 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we have a very, very special video. I am so excited about this one. We are going to talk about painting display quality skin, but we're going to do it on a miniature that I helped make. So, let's get into it. Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style. I love giants. I think giants are super cool, but my favorite giants are more like titans, these incredible, impressive, massive figures, much like gods themselves walking around. They're just huge humans with superpowers basically, right? And I always thought that was such a cool idea. I've built two armies so far of giants, but yet I never had a giant sculpt that I really, truly loved. Having been a fan of fantasy for more than 35 years now, I've always been enamored of the concept. But the miniatures that were out there and available on the market, none of them were exactly what I wanted, or what I thought a titan could be. So, I reached out to CreatureCaster and I worked with them to help concept a new type of giant, a titan, a titan of body. And in this case, oh, he's got a body. Yeah, you're going to see. I think this figure is awesome. Thank you to CreatureCaster for working with me on this, and a special thanks to Alex Boca who did the concept art, and Tudor who did the sculpting for it, who both did amazing, amazing jobs. This titan of body is available now, and here's a little secret. I'm hoping that we do a couple more, maybe at least one more. So, if you think it's as cool as I do, go get one from CreatureCaster and tell them you want to see the rest of these concepts brought to life. But for today, let's talk about painting some skin, and let's get this titan of body painted. So, I love shirtless muscular dudes. Wait, I mean to paint, to paint. I just mean to paint. Yeah, definitely just to paint. Now, the sculptor did a great job here, and thank you again to CreatureCaster for working with me on this. I'm so beyond excited about this project, and about both this titan and future titans. Since we're going to be talking about skin today, as usual, the paints will roll up top, but I just want to talk about kind of how we started out, and what we're doing now as a base. So, I started by zenithaling him, but I'm doing it mainly from his left side to create some light. I then laid that thin layer over just to get us a good color sketch of kind of the area. I didn't worry about achieving full opacity. That's not important. What we're going to do here is work in maybe a slightly different order than what people are used to. And the reason for all of this is because skin is incredibly varied. Skin has variation of both hue and of value. Skin is slightly satin. That is to say, because skin is oily, it's reflective. So what I'm doing here first, off of my deep mid-tone, and this isn't really my mid-tone. I started with this sort of very red pink color to give a good under shade, but now we're going to work those shadows and really get them solid. And you notice how as I take these colors, I'm just slowly integrating these additional browns and deeper reds and stuff like that in here. And notice that I'm not surrounding the whole muscle. When we're working skin, we don't surround the whole muscle and create these little muscle islands. Instead, I'm placing the shadows opposed to the zenithal light that I created earlier. That is to say, I went from the over his shoulder on the left, so hence the shadows are placed towards his lower right leg, in the opposite direction. Now, when we start working our highlights, the next thing we're going to do to avoid these muscle islands is actually connect the muscles. Even though on the sculpt, there are ups and downs, even though there is a recess, that recess is still pointed towards the light. And so you see how across his lower abs, across that deep V, we connect the upper muscular structure with the same tone. And we're going to keep doing that, as you can see right there, for a while until we get into the highest highlights. That's the only time we start then picking out all the individual muscles. Now, as far as paint consistency here, I'm mainly using thin layers. So these are still layer paints. They're certainly not glazes, but they are quite thin. They're mixed with a healthy amount of water. So the paint flows and is smooth and maintains a decent translucency, because that's what I want. I want these layers to blend into each other relatively nicely. Now, there's still jumps. You can see lines. That's okay. Don't worry. And as I work my way up, the important part here is to set the overall environmental light. So you notice how yellow I'm pushing this. He's out. He's in sun. He's in a very yellow light. So we're actually integrating that yellow tone into all of our highlights. And when you initially put yellows into skin tone, especially into the highlights, highlighting with yellow is so much easier than highlighting with just pale skin tones, because it is naturally much more translucent. When it dries, it fades a lot and shows what's underneath a lot easier. In other words, it doesn't cover as well. We all know that with yellows. But in this case, that's actually a huge advantage, because it sets the filter of the color. But as it dries, it's much more naturally translucent and so it allows us to have a much smoother progression of colors while also looking much more natural and real to our experiences of being outside in sort of warm yellow light like the sun. As I'm slowly integrating this up and adding more of the highlights, you see that I'm, of course, covering less and less space. Now, if you want to learn more about just layering, I have a whole video on that. You can find that linked up in the top right now. But the key here is now that I'm up into the highest highlights, I always think in terms of one through five, one being our highest highlight, five being our deepest shadow. I'm only touching the individual muscles and not doing those connection lines when I get up into the high two one area. That's what separates the individual muscles, the little satin sheen of maybe sweat or the slight shape of the volume that's picking out that individual light. That's when we start separating them. We don't paint each individual muscle having the full shadow of the five around it. Instead, we set directional light to make it feel like he's actually standing in some kind of real lighting situation. Now, you'll notice that this guy has a lot of, like, sort of this ingrained armor he's wearing almost like this grafted on armor. I'm not worrying about that too much. So, you know, sometimes I paint over the top of it or paint gets on it. That's all fine. When you have other details like this and you're focusing on skin, don't worry about those tiny details. Paint the whole thing and then you can always go back in later and base coat those other things out. My last step here with the brush is going to be to apply a pretty thin layer of kind of my mid-tone, pulling all of this together and again, re-collapsing those, those separations between the muscle. This is just a paint layer, still layer paint but it's slightly thinner than what I've been working in and I'm just kind of using it to create an initial smoothing of all of the different layers that I've done. But it's not going to be my main smoothing technique. We're going to use this just to get rid of some of the harsher lines and set us up for the next steps. When you're painting skin, there are really two