 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today it's time to explore another color and specifically the color we're going to be exploring today, as you read from the title, is blue. Blue is a fascinating, fascinating color, both historically and how it applies. Interestingly humans recognize a fairly tight range of colors, as blue it doesn't have quite the variance of something like green, in fact will tend to more easily push things and call them green or teal or something like that instead of just blue. Most languages didn't have a word for blue and we're not really sure that human beings actually saw the color blue up until, you know, basically probably around the time of 2000 BC when Egyptians started using blue lapis to make blue die and could actually make a blue pigment. And then from there, once there was something they were making and it necessitated a word, they actually created the color. That sounds crazy because you think, well the sky is blue, but actually most, there's a lot of discussion as to whether people see the sky is blue, unless you tell them the sky is blue. You can go look all this up, I'll throw some interesting links to some articles down below so you can kind of see what those look like, but blue has a really interesting history and there's a lot of potential that it doesn't, it didn't exist to humans, they just saw it as green, you know, the ocean or the sea as it were in Homer was described as being the color of dark wine, which doesn't sound like blue to me, so on and so forth. But at any rate, whatever the case, after a couple thousand years ago, most languages have the word blue now and we certainly recognize it and use it as a paint color. So here I've got another one of our little Skaven friends that's been with us for all our previous color explorations, so why not, why not keep going. And this time I've just applied some basic flat blue. And this is, so this is specifically 70962 from Vallejo model color, flat blue. Blue itself, when it passes out of tones, if it adds a little bit of yellow, we suddenly tend to see it as green pretty quickly, if it adds green we tend to see it as very turquoise quite quickly, but there is a lot of interesting variation in blue. First of all, a lot of paints are still named green, this is especially common at like GW, where they take something like this, Sotek green, no, that's no, that's blue, like I'm pretty, I haven't put it through the spectrometer, but I'm pretty sure that this would appear as blue on that kind of a line, Achille ain't green in the contrast is much the same way. The way we tend to think of blue often isn't in variants of tone as much as its in variants of saturation. So here are two paints, I'll lay on either side of this. So this is 70898, which is dark sea blue, which is very, very desaturated down with black and dark gray. And then over here, we have 70943 gray blue, as the name says, it's been tinted a whole bunch with a white gray. And so it's, we've knocked the blue out of it. All of these are still clearly blue, but these two are heavily, heavily desaturated. And so when we say things like nonmetallic weapons should have a little bit of blue reflection in them, we're usually referring to adding paints like this, not like this, right? We don't want this, this hugely saturated primary in there. The other thing about blue that makes it challenging to work with is this is usually our lighter color of blue, the aptly named sky blue, which is ironic and given the earlier conversation. When people, people oftentimes work with red and they'll think they understand blending and like, okay, I'm good, I've got my layering. And then they go to some color like this and they try to layer and it looks like absolute junk, right? Because if you just go ahead and put this sky blue directly onto, directly onto a miniature, what you're going to notice immediately, immediately is that you can see these big lines of where the lines in between the layers where you wouldn't see the same thing with, with red. So there's a little sky blue. Let's grab some of this, let's even, let's be fair, let's thin it down a fair amount. Let's get a little bit of water in there, okay? And what we'll do is we'll just run that right up there and you can see how instantly harsh that is. Now part of that is that's quite a difference in color, certainly, but even if I mixed some of it with my original blue, let's say we get something that's a little closer. When I lay that over top of something, again, still, it just stands out like a sore thumb, right? Now, why is that? Well, it's because blue is one of those colors that's been, the way you make its brighter tones is by the addition of white and that's not always true. So with our blue color, to get from here to here, we're adding some kind of very opaque paint. In reds, when you get to brighter red, you're actually just using it, usually intensifying the pigment, maybe adding a little yellow, but it's still a soft, transparent color. When you increase the tint, you don't add white to red or you get pink. When you add white to blue, you just get brighter blue, but all that means is that your next layers will be highly, highly, highly opaque and very difficult to blend. So how do we highlight blue? Let's talk about the highlighting and shading of blue. Let's do highlighting first. Certainly you can use white yourself, and there's nothing wrong with that. You can also use something like vertigris. I actually really love highlighting blue with vertigris. I'll show you what that looks like in a moment. You can use something like ice yellow if you want to make it very warm blue. You have to be very careful with this or it will go very fast, it will end up turning green. And then finally you can use a flesh tone. So here, for example, is light flesh 70928. All of these are decent enough options to where you'll get a much softer transition of the colors than what you would if you used traditional white. So let's take a look at how that would look. So let's grab some of that blue and actually