 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about paint consistency or what the heck is the difference between a layer of glaze and a filter. We're going to stick to one color for that from one paint range, but these lessons apply to just about anything. So today I'm going to be using this Indian shadow from Scale 75. Scale 75 is one of the paint ranges out there that has a much higher pigment density allowing you to take it down and make it thinner without it, well I often call it euphemistically snapping, but if you've ever thinned a paint a whole bunch and then put it on a model and had a bunch of tide marks or what's commonly called coffee staining occur that's generally because the medium to pigment ratio was such that the pigment could no longer be evenly distributed amongst the thinned paint and the medium was no longer able to form the requisite bonds and distribute pigment evenly and so the pigment just clumped amongst where there were bonds that could be formed that's how you get coffee staining. So but to understand how we avoid that and how we think about types of paint thinness we need to start by actually thinning some paint. So here on my palette I have that aforementioned Indian shadow. Now right as it is I just squeeze that straight from the dropper bottle onto the palette and the first thing I want to say is we talk about these things as though they're three distinct categories we'll say this is a layer this is a glaze this is a filter or something like that but really these are a spectrum so the easier way to think about this is not as there is some magic golden recipe which is the next question that always comes up what how much do I thin what's the recipe how many drops of this or drops of that the answer is there is no answer I'm sorry to tell you that there's just no recipe for this okay this isn't baking it's cooking baking is science you need exact parts of everything to actually make a cake rise to make the appropriate chemical reactions happen that give you cake or muffins or whatever cooking is a lot different it's often you taste it needs a little more of this a little more of that and in the end it often comes down a lot to taste but there is a spectrum to this rather than a distinct ratio and different lines of paints different mediums might affect it differently so if you're using chimera pure pigment colors you're gonna find a much different ratio to get it down into a glaze same with something like scale or pro acryl compared to say games workshop paints or maybe like a pre-thinned air paint which is already got a bunch of thinner in it hence what's making it flow through the airbrush so let's get into the magic here I'm gonna scoot that to the side for just a moment we're gonna bring in a little piece of paper that explains my spectrum concept so we're gonna have to zoom out a little did not realize how how awful that was there we go so if you think about the full spectrum layer is in fact much bigger than a glaze or a filter these are both thin paints but layer actually covers quite a bit so I can just go straight into the paint which has no water in it other than what I what's it what it's absorbed from the wet palette or whatever we're taking straight out of the pot and that's a layer okay and we all recognize that consistency applied down it's gonna look pretty much you know will often be fairly opaque it will often apply the color in a fairly true fashion however I might take a little bit of water as we often see in our in our videos if we're fans of Duncan or somebody like that where we've heard two thin coats and I could do the same thing here now of course this is gonna be a little bit it'll dry out rather quickly because I'm just going over normal paper but there it's thin down but I still have much the same effect you can tell especially as it dries that the color is a little different and it's not going to be quite as true I could keep adding water to my mixture so all I'm doing is putting the tip of the paintbrush in the water and thinning it out and I'll still get something that's basically a layer okay all of those would probably be called layer paints should notice there's quite a difference in how much they're actually covering okay we in fact we could probably even go a little bit thinner but you can see now on my palette how they look this is the original this is the thinner stuff but you'll notice it's still pretty much looking like that paint right and so I can keep going stretching it just ever so slightly and still get something that's like a layer and realistically I could build from here to here to here to here just by establishing more thin layers of the paint when we're gonna go to a glaze and I have a whole video on how to glaze which I'll link down in the description when we're gonna go to a glaze there we're thinning it much more and it has to do with the purpose of the paint it's as much about purpose as it is about effect when I'm dealing with a layer paint okay what I'm ostensibly trying to do is paint this color on to my fingers weather paint this color on to the miniature I know that sounds weird you might be asking yourself well what else would you be doing with the paint and the answer is well lots of different things with a glaze I'm probably just trying to have a minor effect on the color to turn it lightly into this color for example I might be trying to create a shadow on something right and hence I want to still preserve the original color for example I have a nice blue cloak I want to give it a nice dark shadow so I'm so I grab like a deep purple or a deeper version of the blue or I mix in a little bit of black with it and I glaze it in my goal is not to turn the cape that color it's to have that color interact with the original and create a shadowed version of the blue so I'm not trying to turn it that color and this comes in a lot when you get to things like skin glazing is how we both create our final blends often because again we're not trying to obscure or repaint the color we're trying to bring maybe two distinct blends together or we're trying to add a little ruddiness to the cheeks or something like that but you can see how much more of the paper shows here when I'm going to a glaze the other thing you'll notice about the glaze is you'll notice when I put these layers on I hadn't wicked my brush at all and yet I didn't get any paint buildup at the bottom however when I'm dealing with a glaze and the extreme thinness of it if you want to avoid this drop at the bottom syndrome you really have to be wicking your brush off first so and if you watch my how to glaze video you'll see what I mean by this but we keep a little paper towel here I go into my glaze I wick off all that excess fluid it's just water waiting to cause a problem and then I go ahead and glaze and you notice I still deposit a little bit more down at the bottom which is why it's so important when you have a glaze to always make sure you're glazing in the direction and leaving the brush picking up the brush where you want to deposit the most paint but nonetheless that's a glaze and then finally and most rarely seen probably but one of the most useful things you can you can do is you can go to a filter now a filter is honestly not every paint is gonna do filters well they have to be quite pigment rich things like inks make great filters but this is enough we can do it here we're taking a very small amount of paint and we're gonna really water this down okay notice how even much thinner than the glaze that is I mean that is basically water with a hint of color in it right it almost acts like a watercolor paint if you've ever painted like that even more important than a