use it as a spot color. So many times when I wanted to do like a lot of a lot of characters have these sorts of, she has a whole room. But a lot of times characters will have this tabard. And that's kind of it for the only cloth they have on them, right? And you want to make it purple because it's cool pop color. What I'll often do is mix yellow into it so that it's much less intense on the eye. Okay. So you can see there how mixing those together. I think that looks wonderful. Like look at that great tone, that change of tone we've got moving through those colors. Like purple is so gratifying to work with. Like with just those simple color change, we've got mixing in the flesh tone and then glazing over some purple, bringing some yellow into our shadows and then finally blue into the deepest shadows. I think you get a really interesting profile that really grabs your attention that looks rich and lustrous. So there you go. Uh, that's purple. Uh, a couple other just quick notes. Purple's a great color to transition out of and into other colors. Uh, it works great as a base to move into either of its, um, either of its components. So what I mean by that is if you look at a lot of my slanesh stuff, you'll see I start purple and then start going into pinks and magentas and reds and stuff like that. Uh, you can also do this a lot. I did this on my zinge army where I would start purple and then go into blues and scions and things like that. So you really can, uh, it works great to blend colors down when you're working with just the core mid, sorry, just the core mid dark purple. Because it's so transparent, it's a wonderful color to just glaze in, to put into things, to make them feel more interesting. It's kind of a great deeper base color, uh, to support everything that's near it on the color wheel or in the spectrum. Okay. So there you go. That's purple. The color of royalty, the color of piety, uh, make your miniatures more royal in a good way. I hope this helps, uh, some quick summaries. Remember purple is effectively kind of a fake color. It's a paint color. It's made by mixing red and blue. Uh, it doesn't have a spectral color. It varies a lot by culture. So find the purple. And I wonder if people watching this who are all over the world, which one do you think is purple? Which one is purple as you would think of it? So there you go. Kind of an interesting little test. It's separate than violet. Purple is naturally richer, more saturated, more dark than your violet colors, which, uh, tend to have a lot more blue in them and tend to feel a lot more desaturated. You can use both broadly under the paint of, under the paint idea of painting purple. Instead of highlighting with white, uh, try highlighting with a flesh tone or with a blue gray. Do pay attention to whether you're using or a purple or a violet. Purples will, true purples will respond better to flesh tone highlights. True violets will respond better to gray highlights. In either case, you can alternate with your shadows, make them, uh, warm to a cold highlight or cold to a warm highlight. Hiding yellow is a great way to get warm shadows. You can use things like blue black or deep red black as your dark shadows, depending on whether you want warm or cold. But all in all, purple is a great color to paint with. It glazes super easy because it's so naturally transparent. And all in all, it is just a fun color that's very eye catching. So I hope that helps. This is a really fun series. I love exploring colors. Uh, this is always a fun one to do. So I hope you enjoy this. If you did like it, give it a like. Hitting that button helps other people find this channel, which I deeply appreciate. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one. And we'll see you next time.