 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today we're gonna take a deep dive on wet blending Specifically, we're gonna talk about the things you may be doing wrong. That's making wet blending harder For you to get good results out of so Let's get into it Let's strict techno man sir. That is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V's All right, so because this is the internet We're going to structure these as the top five things now. There is of course as always a bonus item at the end We begin our wet blending journey on the palette and this is the first and most important thing From the beginning of our painting journey We're often told that the secret to good painting is to thin our paints You know thin it down add water go for two thin coats that kind of thing and when you're using traditional layers There's nothing wrong with that, but when you're wet blending. That's not going to work as well Wet blending wants thicker paints. You can basically use them straight out of the bottle In most cases now if you've got something like a heavy body acrylic It's going to be different, but if we're talking traditional miniature paints Straight out of the bottle is the appropriate thickness To work with for wet blending you want them to have some body because you need that To be able to blend them. So don't add a lot of water. Don't thin them down The water we're going to rely on is having a little bit of moisture in our brush Speaking of brushes this is step two get a bigger brush Small brushes are great for detail for doing that careful Delicate fine work, but when it comes to something like wet blending a tiny brush Isn't going to serve you well and the reason why here is because of the classic boat in the water problem That's right like a boat in water, you know No, all right a speed boat comes to a very sharp point and Cuts through the water because very little of it is touching the water creates a lot of wake behind it because it pierces through the surface tension of the water What we don't want that that's a little brush when we try to use a little brush to do this What happens is we end up just cutting the paint creating wake in the actual paint Not what we want What we want is a big fat brush like the pontoon boat of brushes large flat Big, okay. We want some girth on that brush Because we want to be able to tilt it down sideways and Use the flat of the brush to work the paint Effectively there's both the size and the method with the brush here You want to be working as close to sort of zero degrees to the brush being horizontal to the surface as you can You can't obviously actually lay the brush down flat You want to be working as close as possible to that and with a big brush That larger surface area will smooth the paint more effectively and blend it together Without creating brush strokes and effectively that wake of paint Now wet blending really excels when it comes to large flat surfaces Here you're seeing me work on shields because this is sort of the perfect perfect case For when it's time to get some sweet wet blending action on and large flats are usually the area that give us the most Trouble with blending when it comes to things like hair or fur or lots of texture our Traditional tools like washes or dry brushing or things like that excel but a big large flat area of all of those fall down So that's where we get out the wet blending. It's about using the tool in the right place And when you're wet blending across that large flat the key is you've got to work fast and You won't always get it right The first two times you see me wet blend these I'm going to intentionally do things wrong Because I want to show you the wrong way to do it before you really get to the right way So the first thing you do is not working fast enough and not putting on enough paint We'll get to that in a second The second thing that you can do wrong is not let it dry This is the trickiest part of web lending This is the part you actually have to learn and practice because otherwise it's just sweeping a big brush around some part work fast Make sure that you're pushing the paints together if it's not achieving the blend you want if it's overwhelming a color Once you get past a few seconds stop Let it dry You're better off doing that Then trying to continue to work it and work it and work it because what's going to happen as you see here is You're going to pull paint up and create big splotchy areas Now I mentioned earlier you notice the first shield went wrong and the first shield went wrong because I didn't use enough paint Understand how your different paints are going to work together. This is sort of the other tricky part bright colors Will wet blend much more difficultly than dark colors and Powerful highly saturated midtones will overwhelm my colors because I didn't use enough of the bright whitish color The red overwhelmed it quickly and turned it completely pink So I've got to use a lot more white and a lot less red You need to understand How your paints are going to interact with each other a small amount of dark paint will darken everything efficiently You need a bright amount of light paint to win over highly saturated midtones reds blues oranges basically normal hues That brings us to number four, which is multiple passes Okay It's never going to be perfect on one shot with web blending I think with a lot of these techniques like loaded brush and web blending and so like that People expect that they can just put some paint on put the brush down and do It's magically done But as you can see here, I screwed up both of these on the first try intentionally. I didn't strip them I didn't do anything like that. I just kept going because it's already giving me some Gradation and that's what you'll find when you do a pass with web blending It's not going to be perfect. Maybe the paint dried a little too quick Maybe it wasn't as thick as it should have been remember keep that paint thick Maybe you didn't quite sweep the brush, right? Maybe you didn't put on enough of your bright color and it got overwhelmed Doesn't matter. It's fine. Keep working Because you're smoothing the paint out with a moist brush You can do this multiple times you end up with a very thin layer of paint when everything is all said and done so multiple passes is the key and You can keep wet blending these things together on top of your old work and because paint is translucent It'll actually help sell the quality of the blend and the effect So no need to strip everything if you get it wrong. Don't get frustrated. It's okay It's going to take you multiple passes most of the time when I wet blend it takes me two or three Coats passes attempts whatever to get a blend. I'm truly happy with and that's all right Alright tip number five When you're wet blending one of the other things you can do is get the surface wet So wet blending doesn't have to mean one wet paint into another wet paint Wet blending can effectively just be another type of feathering Now I don't want to get caught up in the vernacular here because the words don't matter. It's the technique that's irrelevant But what you're doing when you're wet blending is effectively working against the acrylic paints acrylic paints dry fast They're not actually meant for blending acrylic paints are bad for blending by keeping them wet You're able to work them together in much the same way traditional artists would have used oil paints and work those together Hence why you've got to work thick and fast but You don't have to actually have a second paint You can dip your brush in some water Wicked off on a paper towel and then bring that down Into the area So you can basically put on some thick paint Next to the wet area and then sweep it down into the moisture The moisture will get added to the paint as you wet blend it into that that moist area and Thin out effectively helping you achieve a smooth blend just that easy It's still wet blending. It's just instead of a wet paint and a wet paint You have a wet paint and a wet area of the surface Okay bonus tip here we go bonus tip number six Don't clean your brush in between each Paint dab where you go to get new paint and in between each blend When I say work fast one of the keys to working fast is to simply wipe the brush in between On something moist or wet instead of actually rinsing the paint in your paint water Now if you want to be that person you can eat your paint. I don't recommend it. Don't eat paint It's not meant for eating that kind of thing. All right, but If you don't want to eat paint and you shouldn't Then instead you can just keep a paper towel or a piece of kitchen roll next to you and Then after you apply your paint you wipe wipe wipe wipe on The kitchen roll or the paper towel where it's wet. So take the paper towel Get an area wet like dip your brush in water get an area wet and then just turn the brush and wipe it on that area repeatedly then go back to your paint and Keep working fast the advantage to this is it keeps the correct amount of moisture in your brush It leaves a little bit of the old color there So when you go in to say, you know, I'm working in the red then I go grab the white It actually keeps some of that red in the brush. So it helps smooth Some of that blend out. It's a little bit cheeky loaded brush. Actually, we're just kind of backing into it in a sneaky way But it also helps you work faster because rinse rinse rinse rinse wipe wipe wipe wipe wipe that takes time acrylic paint dries in seconds We got to work quick So instead just smoothing the paint and then wipe wipe wipe wipe on a wet paper towel back in the paint working again Much faster. Now, this is part of building up your speed muscle and over time It's the kind of thing that well you can develop where you get kind of a good rhythm to it So those are your six tips for wet blending. I'm gonna have some pictures of the final shields how they came out I did another pass off-camera after we were all done, but it was the exact same thing you saw here If you liked this, hey, give it a like Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here Every Saturday. I do hope you enjoyed this very much If you've got any questions about this if there's any problems you've been having that I didn't answer through these six tips Then feel free to drop those down below. I always answer every question But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time