 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about doing metallic wings, specifically using non-metallic techniques to have a nice metal sheen to wings that look like, for example, St. Celestine's here, or let's say you've got some Stormcast wings, like they have the little pointy light wings, or really anything like this where you want the wings to look more metal than feathers. So this is a rather unique topic, but it actually gives us a cool chance to talk about the nature of non-metallic metal and some of the things, and some of the easy ways you can create the effect without going to honestly great amounts of effort, which is always nice. And these big wing panels are actually a really good place to experiment with stuff like this. So as I said here, we've got St. Celestine wings, which I love. I ordered a bunch of extra bits of these because I use them all over the place for all sorts of different things. I think they're like the best wings GW's ever done. So I have them, I have, you know, whole units of my Seraphim and stuff converted with these wings and so on and so forth. But what we're going to use today is primarily really just two colors. So we're going to use some Daler Rowney Panes Gray. This is FW Daler Rowney Panes Gray. And then we're going to use some white ink. This happens to be from Vallejo, but you can use the Daler Rowney ink as well. The two brands are very similar. And I like this white as well. So if you can't get this in your area, get this one. And they're both fine. So the key with this technique is we're going to understand how metallics work a little better. We are going to use our airbrush for this, at least for the beginning part, because it's going to be quite simple and fast to do. So we start as always with our airbrush and we're going to put in just a couple drops of thinner here. We'll do about five drops of thinner to let's say about four drops of ink. The Panes Gray ink is where we're going to start starting with our darkest color. And it's going to be really, really intense ink, so it's not going to be thinned out by the fact that we have nearly a 1 to 1 ratio with the thinner. So we'll just backfill and mix that up real nice. Great. Test that out. There we go. So now we're going to do is we're just going to come in. We're going to lay down a nice sheen right over our wings. Now, Panes Gray inside the pot actually looks quite like black, but when you put it over something lighter, as you can see here, because I did zenith all these to start with, when you put it over something lighter, you can see how that blue comes through just slightly. That's what makes this the perfect base color for steel. So nice and easy first step. Now, we need to think about our color structure when it comes to non-metallic metal. One of the things I often see people do with non-metallic is they run the light like this side will be very dark and they'll run it all the way out and then this will be the light. And the problem with that is that's not just actually, that's just really not how metal tends to work. If you look at, say, this airbrush and you see as I move it around, you can see this is by the way why there's no one correct place to often put lights. Like, look as I move this around and it reflects all the lights in my room. There's a general pattern. There's lots of things like chrome, messy, but chrome. And you can see how there's lots of different light structures that happen, but it's certainly not in any part of this just dark in one area and then light in the other. So what we want to do here is we want to create the same sorts of effect. Now, we can use light on the edge because that's rather eye-catching and creates a halo of light, but we're going to want to create some light in the middle here as well. So we're not going to dump the airbrush at all. Just going to leave the same amount of the same panes gray in there. And then what we're going to do is we're going to add just another, let's call it, two drops of thinner. And then we're going to grab a little bit of our white ink. And we're going to start mixing these together. Now, the more white we put in and neutralize the black, the more we'll actually bring out the blue. You'll see what I mean here. So again, let's go ahead and backfill that and mix it up there. And what we'll get is this really nice desaturated, steelish navy color. So you can see how we get a lighter tone, still quite dark. So now what we're going to do is we're going to come over the middle section of our wings and here's where directionality matters. You notice how these wings are like laid on top of each other. They say it looks like they could fold down. Like this wing here is sitting on top of this one is sitting on top of this one and so on, right. So hence my air brush, I'm going to want to bring it from this direction. So we're just going to lay in a little bit of that slightly brighter color right across the middle there, leaving the darkest part on the outside and in the, sorry, in the deep recesses there. Now you'll notice I've barely moved the color. That's intentional. This first step, you just want it to be nice and light. If you jump too far from a dark color to a light color when you're using your airbrush, what happens, and I'm sure if you've used an airbrush before, you've had this happen, is you get speckling. We don't want speckling. Okay, so you can see that slightly lighter color in there. Okay, so now I'm going to actually take the paint, I'm going to dump it out into my cup in that fun look at my little, this is my normal dump cup. So it's got this like wonderful little ooh layers. Looks like a, like the crust of the earth. I'm just going to dump most of the ink out directly, but you notice I'm still even some down in there. Just getting rid of the excess. Another two drops of thinner. Another two drops of white. Nice and simple. Okay, all I'm doing is integrating more and more of this into the mixture. Okay, you can see it's looking much