 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video when today we're going to talk about yellow. It was all yellow. They call me mellow yellow. There's a lot of songs that use yellow, but that's not what we're talking about today. Today we're talking about the paint. Yellow is one of the most frustrating colors often to paint, yet it is also often one of the most interesting. It's a wonderful color that we can use to do so much. That can be a component of other parts of our work. That can be a critical element in something like non-metallic gold or that can be part of hazard striping or just a beautiful color to actually make the main components of your miniatures. Now, what I'll say is right off the gate or right off the rip, this is one of those colors that when I looked around on my collection, I realized I don't use this as a primary color very often, but I do love it and I love painting with it. I think it's actually a very secretly easy color to paint with once you know the tricks. Let's talk about yellow a little bit and what it is and what it means first. Yellow has a very narrow bandwidth of light where it shows. It's a very thin color in the light spectrum and the visible spectrum. We tend to think of sunlight as being yellow, but that's incorrect. The sun isn't actually yellow, I mean, I know we call it a yellow star, but sunlight isn't actually yellow. It does have a yellow color when the sun gets near the horizon often and that's actually the time when we can look at it because you can't really stare at the sun at high noon or you kind of go blind type of thing. But that has to do not with the sun itself, but because of the light diffusion that's happening through the atmosphere. So that's why the sun appears yellow when it's low and hence why we think of sunlight as being yellow. Yellow is one of the oldest colors we have to paint with. It's one of the first colors that people made dyes and pigmented colors out of, not the absolute first color, but there are evidence of people using yellow as long as as old as 17,000 BC in cave paintings and such. And certainly the Egyptians and the Romans used yellow all over the place. It was widely associated with the color gold for quite obvious reasons. We still do that today in our miniature painting where we do our non-metallic gold out of it. So we all have a connection to the ancient Romans and Egyptians in that way. And yellow was seen as this sort of symbol of imperial wealth and authority and things like that. The Egyptians thought that the color yellow was very closely associated to the gods because their bones were made of gold, stuff like that. The color itself evolved over time and it's one of those colors that interestingly doesn't have, I think, a cross-cultural or deep-seated emotional resonance to it. There are some colors that just almost seemingly, for one reason or another, across any culture they sort of have this emotional resonance. It feels like life to most any culture because it's the color of blood and it's very clear. Yellow isn't like that. Yellow has lots of different meanings. It's been both a mark of shame, a mark of heretics, a mark of obviously it has some extremely negative connotations in how it was used in World War II. And so there's a very mixed history of yellow and the emotions we tend to associate with it. But what we always do know when we're painting with yellow is that it's bright. Yellow shows to our eye brighter than almost any color. It draws the eye in a very unique way and it's a very powerful tool. So even if we're using yellow not as the main component but as simply our highlight color as a component in the rest of the mix, it can be an incredibly powerful tool to push the eye of the viewer around the miniature and can at the same time be very important in setting an overall lighting tone. But there is an important thing to reference here. So here I have a whole selection of yellow as you see. I've got some ice yellow from AK Interactive Third Gen, some moon yellow from Game Air, some golden yellow from Model Air, some ochre 4, which obviously part of yellow is ochre, and then I've got some yellow ochre here from Monument Pro Acryl. And when we look at these colors you see that they're very different in how they read to our eye. And one of the interesting parts about yellow is that although we tend to think of yellow as being a warm color, yellow in fact does split into warm and cold yellows. So for example, the ice yellow, hence named pretty obviously, it's warm when put up against a blue, but it's cold when put up against other warmer yellow colors or reds. So sometimes the exact temperature of a particular color of paint isn't an innate factor of that color itself, but more what it's set against. And a lot of times where I see people go wrong is they'll use something like a sun yellow, or I'm sorry, not a sun yellow, they'll use something like a moon yellow, I had the right one on my hand, which is very like cold and weak and has this really crisp lemon-like color, when really what they should be using is something more like a warm gold yellow or even an ochre, right, where we have very different temperatures being registered there, but they'll all register as yellow. Obviously yellow is the color of my favorite space marine chapter, which is the Imperial Fists. Here's one that I did a while back. I quite like this little guy. And this is a good example of all the different yellows you can achieve, and you can see how his highlights get somewhat more cold and push into the white spectrum, and the shadows are very warm, pushing