 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today it's time to explore another color in our ongoing exploring color series. Today it's time to explore red, that's right, we're going to talk all about red. This is a color that is classically I know a lot of people complain about but I actually find it to be one of the more pleasurable and easy colors to paint with as long as you're following a few simple rules. So I've got a nice selection of reds here. You'll notice that there's some slight variation to all of these, lots of different brands. We've got some Vallejo, Nocturna stuff, Warcolors, Proacryl, sure, okay? Nocturne I know is Vallejo as well, but it's just one of their sub-brands. Red is fascinating because it, last time what we talked about with green and how we can recognize such a broad spectrum of colors with green, I thought it was only appropriate to jump to the other side of the color wheel directly. Red is interesting because for the same reason we will tend to recognize the red in a lot of things as being a sort of dominant color. Red is very powerful for how it's perceived. The human eye will tend to track toward red. Red is obviously the color of blood but it's also the color of life. We perceive things that have red in them to be alive, so skin tones that have some kind of red color in them, especially when it's sort of Caucasian or lighter color skin tones will tend to look more alive. When you're doing darker flesh or more African skin tones or anything like that, you still want to make sure you've got a tone like this in there, especially wherever blood would be near the surface. This is true by the way when you're working on aliens and monsters and anything regardless of what they are. If you might have blue blood or something like that, I think classically like Spock, Vulcans bleed green blood or something, I don't remember exactly, but yet it's not like they re-colored or make up the Leonard Nimoy every time to look like he didn't have any red at all. He would still get flush cheeks, his nose had a bit of a red tinge to it, he would still have red beneath his eyes if he was sleepy. Red is just a very powerful tool in our arsenal. Of course, it's also very transparent and that I suspect is where a lot of people run into challenges because red is such a transparent color being that it has just the natural way that the pigments that make up red are made, whether they're artist pigments or the more traditional like miniature pigments, reality is red is just a naturally transparent color. Such when people have classically tried to paint it directly over black, it then looks like utter crap. So step one is don't paint red over black. You'll notice here like most things I have a zenith old miniature, I also then washed him and dry brushed him. This is as per my preparing for your best paint job video. But we're going to turn his outfit here red, we'll do the lower part of his robe because that'll be nice to work on. It has lots of interesting places where we can hide shadows and light. We can use any red, we're going to go ahead and use some bold pyrope pyrol, let's say pyrol, that's an L, red from Provo Krill because why not? But we could use any red you have. What I want to talk about with the color red is yes, it is highly transparent. That's definitely true. But we can absolutely use that to our advantage. That's what's going to make it so easy to work with, to blend and to shadow and to highlight. And I think that's what we're going to spend a lot of time on in this video is discussing exactly what can still count as red and how to really work with it in a deeper way. So we've got a little bit of red here on our palette, just a nice little dab will do you. I'm just going to grab that and then as with everything with the Provo Krill you'll notice it's quite strong. We can still see a little bit of that color coming through and we'll just grab that and keep pushing it around. There we go, just get a nice little base coat on there, do, do, red, red, red using a big brush because look how much I can paint and I haven't gone back to the palette yet. We just keep pushing the paint around spreading it so it's nice and even, no brush strokes, no build up, there we go. And what we get is a nice bright layer of red, right? Now red in addition to being highly transparent is still very as I mentioned attention grabbing like your eye when you look at this especially against something like a black and white image it just naturally snaps your eye into focus. This is where you look. If you think of a lot of, you'll see this a lot of times in art and I think movies like The Spirit and stuff like that did it where they would have basically in black and white but then they would have like some images of red. You see this a lot in like pictures in hotels where there will be like a black and white image but then there's a single red rose. Ooh, and it does draw your attention right because red just naturally snaps. Wherever you look or wherever your eyes happen to be looking if there's red they're going to naturally draw to that place so you want to be careful when you use something like highly saturated red because it will it will draw attention to wherever it is so make sure you're placing the viewer's eye where it should be when you use it. So while that sets completely I want to talk a little about the main challenges of red. You have to go pretty far into orange for us to not really see it as red like red orange type of colors will still largely be seen as red and you have to go pretty far around into like a purple or a violet to get rid of the red out of that as well. Red just tends to dominate. One of the things that people often run afoul of is how to shade red. So of course we can go to something like a darker red so this is Vallejo model color black red that's certainly a darker red and this is shaded in the normal sense of the word. Shading means to add black to a hue right. We'll talk about tinting which is to add white to make it brighter in a moment. So you could just add this and that effectively you get a darker color ready to use it straight from the bottle but that's not all you have. You can bring in more colors so you can bring in something like purple or brown or even green because green is the complementary color to red. It will when you mix this in you will naturally go to a darker brown color and if you guys you get to 50 50 ostensibly you get brown. So you can kind of skip the middle man and go straight here but using any of these will tend to give you a more vibrant hue and there'll be some slight differences like using purple will tend to give you a richer more sort of luxurious feel to your red it'll feel like almost you know sort of silks or something like that using the green will just take the color and make it dull. It'll feel very naturalistic as though it's in real light because by adding the contrasting color you're effectively desaturating it down so to make it