brighter now. Let's test on the back of our hand. There you go. Now we're getting that nice steel color. Okay. All right, so same thing as last time, but now we're going to start creating where our light lines really lie. You notice that I'm pointing the brush at an angle. I'm not going straight on like this. I'm not going up down like this. I'm coming into this angle. Your airbrush can be a tool just like your brush. It's producing a conical stream of air out of the end here. So if we turn that conical stream like that so that this part is hitting first and this part is way more down, right, then what we get is more intensity at the top of the stream and less at the bottom. Okay. Now we get the first bit of our sheen in there. You can broaden that out just a little bit because we're going to bring it way up. Okay. Now the other thing you'll want to notice about whenever you're using white ink, and you'll see this very quickly, is that it's going to apply brighter than it dries. Okay. And the reason for that is because when things are very wet, okay, then they are glossy and glossy things reflect light and they tend to reflect white as light. And hence, if you've ever noticed that when you put white paint on something, it seems like, oh yeah, that's bright enough. And then actually you let it dry a little bit and you're like, wait, what happened to that beautiful, like that was such a nice bright white color I had. And now it's just gone. Why did that happen? Well, that happened because it dried and the shininess of the wet gloss went away. So now we're starting to get a little bit of what we can perceive as that metallic sheen in there. Okay. Same thing. Just kind of dump out some of the excess drops, wipe the edge, get down to just so you can see there's some paint left in there. Same thing. Two drops of ink, two drops of thinner. You'll notice I'm constantly keeping this at basically one to one, right? So I'm maintaining the same ratio throughout. That way I get a nice smooth application. Okay. So now we're getting some brightness. So now we're going to, again, this time we're going to cover a little bit less. Always better to do a couple passes than to try to get it all at once. One of the things I noticed about people when they use their airbrush is they almost seem to want to think that, like, they have to get everything in one pass. Like, your airbrush is such a fast tool, just let it take two passes. It's okay. All right. Same on the other side. Still haven't cleaned out my airbrush, still just slowly increasing the amount of white in the mix. You notice I'm very lightly rocking the trigger, often just letting out no paint at all. Right? Okay. All right. So now what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and actually, speaking of the devil, we're going to go ahead and clean the airbrush. So again, like always, we just put a little bit of water in the airbrush. Then we're going to go ahead, dump the airbrush, a little bit of water in the airbrush, backfill, backfill, and we're clean. We're clean enough for our purses here. Okay. So now what we're going to do is we're going to set the very bright line of the white. So once again, we'll go one, two, three. This time we're going to go a little bit more thinner. So I've got five drops of thinner in there. We're going to do two drops of the white. I want this to be a little weaker. So it's a little transparent and I can build it up. So again, backfill that bad boy. So now we're going to take the wings. We're just going to lay a nice white right along the edges. Let's do the same thing on this side. So notice I'm going to go in kind of in the center of my previous line. Again, never trying to push it with the paint. Let it take a couple layers. It's fine. Nothing wrong with that. Split it back over. Okay. Now let's reinforce that one more time here in the center part because that's where you want it the brightest. Right on the edge. Use our airbrush to just dry that off a little bit. No paint. Everything rocked all the way forward. We're just drying it off. So now we got that nice metallic sheen. Now of course, as always, if you wanted to, you could stop right there. And also of course, like always, we're not going to. Now the other thing you can do since this white is so thin is we can bring just a little bit more off top. Let's bring that up just a little higher. So now I'm going up in this area right on top. Okay. Just doing a real light to get that top tip to those wings real nice and shiny. Okay. So now, once again, we're going to clean our airbrush the same way. Fill it up with water. Backfill. Dump it out. Fill it up with water. Backfill. Dump it out. Only then do we actually blow anything else through the front because the quickest way to clear, clog your airbrush is to put more paint through it than needs to be. This is why most people clog their airbrush. Stop blowing paint through the front. You'll stop clogging your airbrush. I have a video on how to clean your airbrush fast. I highly recommend you go watch that. So airbrush clean. Okay. Seconds. Easy. Easy. One of the common pushbacks I hear against people wanting to use their airbrush is it takes so long to change paints or colors. I literally have no idea what they're talking about. It takes 10 seconds. Okay. So now we're going to go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight drops thinner. This is the most recipe, tastic episode I've ever done. Look at how exact I'm being. It's amazing. Okay. We're only going to put in one drop of Payne's Gray. One little itty bitty drop. The reason for that is one, it's really strong and we'll still have an effect. And two, because we want to make a filter to see the difference there and how effective that is compared to the initial stuff that I did. Now we're going to do, as we're going to come back in on these top parts and on these middle parts here. Okay. We're just going to lay down a little bit of that filter because the Payne's Gray over the white is