things that I've already mentioned to some degree that I want to summarize here with a bullet. The variation of skin, no matter the color of the skin tone, so it doesn't matter what ethnicity or shade of skin tone you're trying to represent, there are two keys that always remain the same. Skin tone needs a variance of value and of hue. Both of those things are important meaning when I say value, I mean light. Skin is often a little oily hence it's satin, it's a bit reflective of the light, it reflects and shines light back off of it so you have deeper shadows and brighter highlights. That's variance of value. Light to dark. But skin also has a variance of hue. Skin tones not only with just on one individual person of course across people they vary wildly, wildly but even on any one individual person skin tones have reds, blues, purples, greens. Now they're all soft, they're all subtle but they're all there. Whether it's the shadow blue colors under your chin on a male or with the sort of five o'clock double whether it's the rosy redness of the cheeks the pale whiteness of knuckles red for scrapes or bruises or just blood near the surface where the skin is thinner. You know if you're painting older people where you have variance of a lot more blue because veins are near the surface or liver spots or any of a million things skin is one of the most exciting things to paint because it has so much variance. So don't ever hold back. Figure out how you can work those additional hues in and push that value to its maximum. Alright now comes the secret sauce and that is we're going to use the airbrush to glaze. A quick note, nothing I'm doing here cannot be done with a brush. You could do the same thing with the brush glazes. It would just take a lot longer. I'm going to do it with an airbrush because it's faster, more efficient and frankly easier. I have what is here a version of my mid-tone in the airbrush. You'll notice I've taken the needle protector the needle guard off of my airbrush because that will give you a much more sharp control. You will also notice that as I paint I have my thumb placed against the trigger as well. So both my thumb and my forefinger are placed against the trigger and I'm just rocking it so gently. And then what I'm going to do is it repeats sort of the same process I did but instead of going shadows first and then highlights we're going to reverse it for reasons you'll see later. So I started with the mid-tone and used that to just kind of smooth out those layer lines. But it's important to use the brush first. You might ask yourself, Vince, why not just do this with the airbrush only? The answer is because it will not look as good. It's really that simple. The brush provides a maximal amount of control for you to set the initial tones and here with the airbrush I am using extremely thin paint. This is thinned 6 or 8 to 1. So we are way beyond milky paint here. We are in water. I have one drop of paint to about 6, 8, 10 drops of thinner depending on the exact paint and how thick it is. And I'm barely rocking that trigger. Look at how little my finger moves. You'll notice also that I tend to push the airbrush toward the miniature. Actually using that to get really tight cones of control. You can do this on smaller miniatures as well. It just doesn't really show on camera. But when you're dealing with larger figures like this, 54, 75mm, big monsters and things in regular 32mm scale, this is your answer. You work on top of the brush layers because the brush layers provide you with a much more strong but also imperfect base layer. And those little imperfections matter with skin. Skin isn't completely perfect. And so by having those little small inconsistencies, it actually makes it feel more real. All you're using the airbrush for as we climb up our highlights here and add brighter and brighter paint is to increase the smoothness of it. But still allow for the small inconsistencies. Now we're going into re-instantiating shade and color. Here as you saw I'm using Rykland Flesh Shade. But notice that I'm using it at the angle so like I have him turned and I'm only coming up from above. This is not pure Rykland Flesh Shade which is already extremely thin. This is being applied, this Rykland Flesh Shade and already very thin shade is thinned again four to one. So it is very, very thin and very, very, very transparent. We're working at multiple times very slowly, very carefully, right? Here I added a drop of red earth ink because again we want to put that tonal variation in there. And that means variation of hue. Skin has these rich red tones in it. And so we need to bring those out and create that life, that blood that's beneath the surface. So further helps hide any lack of smoothness in our layers by adding what we think of as an interference color in our progression. Okay? And so you can see how I just work my way around getting that rich tone and because it's so, so, so thin like that ink is ten to one. I can build it up slowly just barely rocking the trigger, getting that filter in place. The last step is going to be to set the environmental light. Warm highlights have cold shadows. So our last step is to introduce the true environmental shadows. So for this I have Pains Gray thinned ten to one. And you'll notice how I'm just working in the deepest, deepest shadows and I'm taking that and building that glaze of that cold blue black up into those areas that would be completely from the light. Because again, warm lights create cold blue shadows. And we need to bring that out to get that display quality, realistic feeling skin. And we haven't used that color previously because I didn't want it to be anything more than the environmental colors. So it's here as a last step to just introduce that cold shadow filter over the entire piece and really create that warm to cold transition. So there we go. That's the skin all done. Now I'm going to roll some final pictures of how he came out here at the end. Obviously there was other components to him, but I kind of painted those off camera because those took quite a while to get done and weren't particularly relevant to this particular lesson. Many of these I've already covered before on this channel. But I really love this fig. Thank you to Creature Caster again for this chance to bring a vision I had to life and to give me a giant that I was, a Titan that I was super excited about. I didn't mention it, but there are different weapon and head options that come with this as well. So I liked the one with the sword and sort of the bare hand, but you can also have him holding a net. He has a big flail. There's one with an awesome spear that's just beyond massive. There's a couple different heads. It's really, really a fantastic kit and I couldn't be more happy about it. So hopefully you learned a lot here. If you did, give it a like. Don't forget we've got a Patreon where I really can focus on teaching and training. We have different levels that allow you to join in and share your hobby journey, as well as the Discord community as part of that Patreon that is full of amazing people just sharing inspiration, answering questions and really inspiring me every day. So thank you if you're already a patron or if you'd like to join, links in the description. Subscribe if you haven't already. If you've got questions I haven't answered in this video drop those down in the comments. Always happy to help. But I thank you very much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.