look like it's in shadow. Adding the brown will tend to make it look more dirty right so it will tend to look you know realistically more muddy but also just less vibrant. This will kill the vibrancy. Of course you can also cut out all the middleman and you can also just go straight to black. This is also possible but you have to be very very very very very careful. Okay so let's play around with a little bit of that and the ones I'm really keen to work with here I have a whole video on desaturating colors on desaturated colors where I actually use green so we're just going to use a little bit of purple and a little bit of black because I this will be an interesting contrast to sort of show the difference here. It's easy for us to take red and I think one of the most common things we do especially when we start out is we sort of grab our red and we just slap something like agrax earth shade all over it and say well job's a gooden I really don't like that because it it kills all of the visual interest out because agrax is really a black brown and that's sort of the least interesting thing you can do with red so instead we're going to take a little of that we're going to grab some of that purple and mix it in okay so what we get is this much more sort of rustic so we can get that light off the reflecting there we go this sort of much more rustic tone so got him on camera there let's go ahead and then we can just place those shadows and you notice it's a very minor transition because again it's naturally a very transparent color so I can just keep working in more and more purple and just very slowly and naturally get those really nice deep shadows right but it still feels like it's very much in tone so I can just kind of spread it out there we'll do a little feathering on the edge and boom I've got some really nice shadows that are still more interesting than just if I had gone to say pure black or pure brown or something like that now if we want to use the black right let's use him on the side here we'll go around here because this will be a nice place we can but it just it's less visual information we're giving to the viewer so if you can see the difference between those right you see how immediate oh sorry I took it off camera there you see how immediately this one is less interesting than this one I know that's a very subtle difference but even if you don't recognize it your subconscious does it knows when more visual information is being communicated so here we can take that and we'll just put some of that black in there grab a little more force that down in there maybe up in the darkest spot and then we'll just feather that out and this is where it becomes like shading red no matter what you're using ends up being an absolute pleasure because it's so transparent and so easy to get a nice smooth blend it's just really fun to play around with red shadows so my advice to you would be don't limit yourself to just something like agrax or that kind of color when it comes to red try mixing in you know your purples or your greens right or something like that as opposed to just going to brown and black because you'll still get a nice shadowed red but you'll have a lot more visual information communicated but that of course is just shading it and that's the easy part we can all shade red but can we highlight it will it blend so let's talk about highlighting red because this is the other place people often have problems red is very naturally transparent and when you a lot of times the way we highlight many of our colors is we add some kind of white now there are often better ways to highlight than just adding pure white but it's you know sort of a common thing so red can get highlighted in a couple different ways the first way we can highlight red is we can bring it into the orange tone right and this can be appropriate depending on what we're trying to achieve if we want that the color to look very very orange at the highlight like maybe it's some armor that that's actually kind of the tone great then you can just mix in orange but this is necessarily shifting your color it is making it not red right the other alternatives are we use some kind of not white but near white so here i have a selection of three paints i like for this purpose which is buff from velejos this is a very bone-like color we have some pale sand which is a little more white but still quite ivory you can see there and if you want the comparison to just a standard dead white you can really see the difference there and then of course ice yellow which is actually my favorite using a little bit something like this uh scale 75 makes like high chic yellow or something uh that's pretty close to this uh you know there's a couple different colors they have that are in this same tone but any kind of bright yellow white can be a great way to highlight and it's gonna be much uh it's gonna be a much more vibrant red than if we just go straight to white because when we put in straight white with red what do we get pink i'm gonna assume you all just said pink i can't hear you obviously because this is in the past but we don't want to turn our minis pink often i i like to turn a pink sometimes but yeah usually not what we're on about so let's add a couple drops of ice yellow there we're also going to grab a drop of the bright orange of course it would be locked up just cleared it i do like velejo paints but if there is anything that they have it's that this tip clogs way too often and way too fast just literally before this video i cleared that there we go okay so got some orange we've got some ice yellow now i'm also gonna put a little pale sand on here to show you just another sort of trick around this so let's grab a little bit of that much closer to actual white okay so back to our rat you're gonna throw us gonna throw some globes at you all right let's take the red here and let's just straight mix it with some of that ice yellow now what we're gonna do is just go ahead and hit some of those highlights there at the top of his knees that kind of stuff okay and so there we can get to a nice really strong bright red by adding that in okay now the other option is of course we could take that red we could bring in a little bit of that orange tone and you can obviously see the big difference there between those two right when we bring orange in that's a big difference in how that feels so there we'll just go ahead and go over the same part here we'll come back here and get something you know we clearly move it into the orange it's still highlighted but it's much more clearly orange than it is red one of my actual favorite tricks with highlighting red is to just take some pure something like pale sand and we'll do it over here on this this knee here i just come in and i just sketch out my highlight that i want in the actual ivory just like that okay then instead of uh instead of trying to mix it because i want to avoid that pink then