 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about painting to display quality and or competition quality I should say we're going to go ahead and paint this guy up he is one of part of one of my submissions for Golden Demon and I'm going to show you the whole process so unlike in the past where I've done some videos like this I'm actually going to show you the whole process that is say I'm not going to show you every brush stroke but I'll show you everything I do and narrate over the top etc so there's going to be lots of little parts to this but I wanted to start here by saying that I started with the miniature by doing a standard zenithal prime and then what I did was I took a little bit of agrax and druchy violet and thinned it down a little bit added some flow improver and just gave it a nice soft wash over the whole thing and you can see when you add like the extra flow improver to a wash you notice how it didn't really gather at all in any of the on any of the flat spaces it's basically not present on any of the flat spaces and it's just very lightly gathered in the recesses and that's just more for my eyes and anything else it helps to give me those deep shadows it's a great way to get a map so this is very much like what I did in my planning for your best paint job video which ironically was the same figure so we're gonna paint this guy up as always I just want to kind of talk about strategy and what we did first so of course I did go ahead and assemble him all the way because he doesn't really have anything that blocks he's a very open figure this is one of the things that makes him really solid for competition when I say he's an open figure no part of him is really crossing over another part of him in a big way he doesn't have arms in front of his body like this axis and held down in front of his legs he's very open in his stance he doesn't have a big cloak blocking off his back or anything so there was no real need to do anything here with with sub-assemblies I also made sure I set the direction of the lighting so it isn't just from above it's actually slightly to the side you'll notice that this side of his face and this side of his sort of body is a little more highlighted than this side so the his left I should say is more highlighted than his right and that's important I think when you when you initially do your your zenith on map things out it's good to have a lighting scheme in mind the next thing I did was pick my colors and kind of where I wanted you know what to be and what we're gonna do here is go with an alternating warm cold tone throughout so the he's gonna be framed by some cold because all this steel is going to be very cold so that'd be his sword his axe and his shoulder pad here are main sources and he'll be very warm on the inside with his flesh and then we'll cool out the the tabber or whatever this piece is as well to kind of then give us a nice a nice transition of circular colors throughout the thing so that's basically the plan at this point we'll see how that survives impact with the figure and in the next part we're gonna start we're gonna work from in out as always we want to do that way if we make mistakes we're not it's much easier to correct our work because if when painting the flesh I get some paint up on the shoulder or something who cares because I haven't painted the shoulder yet I can go back in and do that later obviously we did all our initial prep work of scraping and gap filling and stuff like that he's nice and smooth now that's just all standard prep stuff so assuming he's ready to go which I think he is we'll start on the flesh and then we'll start slowly working our way out to the rest of the miniature and I'll go through each of the individual parts the way I tend to paint all especially a competition miniature is to go you sort of part by part so in other words I've the flesh being one part and you know then we do the next level up and so on and I bring each of those to about 90% done and then once I have everything in place I go back and do the last 10% which is adjusting colors correcting highlights all those sorts of final steps so that's where we're gonna do I hope you join me for this entire process this is gonna be lengthy as this is for for Demon and this is a competition piece this will be the sort of a very involved project even for a normal 28 mil figure but I do hope this is explanatory and sort of shows you my process and how I go about it so this is our starting point and from here we're just gonna jump into the flesh so back in a moment all right so let's get into the actual painting of the figure we're gonna start with some bugman's glow some black leather and some black art brown you can pause the video if you want to see the paints as a quick note all this is going to be at two times speed I don't actually paint this fast it was just sort of essential otherwise this video was going to be exorbitantly long even with the shorter segments they're just if you really want to see the brushstrokes and you know see me actually work guess what this stuff takes a while and even as it is just as a note you know obviously everything you see me do here this is one application of it keep in mind in any of these cases I went back in and did this all you know two more times at least so I started by applying a thin layer of bugman's glow over the flesh area then I started while it was still wet I went into my black leather and started working in some shadows with skin tones I usually find it's good to start with a nice deeper mid-tone color in this case I knew I wanted his skin to be rather ruddy and tan this guy's a barbarian he spends time outdoors so we're gonna go for some very warm highlights because I want him in a warm setting and we're gonna go for some very deep sort of purplish shadows to bring in a little bit of cold hence the black leather which has a lot purple in it so all I did was just wet blend of the two of those out now I've added some ice yellow and Mojave white to my palette and so what I've done is