 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today it's time to get rusty, dusty and crusty. It's time to talk about 5 different ways to use pigment. All the paint we paint with consists of 3 elements, pigment, binder, and solvent. Now there are additives and stuff in many of those paints as well, but that's the core 3 elements. When you get raw pigment, which can be bought as from various miniature retailers as you'll see today, or you can actually just get ground up pigment, that's effectively one of those 3 things, it just doesn't have the liquids. Our binder is generally acrylic medium and our solvent is water. So what we're going to do today is look at 5 different ways we can use this dry raw pigment and integrate it into our projects to get really awesome effects. So let's get into it. Alright so pigment, they come in many different varieties. When we're talking about these gaming pigments, you're going to see them from places like Vallejo makes them, AK Interactive, MIG, Secret Weapon, they don't make them anymore, but if you can find them, they're all really great and come in a bunch of wonderful colors. Obtolum 502, whatever the case. There's a wide range of colors and tones available and they all have use. Now with my pigments, I like to make a little pigment palette. I just basically dump little portions of it in there, keep it on a palette. Very important note about this, cover it up. Do not leave it out in the open, I put it in a little zip lock and then it sits off the side. You don't want to be in a situation where you sneeze and blow it everywhere. Alright the first of our five uses, the most obvious one, adding color to bases. Perfect for things like Mars bases or Earth. The advantage is that pigments, because they lack the acrylic medium, which tends to be quite glossy, pigments themselves are obviously hyper matte. They are very rough and they scatter light, so they are extremely matte. It's a wonderful way to make your base look like Martian Earth or mud or mossy ground cover or anything like that. I work it in heavily with the brush and then just swoosh the dried brush around really making sure it's in there and scratching back off the pigment from the higher points, leaving my dry brush to poke through and set in place. Now, I often don't seal pigment, but if you need to, there's lots of options. First, you could use something like a traditional wash, like Agrax. You could also use just mediums, you could use the binding agent, which is actually in paint. Put a couple drops of that on there. The last choice is, of course, you can use varnish or something like that. There are also specific pigment fixers. They're all going to do the same thing. Lock the pigment in place. A slight warning, sometimes these pigment fixtures will alter the color, especially if you use a wash. And so they won't be as intense once sealed. If you really work them in there as you see me doing in this video, as long as they're not handled a whole bunch like just normal gaming use. If you're not wiping your finger along the base, you wouldn't see much come off. Now, the second trick is integrating your models into the ground. And here I'm going to do it with rain first, but we'll look at a model next. And the reality is, is that outside's pretty dirty. Like there's a lot of dirt outside. In fact, that's where they keep all the dirt is outside. And when it rains and gets muddy and starts splashing up on things and then dries, you should have the lower parts of buildings or the feet of people who walked in there be stained much the same color as the ground they're walking on. And so taking pigment and working into your base and then also working it up onto the terrain or onto the feet of your miniatures is a great way to make it seem like that terrain or those miniatures, whatever the models happen to be actually exist in the universe. But once again, the same tricks are going to apply here. You're going to force that that pigment in there with some, you know, just put in some raw pigment. Then you're going to wipe it off of the brush as I saw me do there. And then I just scrape it away. Basically, there will always be some that remains because it's going to go into those deep recesses, that kind of thing and sit there and be pretty well worked in. Again, whether or not you fix, I will leave to you. I'm going to interrupt the list here real quick to jump in and say, this certainly isn't meant to be an exhaustive list. There's even more pigment is quite versatile because it is just the raw component of what our paints consist of. Now, a lot of the pigments you see in the using today because they are these prefabricated game pigments made for miniatures, they've been stained, they've been dyed, stuff like that. So they are particular colors. They're not the raw pigment itself. We'll do a future video on working with raw pigments like what consists of single pigment paints because you can get those and those open up a whole different world of possibilities for even more cool tricks. But if you've got an idea for these pigments that I haven't included in the video, drop those down in the comments. I'd love to see them. All right, let's get back into it. Rust and grime, you've got metal models and you want to make them look rusty, crusty and grimy. Some pigment can certainly do that. Same basic application here, except this time I'm going