what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna take some of that red and just make a nice thin glaze out of it in this case i'll do it with water maybe i use a little glaze medium you know whatever we test it on the back of our hand to make sure we're of an appropriate thinness let me get a little bit more paint there okay great so then once that's dry what we do is we just then come in and glaze over that ivory and the cool trick about this is that again red is very naturally transparent so i can actually glaze over everything let those colors work and what happens is we bring all those tones together now the first time you apply that glaze depending on how thin it is or what you're using it might end up looking a little pink but when you go in a second time it's going to immediately snap into being red this is really one of my favorite tricks with working with red i'll do it up here again where you can see it very easily on the top of his uh his shoulder here this is very nicely laid out part the reason i really like this trick is because it gives us an opportunity so i can get that darker bring a little more purple in there one of the other nice advantages purple is it's also quite transparent we'll talk about purple more in a future video okay so now we've got that part of their red we want to intensify that a little bit we want to get that even brighter because the red especially once it dries a lot of people say if you're painting with a red that has a very satin sheen or even a glossy sheen it's going to look really intense and then when you matte it out all of a sudden it looks dull and lifeless you know what happened i thought i had a bright intense red and it just went away i didn't go away it's just matte red looks a lot different and is much less vibrant that's why often when you paint your red on and it's wet you'll be like oh man that looks great that's a really intense red and then it mattes out and you're like oh okay i guess it's just kind of flat red so however we can bring that back like i said we go to just some ivory here let's go ahead and bring that up top we'll just hit some highlights here right at the top of this thing maybe we'll hit the edge there we go we let that dry we should just take a second or two and then what we're going to do instead of doing that let's get some more red glaze going here okay and then we just come in we do a nice thin glaze over the top and by letting more of that white show through using the transparency of red as an under shade what we effectively get is we restore that tricky satin sheen that's normally there when the paint is wet and instead we're just actually tricking the eye into thinking it's still the same thing and it's still there and in place and so what we end up with is a really nice transition of this really really vibrant red right in this case the uh the pro krill red is so pigment tense i didn't really have to worry about turning pink very much uh because it's just it immediately has the pigmentation to to stay red if you're using a different color red something with less pigment like a citadel or something you may need to just apply you know two glaze thin coats so but there you go that's exploring red it's a really fun color like already you can see just how eye catching that model looks with that bright red transition there uh the brighter reds really popping against the darker color all of that was shaded with purple as to what we're looking at right now and you know the best part about it is you can just keep pushing it around because I can keep you know taking that red maybe I glaze a little more of it here to kind of soften out that transition on the side maybe we take a little more of that strong purple and we really make sure that lower shadow is dark or under there right like we can keep working with it in really interesting ways to keep pushing that contrast around and just really really make that red interesting okay so keys with red that you want to remember one uh it is your color of life uh and of blood it's eye catching and it will tend to draw the eye wherever you place it on the model so be careful with intense saturated red by saturated red I just mean something like this where it's straight out of the pot and it is just red if you're going to use red and you don't want to draw the eye then you want to desaturate it that means mixing in black brown purple green and or lighter colors but then you're going to in many cases um so use your make your shadows more interesting than just browns or blacks you can use lots of different colors to make shadows and reds dark purples uh dark greens browns and blacks will all work and have slightly different looks the place where I will tend to use black by the way I still mix in a little purple but the place where I tend to use black the most is red armor so if I'm doing something like a blood angel space marine red is really or sorry black is your a great choice to saturate that because it can help more of the sort of non-metallic look of it though I will still usually bring in a little purple just have some visual information there when you're highlighting the key is don't just limit yourself to only going into the orange spectrum and don't be afraid of the ghost of turning pink just use something that's warmer and has more yellow in it something like your buff bone ice yellow something like that mixing in these will tend to prevent the color from going pink uh or alternatively you can take something even brighter like a pale sand or an ivory you can do your highlights just in that and then use the natural transparency of red to then smooth back over and get a really intense nice lustrous red so there you go with that that's exploring colors red we're going to continue this series with uh until we work our way through all the colors it's just fun to think about these colors and how they can work uh and the spectrums that they can push in uh red is a fun color because like I said it's so dominant it's it's so much it looms so large in the color wheel of our mind because it will just tend to win so I thought it was a fascinating one to do it's an easy color to practice your blending with so if you're having trouble making blends with things like blue or purple where they tend to get lighter by the addition of white uh red is a great color for you to practice your blending with and build up some quick confidence and quick wins because red is naturally smooth you can fly between the layers and the glazes everything shows through everything stacks really nicely see very few hard transition lines it's a wonderful color so there you go that's exploring colors red uh I certainly hoped you liked that if you did give it a like if you've got suggestions for future hobby cheating videos go ahead and drop those down in the comments as well as any questions you might have subscribe for additional hobby cheating we have new videos here every Saturday but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time