with the black or brown which is the black or browns a scale 75 color from their fantasy and games range I basically wet blended all that into a nice loose rough sketch again I was working very thin because I don't mind the you know I'm gonna put so many thin layers over this there's plenty of time I don't need to cover all of the zenithal I'm gonna keep letting that sketch show through for a while so now we're working with a mix of the ice yellow and the black or brown and we're really gonna set our high highlights now this isn't gonna be as high as I ultimately go we will eventually it looks very stark right now because because it's set against these deeper colors but right now I'm working on mainly the face chest the area that I want you to pay attention to so the center of his pecs and up into his face I get all those set kind of smoothed out and then I'm just gonna repeat all of this over and over again the goal here is I start with the higher highlights and then I slowly work into the black or brown and then I slowly work into the bugman's glow to smooth it all out and reset it so now you can see I've got some high highlights set there we go thumbs up okay so now we've also added some Indian shadow from scale 75 to the palette as well as some flesh five which is a nice desaturated shadow skin tone color and these I'm gonna work rather thinly so the goal here is to start adding some color tones into the skin skin is naturally transparent and as such you want to make sure it shows a lot of different color tones in it skin is fantastic it has so many different elements to it it shows reds and purples and whites and yellows and oranges and that's without any kind of weird light pollution going on or OSL effect so as a result here I just take those I start with the thin Indian shadow and I'm just kind of working that around to add that sort of sunburnt sun tanned feel to it now it's gonna be rather strong so here I'm taking the flesh five and you'll notice I'm focusing on the parts away from the light the light on this guy is I've set the light to be coming from about 1 p.m. you know the word slightly off-center from a standard zenithal which is generally what you want to do you want it to be at kind of an angle especially for a competition piece light from directly above is boring light from a slight angle just feels more realistic and visually interesting so now I'm taking some of that flesh five and I'm just working it into the various places to desaturate where there's a shadow once I've done some thin glazes of all of that then my next step is to go in and continue pushing the highlights so much of working with skin tone is building your contrast so once I've taken the red and desaturated down or shouldn't say desaturated I'm sorry and and added all the hue into that skin tone there you go that's what I'm trying to say the goal is to go back and reinforce all my highlights now I feel this is a good time to talk about the general way I work on competition pieces which is I think of it like a pyramid an inverted pyramid I start very broadly so I'm working with you know my brush in a big sweeping fashion I'm trying to set general tones and highlights across the whole miniature thinking about where light is placed in general and getting things placed as time goes on and what I'm doing a lot off-camera is just zooming in into the little detail stuff that's very hard to record but very important for a competition piece which is yes that's my symbol for I repeat this now about three more times and I zoom in and I really focus on every little detail did we get the eyebrow right is each muscle exactly highlighted that's what we're doing so now I took some brown glaze from war colors which is I love their glaze line it's so wonderful for a purpose like this and brown glaze is just such a wonderful tone for this when you want that lustrous tanned look to skin taking a thin knife I've thinned the brown glaze further by the way anytime I say I'm thinning in this I'm just using water and generally like a drop of flow improver and a little bit of occasionally a little bit of master medium from green stuff world which I really like but this is such a good way to just add in that that warm tone that tanned tone it's like it's hard to really explain but when you when you add this step in it's magical the brown glaze over a sort of standard Caucasian skin tone just really gives you this wonderful tan pop of somebody who's been out in the sun it just smooths all your blends out gives you this deep impression of of a nice tan color and and really enriches the whole paint job and it's one of the last things I do because it needs to go over everything else laying this brown color over things like the red and the deep purple also helped to sell the effect of you know blood under the skin the reason when I'm working skin I'm working in so many multiple thin layers is because skin itself is naturally translucent and shows lots of stuff underneath it okay all right so now we've got some Abaddon black on the palette quickly and that's because I'm gonna black out the hair now why am I doing this I'm not gonna actually paint the hair I'm just gonna black out the hair and the reason for that's very simple I need to check the intensity of the highlights on the skin and that's very hard to do against that zenithal prime of the hair so I take some Abaddon black which has a nice little satin sheen and will give me a good sort of map for where I'm gonna go later and I just very quickly apply the paint color to the hair still a nice thin layer of it a little bit of the under shade is gonna show through but it's gonna give me an idea for comparison as to how bright my skin actually is colors only look right when set against other real colors this is why I only ever take the entire when I work areas I work them to 90% stop do the next area and then come back and adjust everything at the end so you look notice how much brighter the skin looks that that high highlight on his forehead against the black of the skin or sorry