glaze with a filter is wicking off all that excess liquid and you can see the difference there of just how much spills out of that right and then when we bring back up our sheet and we come to our filter section here you notice that there is barely any color there okay that's the consistency of a filter now if I go a couple layers strong on it I can build it up it can start having some actual effect but a filter is most often used for those very very subtle effects the light touch of maybe an OSL glow the slight rosiness of cheeks right or something like that where you want just the hint of that color in there okay that's where your filters work something like doing stubble very very light stubble on a chin is great as a filter so you can see that again with each of these I mix them from the same paint and just added more water the more water you're adding the more important that that wicking of the paint becomes but the important part I want you to recognize is this is all a spectrum I didn't do anything magical with the paint I didn't mix anything into it except the water out of a clean paint cup there was nothing else going on there okay this the first one the layer you notice how it's still basically holding its shape as paint right like when you look at it on the palette still just looks like thin paint the glaze has largely broken up because the mixture here it you'll see this effect happen on the wet palette where it'll start falling into these like little clumps because of the covalent bonds right being kind of dispersed in the water enough the filter is gonna get real real real thin because it's mostly water so what you'll see is it mostly hang together like water what we're effectively doing here is transitioning more and more solvent into the paint in acrylic paint your solvent is water okay so you have three basic components to acrylic paint pigment which is the pigment the color binder a binding agent which in this case is acrylic medium and solvent and all we're doing is adding more and more solvent you can also do this with the addition of mediums so if you have thinner medium or blaze medium or master medium or contrast medium or Lamia medium or any medium you like it doesn't matter if it has the word medium in it it's just fine it'll work for this purpose it doesn't matter any brand any kind it all works fine but you don't need to you can do this with water especially if you have a higher quality higher pigmented paint okay so now let's put this in action we saw it on a piece of paper now let's put in action on our friend Larry the ogre he's got a fresh new coat of paint look at him he's all ready to go and we're gonna we're gonna work some of this in so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna grab some of our layer paint and this is where we're again we've just added some water into it but it's still basically paint okay and so here in the deepest shadows say like this big thin crease on his back we're gonna put that in there bottom of these muscle structures right that's a layer you can see how it is basically turn to the skin that color okay easy enough we all know layering we've all done it a whole bunch it's basically just applying paint when we need to then smooth the transition between the two or add a little bit of that color that's where we can go to our glaze so our glaze and always test on the back of our hand a little more paint we over thinned that just a tad and that's just it that's why there's no ratio and that's why you'll see me test on the back of my hand all the time because every time you mix it it's gonna be different so with the glaze we wick off all the excess and then we're just gonna come in and bring that over and just glaze down maybe we'll get some of those upper muscle structures some of these deeper recesses but the goal here is to mostly still leave the skin color being dominant finally the filter the last one you're gonna see how that has the most minimal effect and in that case we're still gonna mostly leave the skin intact again all of this is a spectrum I could mix a slightly thicker glaze I could mix a slightly thinner layer right all of that would be fine these don't have some kind of like exact definition of once you cross this particular point of opacity you've left behind a glaze and you've entered into you know into a filter or something like that I wish there was some kind of scientific thing I could point you toward that said that but there just isn't and when you get down on to things like the face that's where you're really gonna want to focus on that glaze and filter consistency for example I want to add some ruddiness to his big fat cheeks this is where I'm working in a nice glaze consistency here maybe the bottoms of these little bumps he has on his head ogres have very expressive faces but you can see how we can just work that in real subtly ironically we're all much more familiar with this stuff than we think mainly because a say like a GW shade like an agrax or a sarah from sepia is basically thinned to a sort of thin glaze consistency right away that's what it's doing it's just meant to gather up into the recesses and and act a little thicker there than it would otherwise but of course if you apply it thinly if you take it and instead of you know sort of slopping on like we tend to do with the washes what you'll actually get is something that looks like a glaze or even a filter but you can see then how those different effects can mix together you see how he has that nice dark red under his cheekies now little puffy red cheeks little puffy red jowls as he's yelling there and you can see how those smooth out and we don't have the hard transition line once they're dry in between the diva red and the skin so to summarize okay again layers represent a larger spectrum of how you're going to use your paint glazes represent this thin area where where you can still see the color it's still going to be present it's going to interact a lot with the under shade filters are when you're just trying to add a tint to the under shade but still at the under shade win not so what I mean when I say it's more about the effect than it is about the exact ratios what paint is winning is what's underneath the paint you're applying right now winning or is the paint you're putting down winning if you're doing a layer then the paint you're putting down is winning if you're doing a glaze maybe it's a little bit tied if you're doing a filter it's the color underneath okay you're just trying to see it through a lens like as though you put on you know some maybe a little bit of colored sunglasses or something like that that's probably even too strong but you get the idea so again all of that can be mixed just with water all right the key is to always be testing your ratios first just like I did here first time I remixed a larger bat batch of that glaze I was a little too weak added a little more paint and I came up to here so always be testing a BT's and there's Larry he's back he's excited about his new red tones he'll continue to star in future videos don't worry Larry will always be with us but at any rate there you go that's paint consistency I do hope that helped explain the whole concept I know this is often very tricky stuff especially for newer people to the hobby so I hope this is absolutely helpful if it is give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating we have new videos here every Saturday if you've got questions feel free to drop those down in the comments always happy to see those if you've got suggestions for future topics go ahead and drop those down there as well but as always I appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next one