down into a warm brown. And to me, this is the most comfortable way to paint yellow, because it ends up just feeling right to my eye, and that's what we're going to talk about now. So as usual, we've got a little scaven here, I've always got extra scaven to paint on, it's always the right time for more rats, always the right time. And we're going to just go ahead and get some paint on this guy. Now this guy's been zenithaled with a standard zenithal sort of highlight, and I'm just going to grab some of this moon yellow here and paint over the top of this guy. And what you're going to see happen is this is going to look real bad. Okay, look at that. No coverage, horrible, sickly tone, right? I mean, I don't even know how much that registers on camera, to be honest. But let's talk about yellow and its interaction with the colors underneath it. Yellow in paint form is, for the most part, extremely translucent. Black primers and black paints in general are usually not black. They are actually usually, not always, but usually very dark blue. If you have ever painted over something that was black with a yellow and got something that looks sickly and green, that is because you put yellow and blue together. You didn't know it at the time. You thought you were painting over black. It looked black when compared to whatever it was, but the yellow effectively brings out the green tone and then makes it more of a sickly color, right? Whereas if we go to something darker, something a little more warm, when we go into those yellows, we get something with a little more coverage. So this is the yellow ochre from Proacryl. And you'll notice it's a much deeper tone, but it is going to work a lot better over that base coat. Okay. However, we also might want to say, well, Vince, that's all fine and well, but that's not the yellow I want. So let's talk about how we paint yellow quickly and efficiently. The first thing I would do is, when I'm painting yellow figures, I don't actually zenithal them like this. Instead, I use something like this. So my zenithal might be, I might still do like a black, because that's the color of primer I have, but then I'll do a light rust over the whole thing and then maybe a sunny skin tone into like an ice yellow or an ivory or something like that as a little bit of the highlight from above. Okay. And what that's going to do, which we can do a little bit of that right now, let's just take some of that light rust and let's just go ahead and very quickly, we'll run some of that down in here. Let's just recolor this guy as though I had primered him differently, right? And we'll grab some of that sunny skin tone. Just putting thin watery paints over here real quick. Now, obviously, again, I wouldn't normally brush paint this guy, but I wanted to show you the basic and why it has problems. Let's take a little bit of that ice yellow, which just really shows up and reads almost as white to your eye. Okay. You can see how it almost looks like a flesh tone. And that's actually part of the key. One of the best undercoats for yellow is something that looks pretty much like skin, like Caucasian colored skin, although any tone down into more of a Mediterranean or African skin tone as your shadows are all excellent under yellow. Because this light rust isn't just a good undertone for your darker yellow. It's also a great shadow color for your yellow. So for example, this guy, the deeper parts of his yellow, so these shadows that are back here and under here, like all of this area you see here, those are done with that light rust, like glazed in very carefully. Okay. All right. So the key with that painting is right. The key with the yellow is that you want it to be over something that's friendly and to the actual shade itself. And in the end, this black and white back here, it just isn't going to cut the mustard. It's going to another yellow thing. It's going to end up looking sickly and end up looking bad because the white is too cold. It has a little blue in it. The black has blue in it. The gray has blue in it. All of these normal cold colors we prime in have a lot of blue tones to them. So when you take a bright, cold yellow, you get this ugly green color. However, if we take that same moon yellow and we run it over our colors up front here using the transparency to our advantage, effectively because yellow almost always ends up like a glaze, let's grab a little bit of that rust and we'll start working that in there as our shadow color. Now we can get a really, really nice yellow into sort of ochre transition. And that yellow is bright and super vibrant and just pops. I mean, look at how great that side looks compared to that side. And that's again, it's just one coat, both sides. I didn't do anything different with the paint, right? The difference was what color was underneath it. Yellow is so sensitive to what's underneath it. And honestly, looking at this guy, I just suddenly said to myself, wow, I want to do a whole yellow scaven army. What does it matter with me? But at any rate, it would be very simple because it's just one quick color over a zenithal undershade. So yellow can be highlighted with most anything. If you want your yellow to go to stay relatively in tone, something like this ice yellow is great. You can use, of course, your classic pale sand or ivory or anything like that. Anything in these tones will work well. You wouldn't think that you could use something like glacier blue with a yellow. So a traditional cold blue color for your highlight, which can. You can actually use a very cold blue like this with a yellow. If