the black of the hair okay so now we've got a little gray this is some secret weapon rubber which is just a great color for doing like gray leather belts we talk about why I picked this color for this because I think that's the interesting part here especially as I'm just base coating this all out so I wanted this guy to be concentric circles of sort of warm and cold and the skin is very warm right like it's naturally these orange and yellow tones and so a lot of it is going to be very warm the gray rubber color has a little bit of blue a little bit of green in it it'll really chill out and it'll pop against the skin if it's a cold color if I had used say brown this is one of the things I want to impress upon people you decide the colors of your miniature always and for every element you are not forced to to make some decision just because a thing looks like leather suddenly I have to make it you know brown leather no no no no no no you get to be the decider and in this case like a nice neutral gray I didn't want drawing lots of attention but I did want it to stand out so once I got the base gray down I mixed in some Mojave white a lot of this you're going to see I use the Mojave white and the ice yellow as highlight colors and the reason for that is because I want to use a singular universal sort of highlight color as much as possible to draw the piece together using similar highlight colors and shadow colors can actually quite help the overall miniature feel more unified like it's in the same light if you use a bunch of different colors to highlight different elements the miniature won't feel like it's in a singular light so in this case where I want things to be warm I use ice yellow and Mojave white okay things where I wanted to stay cold I just use Mojave white so now what I'm doing you'll notice is adding texture to the belt so I started with a nice little edge highlight and then I'm going in and very very lightly just making tiny little hashes you see how my brush strokes are chops little like chops into the side of the thing to add that texture to the leather I'm going to zoom in a little bit here sorry for the camera shake because this is we're painting really small now I mean this is the width of my you know the white part of one of my fingernails so I'm then going to take a darker color so here I'm mixing in some paints gray which is a good blue-black cold shadow color and I'm just going ahead and you'll notice like picking out some of the deeper shadows it's very thin I'm not using it straight out of the pot of course but I'm going to I am managing to go off camera like a genius but when you're zoomed in this much it's difficult and I'm I'm just reinforcing those shadows I let it dry it's a nice thin glaze of that shadow color to again make the outer part pop what we want to do is start these concentric rings of light to dark light to dark light dark light dark light dark right so that was the goal there once I've reset my shadows I come back into the hilt and I just pick out you know other little details now I'm into pure Mojave white instead of the mix like you saw last time I'm reinforcing the edges especially where light would catch so notice it's the top edges there where the light would actually catch on it I go in and reinforce those sides with just the pure Mojave white now comes an interesting part the his tabard this is always very challenging because it is a singular piece of cloth lots of miniatures have this challenge there's not a lot of other places to put the color so what I ended up doing was making a mix of purple five from war colors and blue green from Vallejo to get this wonderful violet color again it's cold right which is what I wanted the reason I did both of those things instead of just using some kind of violet color is because then it let me push into each each color for the highlights and shadows this is a fun trick you can do so I took two very different colors like this that mix very well purple five which is a very red purple and blue green which is a very cold blue green it's pretty obvious on that one I suppose and by mixing them together I can push into the blue green for my highlights and I can push into the purple five for my shadows this means my shadows have more hue than just being dark and my highlights have more color than just being white now I'll still use a little pains gray for the shadow and a little Mojave white for the highlight you know mixing them in as I really push up to the extreme edges but it gives me a nice opportunity to not just rely on that anytime you can bring in real colors you know real hue it makes a huge difference things are white and black are visually boring they aren't interesting and they just desaturate they don't add visual interest to your piece especially alone so by bringing in a real color this is why you see me using ice yellow most the time instead of say white it just increases the visual interest so what I start here is just doing this is all wet blending I mean it's very simple I'm just pushing into you know a basic value sketch of the thing but again we want to separate the cloth from the other elements on here as such it's now time to do some texturing so going mostly with that blue green and then adding in a little bit of a white highlight I go ahead and you'll notice again we're doing a very this time we're being very striking with the hashing method so this is the same method you saw me use in a recent video if you saw me do the textured cloaks video this is maybe two videos back three videos back something like that you'll see exactly what I'm doing here but what I'm essentially doing is just hundreds of very tiny very thin lines just hashing across just and this time I'm traveling the whole surface I'm focusing on the highlights and then here I'm adding in a little Mojave white and you'll notice this time I focus on the very tippy top the edges so those edges that will catch light those areas that will be the most lit and Mojave is a very weak white it's very desaturated it's really nice