going to have a different look than the initial Payne's Gray. Okay. Simultaneously, we're also reinforcing our original colors. So now we've got a nice metallic sheen. Okay. Cool. So only one thing left to do, that's for me to make a mess out of my desk. Now only one thing left to do. And that's, we can't get a good non-metallic metal without having some kind of edge to the light. In non-metallic, the name of the game is capturing those bright edges where there's a bunch of light. Now, sadly, we cannot do the edge highlighting with our airbrush. I would love it if we could. I along for the day of the edge highlighting airbrush when you can just spray something and it automatically edge highlights the whole thing. Sadly, this is not that day. One thing I will say here is there are other things you can do with this as well. You can glaze in other colors. So if you, like right now, I have this very cold steel blue metallic. If you wanted these to look older, you could glaze some sepia tones in right here in this area in the mid. You could use some yellow ink or something like that and bring that in there and that'll give it a more warm reflective light. You can play with this recipe in lots of different ways to lots of different effects. The key is because we've got these two transitions, it makes it a lot more interesting than if we had just gone one light to dark. It also helps because this framing mechanism here and like the storm cast wings have the same thing, whatever's holding the artificial wings, which in this case is these little pieces here. When these get painted, some kind of bright color, probably gold or whatever, which I'll do and then I'll take the final picture at the end. When these get painted that final color, they're going to be very bright. And remember, one of the keys to making painting eye catching is the alteration, alteration, good lord, the alternation between light and dark. That's where contrast lives. So let's talk about edge highlighting. So super easy. We're not going to get any more complicated in this than we need to. We're going to grab the same white ink we've been using this whole time. I'm going to take a couple of drops and put that out on the palette. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. We're going to grab some flow improver. In this case, I'm using Warcolors Flow Improver. You could use whatever you like. There's this very good. I happen to like it. It's premixed in a way I really enjoy. Use the product you like best. But I like theirs and it's worth a shot. So now we're going to do is we're going to get into a little bit of that flow improver. All right, I'll bring this over on camera. Get in a little bit of that flow improver, mix it up with a little bit of that ink. Hot to do. Should be ready to go. You can mix white paint into this as well if you want. And then we're just going to come along the edge of each wing. And sometimes you'll make a little mistake like I just did. See how I got that white up there? No issue. Just wipe it down real quick. But if you can't get it all off, it's fine. You can always just touch a little paint spray over it. Everybody makes mistakes. No big deal. These wings are real tight spaces. Not the end of the world. Okay, then we're going to go ahead and get the other side. You've got to get both sides of the wing. Just carefully get all those edges in there. Okay. So now of course we can start with the, there we go. Now the hardest part is these areas right here. The ones that are actually where they're truly overlapping each other. It's also the most important ones to edge highlight because it's what makes them stand out from each other. So for this part, it's pretty straightforward. You get a nice sharp brush. You get some nice flow and paint and you hold your breath. Okay. And there we go. You've got our nice lines. Now sometimes your lines will be a little uneven. If that happens, it's not the biggest deal in the world. Okay. Like every so often you're going to have these areas where you've got kind some of your edges got out of control or something like that. If that happens, no problem. You take your original paints gray, take just a little drop of that out there on the palette, thin that down with just a little bit of our water and we just come back in and clean that up. Sometimes it can be a little tricky to clean things up you did with your airbrush, but in this case it's not too hard. And if you can't find a good way to do that, you have another option. The final trick to making these kinds of wings pop and look like this kind of shiny metal is that this kind of shiny metal often has sparkles in it. Just like I showed you with the airbrush earlier, you notice how light is somehow sometimes just bouncing around in there and there's like bright little places where there's light catches. For example in here, where these things are bouncing off up here, here. Well we can do the same thing here. We can come in, grab a little bit of that same white and if there's an area where you maybe got a little too much, that's okay because what you can do is you can come in and just kind of touch a little bright spot and turn it into a little. So we capture those little sparks here and there, those little sparkles that would happen on the wings. And that's it. That's all there is to it. So that's how we do our shiny metallic wings. It's a super cool effect. I use it a lot on these types of things. I really do love it. I think it's so much fun. As you can see, it is really a pretty easy process to do and a lot of it involves the airbrush. The edge highlighting is the part that's the most annoying, but you know, when isn't that true? So there we go. There's our shiny wings. I hope you liked this. If you did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got questions, drop those down in the comments. Always love to see those as well as suggestions for future topics. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one, and we'll see you next time.