you have it, if you lay it down and then glaze the yellow over top of it, the less you mix it together, the actually better it will be at setting a more cold, crisp yellow tone. OK, you know, it'll kind of feel more lifeless, which could be what you're going for. Shading yellow, and this is where people go wrong, because when I watch people shade yellow, they often shade it in orange. So we've already talked about one potential color, and that's your light rust. This is a great color. Things like particular wood tones can be really good, something like that. So this is a Vallejo Model Air wood. I mean, there's lots of different wood paints out there. So, you know, a brown in that tone, that can be a really nice shade color for yellows. However, as per usual, we can also get tricky. So you can also go to something like this. So this is royal purple and royal purple or purples in general. Purple is the complementary color to yellow. So it just has red to green and orange to blue. And you can use purple in your painting of yellow, but you have to be really, really, really, really light touch with it. However, it can make a really, really fascinating tone. So just as in the purple video, you saw us highlight, or sorry, a shade yellow or purple with yellow, which is counterintuitive. I can take a little bit of purple and turn it into a yellow shade color. And just as a point of fact, I'm going to bring over my messy palette here onto the camera, just because I want to show you how cool this looks. So there we go. Right here. You see that? That really interesting tone that I get when I mix just a touch of the purple in there. I get this really nice, almost kind of, it almost passes into like a pseudo-sickly yellow color. It can be a great shade color for things like if you're doing yellow on Nergal troops or something like that. It's very minimal in its effect, but it's a wonderful, softer tone. You can also just take that purple, thin it way, way down, so effectively you make a soft glaze out of it. You almost get like a puse type of color when you mix it in with the yellow, but you can take that purple and we can thin it way down. So that's the kind of thinness we're talking about here. And if you want to get some nice cold shadows in your yellow, the purple can actually be a great way to get those nice, cold shadows in there. And it'll feel like a very naturalistic shadow to the purple. And you really need so little of it to have an effect, okay? It just, it does not take much at all. You can see how I get some really subtle, natural shadows there. This is one of my favorite tricks. As always, working with the complementary colors is almost always the secret trick. You just have to understand the ratios to use them in. When it comes to something like red and green, you know, if this were a computer, it wouldn't matter. You just mix them and everything would work. When it comes to something like red and green, the pigments we tend to use tend to be of about equal power, often not always. So you can kind of just mix them and get to any middle color. With yellow and purple, the yellow pigment we use is so weak, and the purple pigment we use is so strong that you have to, like, take the extra step of balance yourself to really thin that purple, to really use a minimal, minimal amount of it. So there you go. That's painting yellow. Your keys to remember are, don't ever go over your black or your white or your cold gray, which is what most primers are. Instead, if you're using an airbrush, get out an airbrush, lay down a nice coat of something like a rust or a flesh tone or an ivory or whatever you're comfortable with in a kind of zenithal pattern, right? And then, if you want to get a nice bright yellow, then you can go into something like your bright, colder yellows. And with one nice coat, you'll get a really great, great, great, powerful, bright, kick in yellow that just jumps off of the model. Shading it, if you're going warm, then you go into a rust or a wood or something like that into a soft brown. Do not go into orange. The shadow of yellow is not orange. It is other color. It's like softer, warm shadows or more softer tones of browns or deep ochers. If you're going into a cold, you don't want to use blue for that because, again, blue will just turn your shadow very green. There are ways you can integrate blue into yellow, but that's for another video about reflections and things like that. If we're going for naturalistic shadows and you want them to be cold, then go into your friend purple. Something like the royal purple here from Game Color is an excellent option. But any kind of deep purple like that will work. And then very, very, very limited amounts of it and you glaze it in softly and boom, you get a wonderful natural shadow. So there you go. That's yellow. I hope that helps. The brightest scaven in the universe, some imperial fists, the sacred defenders of holy terror, or whether you're just maybe doing a really bright, gloom-spite gifts army or anything like that. So that's Exploring Colors Yellow. This is a really fun series. I love this. We're going to keep going. We've covered all sort of the traditional primary and secondary colors now. So now it's time to get crazy and get interesting and get into the more wild colors of the spectrum. So I look forward to more in the future. As always, if you liked this, please do give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got any questions, feel free to drop those down in the comments. But as always, I thank you very much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.