to work with but you have to let it dry it dries a lot duller than it looks initially so now I'm just going ahead and making a thin glaze out of a little panes and my purple five color and I'm just glazing that softly into the shadows over the edge of the texture that I did and the reason for that is so it smooths all that texture down makes it feel like it's more a part of the miniature okay all right so now we're on to our on to our next task so we can see how the cloak looks there or tabbered or whatever and now what we're going to focus on is we're gonna start working out into some of the additional elements and here I'm going for the fur so let's talk about warm and cold again that skull that's right next to his skin and the all the other bone I want to stay relatively cold I'm gonna do that in a cold bone color because it's unexpected it's different a lot of times bones warm it's fun to it's fun to subvert expectations but if I'm gonna do that I need the fur to be very warm as a result here I'm using these very warm colors and I begin by laying down a base coat of this color again working very thin because I'm gonna do many many many layers of paint and you'll notice how it looks nice and warm I mean fur can be any color that's the wonderful part about it right I mean especially in a magical world full of you know nonsense like it can be whatever you want I'm also gonna do these leather straps in the same color because you'll notice that the cloth underneath his little leather straps I did that same purple which is nice because he does have a little bit of a color triangle with that purple but I mean the the the cloth bracers he's wearing are so much smaller than the tabbered they don't do a super great job of balancing hence why I went for that very desaturated violet color but to break those up I want to again warm cold light dark contrast against each other over and over and over and over again right that's the goal so here we do those little leather straps in it and we we want to make sure that that's nice and nice and complimentary and contrasting to all the cold things that are going to be around it now because this is warm ice yellow is going to be my highlights so that's what I've worked in here that's what you see me going in and picking out each individual fur piece with so I'm going through with this ice yellow and just doing some nice soft layers with the ice yellow it looks rather strong here in this zoomed-in version when the paint's all wet it does dull out when it dries but at the same time I'm gonna also knock it back a little more later now with things like little bracers it's important that each of them has an edge that they have a light edge against the deep shadow of the cloth that's trapped underneath them so you can see how I went in again and edged both of the little leather straps again we will re-control those one of the things you can do if your edges like that on such a small space gets a little it gets a little fat it's not a problem just go back to your base coat color and then trace a nice thin line in the middle and bang bang boom you're right back where you want to be you'll get a nice hyper-thin sharp edge so now what I did because I didn't show this color on the camera so I do apologize but I grabbed some calahari orange one of my most favoritist colors alone and I've just turned that into a thin glaze and I'm glazing back over the edge in between where my previous highlight layer was and the highlight right so you can see here how how each of those gets to be nice and contrasting so now we're going to move straight to the bone and as you can see I just went through a bevy of colors there but all of them were cold and this is all colors I've already used so this is the gray rubber Mojave white the gray rubber and the Mojave white are gonna be my main sort of things but then I also have some white ink I also have some blue green to glaze in some interesting colors just very lightly I also have some Payne's gray for my deepest shadows you know that kind of thing I want all the bone to be this gray white blue cold color so like you see me here that has a little bit of that blue green and you can kind of see it there now I'm gonna end up highlighting back over some of that and getting rid of that intensity but that's still important it sets the overall color tone when you put a cold color under something like that it shows through it you don't need to play in spaces that are so bright a lot of times when I talk about contrast what I see people end up doing is then going all the way they put some hyper bright blue next to some hyper bright orange and you don't want to necessarily go that strong you can do a lot of work with soft implementations of the color okay we can be very gentle with it and that will actually tell a better story because we don't want it to be a there are ways and models you can just make a riot of colors the scene just pretty famous for just you know you hate go nuts go crazy right but with a miniature like this that's much more naturalistic like this guy is clearly a barbarian who's out there in the wilderness chopping and changing stuff up right he's not he's not done in these like if he's done in these pastel hyper colors it's just gonna ring falls so we want to use that cold warm contrast we don't want to be a total slave to it where it's just like overwhelming and drawing attention in places we don't want it so there you can see how I keep glazing back and forth layering back and forth using paints and different thicknesses to set the tone of this skull to be something cold but still feeling like bone one of the great parts about bone is that you can use basically any color you want as long as your highlight color kind of feels bone ish in that general area of of a warmer cold white you'll get it like people will get it and that was just my symbol for repeat because I ended up repeating a lot on this bone but with the bone completed guess what it's now time for metal and of course when we go to metal we're only going to trust