just let's reset this whole arm back to the normal flat blue real quick. So there now we've got that blue. And now let's see what we can do with our highlights. In fact, let's go get the lower parts of the road too. So now we're back to just blue. So if we take a little bit of art, let's all bring my palette on screen here so you can see directly what I'm doing, if I take some of my blue and we mix in a little bit of that ice yellow, you'll notice if I just mix a little I can still keep it very much blue. Like I haven't turned that green at all. And it's a wonderful tone. Do you notice how much warmer that's getting, right? It's a little, it's desaturated, but it's better than just if I added white. And so instead here, I can start tracing that down. Maybe we'll put a little on his knee. Let's get the other top of his arm up here, the edge of that. And you can still see a transition, certainly. But it's softer. It's the softer side of blue, right? And what you get is this nice warmer tone. Now, similarly, the reason I like something like vertigris or even picking like a glacier blue out of, out of Vallejo Game Color or anything like that. I'm using these Vallejo ones since they're kind of well known. Keep in mind there's nothing magical about these specific paints. You could use any one you want. The reason I like something like vertigris over something like ice blue is because it also adds a slightly colder tone, having more of that icy green in it than I would get out of just adding sky blue. So here I get much more, it turns into a nice, flat, greeny gray blue. And so I can bring the sky up and we can just, and here it'll appear very cold. All blue has this sort of natural coldness to it, but you can make warm and cold blues. You don't have to stick just with cold colors. That's one of those things that we often feel like is a sort of a truism. They're like, oh, the only way you can do blue is blue is always cold on the miniature. That's not true at all. If you use something like ice yellow for your highlights and then you use something warm for a shadow, you can actually end up with a pretty warm blue. So there you can see the difference there between those two. This one's going to be much darker, much colder because it has that white in there. The flesh tone would be a nice middle ground. It's very soft. It's a good way to get a middle highlight. Let's play with shadows though. Let's talk about how we shade our blue and have success in that regard. So there's lots of different ways you can shadow blue. You can go to just a darker, desaturated blue, something like the dark sea we already talked about. To warm it up, you could go into a purple. Here I have some Warcolors Violet 5. Very, very dark, dark purple. You could go straight into a red. Red plus blue will make purple. So you can get something like this with a deeper shade. This will make it more intense because you're using more of the real red. So we can use something like a whole red here. Or of course we can use something real dark like our Dollar Rowney Pains Gray ink. And in fact, that's what the four colors I just went through are these four right here. So let's take a look at some shading. Now, personally, I actually like shading blue. Let's make a little pile of our flat blue up here. I actually like shading that. It's just a little bit of that whole red and a little bit of that purple. You can see how when you mix that in, keep enough blue. We still get a pretty bluish tone. It's definitely very purple. See how that looks. And what I like about that is it gives us this really nice rich shadow. So here on this guy, we'll stick some of this here under his head and stuff. And by pushing it into that tone, we end up creating something much warmer. It's still darker, but because our shadows have a lot of warmth to it and the highlights, and generally you should oppose cold highlights, warm shadows, blosy, blosy, blah, but sometimes you want a piece to be more refined all into one thing. Now, let's compare that in the shadow we get out of that, which feels pretty natural as things go. Let's compare that to bring this back on. Let's take some of our blue and let's just go straight into that ink. You'll notice here when I bring in the blue black ink, what I get is a much flatter tone. So for example, if we then apply that down here on the robes, what I end up with is much more of a perhaps correct, but not as visually interesting shadow. You could combine these two and just use this one for your deepest shadows up here to really create it. In fact, we can go all the way into the pure ink itself if we want that area underneath to be real dark. We can get those real deep shadows. So there's lots of options when it comes to highlighting and shading. Each one is going to give you a slightly different result. I would generally recommend staying away from just the own, that's something like the dark sea blue that's just naturally saturated or desaturated. You'll see how much like there is a difference there of color when I add those together. In general, I don't just, I don't love just using the darker blues because frankly, they're kind of boring. Like it's just, it creates a pretty flat, boring shadow. When what you want is the piece to be visually interesting. And so mixing something like that purple is just a great way to keep it more sort of visually engaging for your viewer. And that's one of the bright, bright things about blue is that it does have a lot of visual interest, which also means we've got to be very careful with it. When you're working with a bright color like blue, especially if it's saturated, you need to make sure it's well balanced across the model. So like I would never put blue on a model in just one tiny spot. That's a good way to suddenly make the model feel way off kilter and way out of balance. When you do that, the eye, it's bright, especially saturated blue, is one of those bright colors that draws the eye. Not as much as red, but still quite a lot. And so what'll happen is you will, uh, you'll very much make it