 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about brush control. I recently painted these skeletons and when I painted them I did the entire model, all 10 of them, every bit, every detail with one brush. A size 3 Raphael 8404. It's a big brush, but because your brush is a multifaceted tool and can work in so many different ways, I didn't need any other brushes nor did I need a brush of any other size. It could do everything I needed in one tool. How you use the brush is often just as important as your paint consistency or the paints or any other tool you're using. It's also one of those things that you really have to learn over time. So today I'm going to show you on this model, this old witch hunter, exactly the different types of brush control and how you need to think about using your brush, holding your brush and moving your brush over the model because it is so multifaceted. So I'm starting out here just applying a nice layer, a simple base coat. And you notice when I do this, look at the angle of my brush compared to the miniature. I'm never using the point, I'm only moving along sweeping it, mostly sideways wherever I can and at a great angle, it's only a few degrees off of the plane of the model. Wherever I can move the brush completely sideways, I do so. This helps hide brush strokes, apply an even coat of paint and make sure that everything goes on smoothly while preserving the tip. Now we're going to go ahead and make a glaze because when you make a glaze, you need to control your brush in a very specific way. And you can see when I suddenly hit glaze consistency, notice how the paint keeps drawing back together and then all of a sudden when I add the right amount of water, you see how that consistently changed, it moved into a pool instead of individual beads. Then I wick off the excess into a paper towel. This is the most important step of glazing, drawing out all that excess liquid so that the brush is ready to go. Now when I move the brush on the model, I'm going to move it in the same way I did with my base coat at that low angle, almost the same plane as the miniature. The difference is I'm going to push the brush and end the glaze where I want to collect the darkest. So you'll see here how I push the brush up, making sure that because where the brush stops, it's going to deposit the most paint. So glazing, you move it much the same but you have to have the directionality in addition to the angle. Your brush though is also a feathering tool. It also can help you blend and that's not just in the ways we normally think of when we apply our layers. Here I have a very thick amount of paint and you can actually see the mass of the paint on the end of my brush. I'm just going to put a little layer of it there. Then I void the brush. You can do so by wiping it on a wet paper towel or eating the paint or whatever you happen to do. And it's dry. It doesn't have a lot of moisture in it. I shouldn't say dry. It has a little bit of its moist. And then I take the brush and you see how I make these quick sweeping motions. I'm not moving it long and slow like I was with the layer. Instead, it's lots of little sweeps right around the edge pushing the paint around, picking up that pigment. This is really more of a painterly technique. It's more drawn from things like oil painting. But your brush has this same capability. Again, notice that I'm at about a 45 degree angle to the surface. I'm letting the tip of the brush bend when I do this. I think this sort of feathering technique is something that people often undervalue. And don't use enough. I think people are scared of putting thick paint on a miniature because they've been trained so religiously to go to two thin coats. But it really does make a huge difference in making your blends easier. Using a technique like this, softening the edges of the paint, feathering it out with a moist brush, if you work quickly around the miniature, you'd be amazed exactly how much you can feather out and how big of blends you can accomplish really fast. And the key here is my movements are matched to the paint consistency. So now we're going to talk about edge highlighting. Yet another trick of your brush and yet another angle. This time I'm watering the paint down some. And you can see when I hold the brush up here, it looks like liquid in the shape of the brush instead of a mass of paint on the end. Once again, I'm going to wipe some off just to test the consistency. Actually, I don't wipe off quite enough, but that's okay. And then here with just the very side of the brush, I move over the space. Yeah, I went a little too heavy there. I'm not engaging the tip at all. Here I am completely perpendicular or as perpendicular as I can be to the surface I want to put the edge highlight onto and I sweep my way around. Now because I'm doing this on camera, I can't turn the model as much as I might normally do so because I would flip it around, turn it upside down. You'll see I actually do that here in a moment to get the bottom of the cloak. But the key here is when you're edge highlighting, you want to avoid using the tip of the brush as much as possible if you can do that with the surface. Now if you need to draw a sharp thin line because there's just no other way to get that edge, we can do that too, but we've got to use the brush again in a slightly different way. When we want to draw sharp thin lines, we want nice fresh paint. You can use things like flow improver and ink and those can help as I've shown in previous videos. You can find the sharp thin lines video linked up above. But even without that, if you have your fresh paint and it's at a nice thin consistency, you can get those layers but it's about the movement of the brush. So instead of moving my whole hand, I'm really just moving my fingers and I'm barely touching the miniature. Look at how close, look at how locked in my hands are. My elbows are resting on my lap, my forearms are resting against my desk, my hands are locked together. The only thing that's moving is my fingers. And by doing that, I'm able to make very sharp lines. Now the other key with doing sharp thin lines is you've got to know when your paint looks like that. See how it no longer looked like liquid? It started to dry on the tip. The more it dries, the more you're pushing, pushing like I'm doing there. And when you push against the miniature with your brush, the tip of the brush splays out and you don't get that control. You need that paint to flow very smoothly and efficiently to get a sharp thin line. So let's summarize. I want to go through all of these different techniques and really talk about how we use them. A lot of times I see people, even when they use the side of the brush, they tend to do this, where they sweep in one direction when doing a base. The problem with that is that it doesn't as efficiently draw the liquid that's sitting in the belly of the brush, the area behind the tip, where all that liquid and water and paint is kept. But if we apply most more in a sweeping motion like this, back and forth, that creates a motion that draws all of that liquid and paint out much more efficiently and smoothly. So even when you're base coating, when you're thinking about your layers, think about how you're moving the brush, sweeping in that fashion. When you're applying that glaze, again, make sure you're always pushing in one direction. Now is where you want to push in one direction, because you want that tip to deposit the most paint. When you're trying to do a nice sharp line, the key is you want it to be thinner than a layer consistency. And you want to really, really lock everything in place. Lock your hands in place. Keep everything down here as I'm about to write. I can lock my hand against the desk, something we can't normally do when we're painting a miniature. The last thing I want to say about brush control, I think this is often the most overlooked point. So thank you if you stuck with it, I'm glad, is think about how you're holding the brush. It doesn't really matter if you tend to grip in sort of a pencil grip in your fingers. You have more of a little bit more of a claw like me or a heavy claw like some people. That's fine. I mean where you're gripping it. Notice when I grip real close to the tip and then I move my fingers just a little. See how little the brush tip actually moves? I mean it's a basic lever. The farther back I move my fingers on the brush, where I'm very extreme here, look at how unstable and how much that moves. Control can be gained by choking up on the brush. So think about the angle you're moving, the direction you're moving, the purpose and the paint consistency in the brush, and where on the brush you're holding it. These four things are the secrets to brush control. So there you go. I hope you like it. Give it a like if you did. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. But as always, thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.