one metal above all else and that is the lejo metal color steel and silver are my main go-tos I started by already laying down off camera by the way a base coat of the steel because I didn't feel you needed to watch me base coat metal a bunch places it's just literally that and what we're going to focus on here on camera is the sword so this is my standard and this is going to be just an absolute bear to keep on camera because I have to flip it around so I do apologize I'll get better at this in a second when it when I realize what I'm doing so you can see how I worked some of that blue black ink into the steel paint and I'm now placing the deepest shadows this is a tough thing to record I warn you right now and just because like holding it upside down like this now I mix in a little bit of the dark sea blue because I want to mat out those shadows a little bit while also adding a little more of the blue tone to it okay and so that's just kind of creating that that it's just like as though I was I was painting non-metallic metal I'm following sort of a similar strategy here right so now I've worked in the turquoise ink into the silver and steel I'm always using some metal paint in every layer none of these layers are the just the map paint or the ink I always have some of the metal paint in it and less because you know like it's I want the other stuff to win but now we go to the steel or sorry to the silver and now with pure silver I'm doing the sort of centerline of the sword as well as edging it as well as hitting my highest highlights I'm just making sure that that's that all mapped out there you go way to go Vince way to figure out where the camera is when you're working with a square inch of space where you can film and needing a miniature that unfortunately have to flip back and forth over and over again this one gets real tricky but at any rate you'll see how now what I'm doing is just working through all the colors thinning them down now that I've got the basic sketch done of where I want my you know highlights and shadows and stuff like that now I'm just mixing lots of thin versions of these colors in between a little bit of turquoise a little bit of silver it's tough with true metallic metals because they will look different depending on how you rotate the miniature depending on how much light is exposed to them your blend will look smoother or worse so you need to make sure that when you're working with TMM which I really do prefer working with true metals in this kind of a tactic especially for Golden Demon Golden Demon itself tends to which is what this piece is for Golden Demon just as a competition I think tends to prefer true metals unless you can absolutely nail non-metallics right so and I mean I I like true metals better anyways so there you go so it's just fun to work with that okay so now let's do some gold here we have a mix of I've base-coated this in a mix of three to one Vallejo metal color gold to one copper so three gold to one copper that gives you this nice warm tone gets rid of the greenish tint to the gold those colors are like that for a reason it the the gold is very cold because it's meant to be mixed with the copper which is very red and when you mix the two guess what you get to die you get brown because that's how you that's how those things work so I also have some brown glaze again from war colors I have some sepia ink and I have some our buckles brown which is a great tone with a lot of brown purple in it perfect for gold shadow because warm gold wants some purple tone in the shadows that's how it gets nice and rich-looking okay so here I've just started placing my shadows I'm gonna focus mainly here on the sword hilt so I placed the initial shadows now I'm going in with a little bit of silver mixed with my gold mix to start creating highlights when I'm working here silver pale burnt metal those are my go-tos for for highlighting pale burnt metal is just a little naturally thinner and weaker so it's a question of what you want to achieve often times with gold I'll use pale burnt metal because not only is it weaker but it also has a little bit of brown in it which again obviously then works well with gold which yellow brown are really nice with gold so you can see me just sketching in the highlights and again once I have my shadows and my highlights placed now it's time to play the glazing game let's play the glazing game so this is the most popular game when you're doing a competition mini the glazing game goes on for a while so it's just me rotating the miniature a lot checking my various reflections and then smoothing it out once I'm happy with that tiny area I go back I'm gonna do my edges again so this is me carefully with just the pure silver edge highlighting when you're working with true metals I like to use a pure silver or pale burnt metal to do my edges on gold because it still reflects pure white light right like what you're trying to catch with gold especially highly polished gold is the reflection of pure white light and so you want something that is as absolutely bright and reflective as possible to be that light reflection you know these are the areas that would be darn near white if I was doing non-metallic metal they probably wouldn't be actual white but they'd be you know something real close and I you achieve the same thing with pure silver in your in your true metallic metal okay so now that we've got all of that done it's time to come back and really look at some finishing steps so there's not that much left to do we're gonna specifically start working on all the little things like hair and again I'm gonna use the same cold tone so Abaddon black the original hair color blue green little Mojave white stuff like that because ultimately we want to have those same tones in in the miniature all over where it feels like he's in some kind of you know established ambient light so we're gonna do that for the boots and we're gonna do it for the hair so we'll start with the leather boots and you'll see similar color structures going on