so the viewer's eye locks into a specific place and they don't see what you're actually trying to show them. They don't see all your work around the other part of the model. Instead, they just see that small area of blue you've painted. So it's one of those things you absolutely need to make sure you're keeping into balance. Okay. Now, final note about blue, uh, when you're using it in painting, is with glazing. Some colors will glaze better than others. Blue is happily one of those colors that is great to glaze with. So when you're, uh, when you're doing these kinds of experiments with the various shades, shadows, and highlights I've talked about, if you are just using, let's say the only thing you have access to is this blue and this blue, you're like, Vince, I understand you said you said you had a bunch of white, but I don't have a bunch of different crazy colors. I don't have any ice yellow. I don't have any vertebrae. What's, what am I to do? Well, the advantage is we'll come here to the back of his cloak. Even if I just take that sky blue and just run a big section of that right along there. Right. Like boy, oh boy, that couldn't be starker. Right. Let's just really make it hideously ugly in how distinct that is. Okay. So those are your options. You've, you've painted your model and you go to highlight and you're like, oh gosh, that's all I've got. And look at how ungodly stark that is. Well, the advantage there is that blue mixes into a glaze really easy. Blue paint tends to be pigmented nicely and it tends to be transparent. So much like red, we can come into our blue and put a little out here. We can get some water, thin that down. And I will say that it has to be a middle tone or darker blue to glaze. Well, if you try to pick a color like this that has a bunch of white, then it's already too opaque and it won't glaze very well. But if you pick a color like mid blue or darker, deeper blues, okay, then you can get a nice glaze. So let's go ahead and test that on the back of our hand. Nice. When we spread that out, you can see how wonderfully transparent that is. So we can grab that. We can glaze over the whole lot there. And you notice we can just bring it right back into balance. So it becomes much easier. We can mix a little bit of that with the blue glaze, just re-catch those few edges and get something much softer. And that's just for the single glaze application. Obviously, if you were to apply multiple glazes, you could snap it back together. So if you're looking for good colors to glaze, blue is one of those very much like red or deep purple or deep green, where it's an excellent glazing color. So the final thing I'll say about blue, what I really like about it is it's just in the end so eye-catching. It's fascinating to me that humans didn't really recognize blue for so long. But when you look around in the world now, we tend to use blue a lot. When you think of the color of the future and like if somebody in a movie wants to use, wants to portray the future, they use blue, they use blue lights, you know, high-tech stuff always has blue lights. The power buttons on our computers are blue lights. Why? They don't need to be, they could be any color, right? When we think of the sort of retro 80s futuristic synth wave aesthetic, it always has this sort of bright blue in it, right? And that's just because it's very electric, it's very eye-catching. It has that feeling of visual interest to it. And just looking at that scaven right there, you notice because you get those bright intense highlights, it just is super, super intense to your eye and draws your ear, you in. So I do think it is a wonderfully fun color to use on miniatures. It can really be something when used in balance well that just grabs the eye. Obviously, blue is complementary color. It's contrasting color is orange. You can use those together. They do work well. I would ward you off using straight, fully saturated blue, and then coming in and using straight, fully saturated orange in equal degrees. If you're going to use a highly saturated blue, then you want to use it and you want to put an equal amount of orange on there, then the orange should be desaturated some degree or vice versa. If you want to use the bright saturated orange, then you would use it sparingly. Like if it was on this guy and I wanted to use a little bit of orange, then I would make his eye lenses glow orange. I would make the warp ball orange and I would put orange rust on the blade. Bing, bing, bing. There's another orange ball there. Nice little triangle of light I would create around him and done. And so the blue would still be a much bigger part of the overall miniature, but now it's popping. Now it's working in tandem. Because when you just stick the two of these right next to each other like this, they're so bright together that it's overwhelming, right? But if I use it with one of the more desaturated blues, sorry, if I use it with one of the more desaturated blues, I can still get that pop. But it's not as mind-numbing as it were. So there you go. That's blue. Some of you have asked like, because sometimes I use complementary colors for shadows, why wouldn't I use orange for the shadow here? It just tends to be too bright. Oranges are such a bright color. You can use blue to shade orange, but it's very hard to use orange to shade blue. I just prefer using reds, which already have obviously some orange in them to a degree. And purples and stuff like that. I just find that to be more visually compelling because it moves it into the purple spectrum. It feels more naturalistic. So there you go. That's exploring colors blue. If you've got some questions about that color, feel free to drop them below. If you've got suggestions for future hobby cheating videos, hey, drop those as well. Always appreciate that. If you do me a favor and give this a like, that's greatly appreciated. But as always, subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We have new videos here every Saturday. I thank you for watching this one. And we'll see you next time.