to wipe a lot more off, especially from the flat surfaces. You may even want to take a second large, flat, soft, clean brush and really give it a good once over because you don't want this pigment to be collecting if it's meant to be rust on the upper surfaces. It should be down in the crevices where there is water gathering and things like that. Now, the other thing you can do here is we can introduce another element of our normal paint mixture, but we can introduce them separately. Think of this like going to one of those fancy, shmancy restaurants that deconstructs your food. Here I apply the pigment, then I take a clean brush with water and just run it over all the pigment. You can also use isopropyl alcohol for extra points because that has much lower surface tension and will run into the recesses easier. But I just wipe over the whole area and what will happen then is the rust will gather down into those spaces around rivets in cracks, things like that. And you get this nice, dry, beautiful texture that really looks like natural rust has sort of gathered because it is at that point of the detritus and pigment and color left by evaporating water very much like the oxidation of rust itself. All right, let's get wilder. Here we go. Let's get real crazy. You've got trouble getting smooth blends on shadows and skin. Well, have you thought about pigment? You apply a whole bunch of it as we have here on Larry the Ogre, our friend. And then we use our favorite blending tool, our finger. And we just wipe the top pigment off. Now, that will be somewhat extreme. So then with the dry brush, which we have wiped on a paper towel, we come back in and just soften the edges of those out and bang, bang and a few seconds, you have hue and shift and tone change on your miniature. It's pretty amazing, honestly. Now, the miniature does have to be of a relatively decent size and you have to be working with relatively reasonable recesses where you're trying to integrate this hue into. I often push people on things like skin that they need more contrast of hue, not just value. That is to say, working in tones like reds and purples and browns and things into skin. And this is an amazing way to do it, especially on a model like ogres or big giants or trolls or whatever, something of significant size and folds and space in the skin where you can work it around. It's fast, it's easy and a wonderful way to get really interesting low tones into your models. Note, it only works for the shadows. You can't really do it with the highlights. You do. You will, in this case, absolutely want to varnish that in. Now, in this case, I deployed it when his pants were already painted. And oh, no, now we've turned his pants red. The better way to do this would just be not have painted the pants yet, but I didn't want to show you how you can correct this. So you can see when I wipe with my finger, the problem is I don't clear it all away. So instead, I just flood the area with water, like I get a whole bunch of water on my brush and I just absolutely completely flood the area way more than I did with the the night that you saw me do. And then I take a clean, dry brush or my finger and wipe it up and all the pigment will be lifted. Since there's no binding agent, you can remove it. No fuss, no must. The fifth one that I really love is Scorchmarks. Now, I actually showed this recently in a my Grimdark terrain video. You can find the whole video linked up above. But if you're trying to show the Scorchmarks of fire, burn, an impact of a missile or a ballistic item onto a piece of armor, especially good for sci-fi models that you want to look battle damaged. Some black or dark black brown pigment just worked in and spread around can really do that bonus tip time. So sometimes you want chunky paint. Now, not always, but just sometimes. For example, if you're trying to get heavy rust, they sell that typhus corrosion stuff that it's supposed to be like chunky paint. But I say, why pay more money when you can make your own? Take any old brown paint, mix some thick pigment into it and boom, you've got chunky paint. You can then place that on to edges and into recesses and around rivets and stuff like that. And in doing so, you'll get really natural looking rust when it dries. The awesome thing about integrating this additional pigment and I'm just stippling it around in places I find interesting is that not only does it have an actual texture, you can pick out through later dry brushing. But as it dries, as you can see here, it's hyper hyper matte because all of that additional pigment you introduced. Now, this will already be set in place as well. Since it was mixed with paint, it already had binding agent in it. You don't have to do any extra steps to seal it and you get wonderful natural rust. So there we go, five uses for pigments plus a bonus. I really hope you enjoyed this. If you've got some questions, I didn't answer. Drop those down there. I always answer every question. Give this a like. It helps other people find the video and the channel. Subscribe if you haven't already. Don't forget, we do have a Patreon where it's focused on review and feedback and helping you take your next step on your hobby journey and has a really cool discord community that's very supportive as part of it. So check that out if you're interested. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.