both but they'll be highlighted differently because the boots are gonna be much duller than the than the hair so with the leather boots I took some of that blue green mixed it into that Abaddon black and got this nice sort of really cold gray mixture and I just applied that all over as a thin and quick layer now what I'm gonna do is just work very wet on wet I take some pure Abaddon black start working it up into the shadows I'm not worried by the way if a I'm trying to be clean but a couple times a tiny amount gets up on the fur that I already spent a lot of time on Do I do I worry about that nope not even a little I mean I try to be careful of course I'm not gonna splatter all over it but like I hit a couple hairs and who cares because it's two hairs I go back later and clean it up it takes let's say three minutes right it's it's not worth the frustration and the stress when it takes up just a tiny amount of time to clean up later so now I come in with the Mojave white and again you'll see I'm using a sideways sort of hashing pattern to create my highlights what I want to do here is create the illusion of textured reflections leather boots like this will often be stretched over the foot they'll be sort of scuffed so hence that's the area I want to go again still working very wet on wet you notice I haven't touched the other boot I'm doing one boot completely and then going to the other boot and I'm doing that so I can work very wet on wet and then once again once we get all those placed and I'm kind of happy with my general structure of the highlights then it's time to come in and play the glazing game yet again so I'm just resetting my tones making sure I like where everything is and smoothing it all out right so there you can see both the boots are done we've got that nice building reflection along the center of the boot same colors we're gonna go in and this time we're gonna hit his hair so his haircut is is dumb it's real dumb he has like the dumbest haircut this guy has Hawkeye's haircut from Avengers Endgame I didn't realize it until I was painting the hair really closely and really looking at the kind of folds of it but yeah he's got Hawkeye's hair and that's well known to be one of the worst haircuts in movie history so it is funny to me that this guy also has it because he's got the the business in the front party in the back kind of thing going on but the shaved side heads it's it's a crazy haircut anyway so the first thing we wanted it makes it difficult to highlight because it's not a very standard thing so I actually did go look at pictures of Hawkeye he has a very different hair color but once I realized this again if you can ever reference a real-life subject for what you're painting do it always do it so in this case yeah I went excuse me looked at pictures of Hawkeye and kind of from the movie and looked at like where light was falling in his hair and then sketched out the same places here I will say our brain has a slightly longer ponytail which makes it even dumber but hey who are we to judge this guy's lifestyle he would kill me with an axe so what do I know so we're just kind of sketching in highlights now with the hair I take a very different tactic with black often especially something like this that has sheen then I do with other things the boots were a little bit of an exception but with hair where I want these nice thin tiny strokes and layers I'm actually just very slowly building up so I start with a pure black add a little bit of that blue green and I just build it slightly I'm also going to use a little bit of that dark sea blue you saw me use earlier in the metal here as well to just soften some of the black and make sure that the only true black is in the shadows the deep shadows and I'm just gonna I slowly work layer after layer after layer always in the direction with my brush strokes you notice how my see how my brushes I'm like reaching around the miniature and like pulling up that's because I always want to be moving the brush in the direction that his hair is moving little brush strokes like that are going to create the impression that there's actual hair there and that's really important we want to create in every way we can the illusion that this isn't just like a mass of plastic which is what it is because this is just big chunks of plastic there's no there's no actual follicle or thinness to this right so by making our brush strokes move in that direction we can we can really help in the subconscious way sell the illusion now with black hair there's always a trick black in general it's it's the 50% rule 50% of your surface has to be the color you're aiming at the other 50% can be anything and it will still read is that think of a shiny black car hair black hair is very often glossy black cars are very glossy really look at a black car and see how little of it is black okay there's these bright glossy light reflections and light lines it's reflecting the environment around it there could be green grass if it's parked out in a driveway or something you know whatever right so as a result I over highlight it and then I slowly glaze back in the black I let it dry I make sure that I like the way it's sort of set there how much my tones are coming through underneath and then I repeat right and yet again here this time I decided to show you some of the repeating because I think this is kind of a hard thing to grasp with hair why wouldn't you just do it once and the answer is because it just helps to sell the illusion if you have lots and lots of different times you're attacking this and repeating the same process especially it's a hair is often the same thing as skin we're trying to represent something extremely complex in a very small space right so as a result that kind of repeating is very valuable okay alright so yet again we're gonna move straight into another section instead of breaking things up so here I have some are buckles brown and some black leather and now it's time to hit a bunch of final details this is a really really important element of any kind of competition figure and by the way not the last time I do this but you don't want to just go through and stop like I said I only took everything to like 90% so there are little things I painted off camera here that I couldn't capture like the gems and his eyeballs and stuff like that which are so teeny tiny baby small in this guy it is insane how teeny tiny his eyes are but you want to relook at everything and make sure is it all working and here I looked at that gray hilt on his axe head and I was like not that doesn't work because it was too much cold all next to each other so I had to go in and actually change it over to be a slightly different color still neutral right but not just stuck in that in that sort of gray tone that just it wasn't doing anything for me it was too much gray there with the axe head and his bracer and all that kind of stuff we needed a little more visual interest so moving it to that contrasting warm color made it much more interesting but it's a very very very desaturated color because ultimately I don't want the axe hilt drawing a lot of attention right that's not what it's there for it's just there to exist and be a functional thing so you'll notice I also don't take the highlights and the shadows very high on this again I felt that was really important it shouldn't be eye catching you want to make sure that your highlights across the miniature match to what ultimately the purpose of that thing is the skin where we're drawing a lot of attention his face that has very contrasting colors because we want to draw attention there so that has a purpose the metal is very shiny the material needs to be very bright hence that has extreme highlights when we're dealing with a softer material like this and one that we really don't want to focus a lot of attention on we go to something like this okay so hence why you see me being much more gentle and soft with it so that's the end of the narration all right well that brings us to the end of the road so cue the boys to men but that is the the model there all done and you know ready to go we've sort of touched everything I want to talk about the importance of final steps as I mentioned in a recent video you know one of the most important things you can do is go back over everything so there's a couple little touches I did off-camera like I hit a little bit of brown just very lightly down in the dense of the armor I did the gems here that is way too small to actually see on cameras there wasn't really much value to me recording it like that is even at a million times zoom I just I you wouldn't be able to standing a value go over make sure everything smooth look over it set it to the side look over it again take a picture of it look at it again you know one thing I noticed when I had to look at it many times but was this tiny area right up here at the top of his hand right there where the top of the sword hilt is showing through I hadn't noticed that for a while so just little things like that make sure that you're you've touched everything one of the other important pieces of advice I can give to you for competition painting is once you think you've got something to finish to where you're you're happy with it and you're pretty sure it's where it's going to be for the foreseeable future set it aside work on your competition stuff well enough in advance that you can set it aside for a week or two or longer and then before the competition come back to it and look again and make sure that with fresh eyes there's nothing you don't see that needs additional attention or help or stuff like that but that's pretty much how I paint a figure like this for Golden Demon I mean as you know that you saw through the tips and as I was mentioning in the narration it's really a case of refining you know a lot of these little clips are recorded were three minutes or six minutes or ten minutes or something like that and then you have to understand I just repeated that exact same process that you saw me do with successively thinner paints and slightly more accurate strokes and getting very careful for another hour so you know when I'm working on something like the blending on this sword which you saw me do with the gold you know I went back in and successively thinned down those inks and those shades until I had this nice transition throughout when I was working on the skin it was repeatedly tiny little corrections right of just slowly working areas and checking the blends and turning the figure around and looking at it in different lights and making sure that all my reflections were caught properly and everything looked you know good and smooth and nice and it's just successively thinner paints repeating the process over and over and over again it's the exact same stuff you saw me do on camera just with thinner paints just over and over again from the beginning so that's basically it he's ready to go join his base his base will actually be its own whole separate video so look forward to that as we've got to sit him in a nice environment where he'll where he's where he's doing his his dirty work here mr. chaos mr. mr. dark oath you know our champion of war here he's ready to be the chieftain ready to be the chief hail to the chief so at any rate there you go that's how I paint a figure you know literally every step on here except like I said like the gem and just some final touch-ups that were very very very very very small that I did off camera by correcting side reflections and things like that but I hope you enjoyed that I hope you got an idea of what it is to in the process I go through to paint a figure like this to this quality and why I would never do this for an army because if I was painting every model to this level I would go insane that's pretty simple but if you liked this give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future if you've got questions comments or suggestions for future videos feel free to drop those down below always appreciate that but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time