 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about doing less than your best. So this is one of the things I often hear people talk about is I take too long to finish a miniature and I want to you know paint an army or I want to get done faster and I feel like I have to take everything to perfection. And my immediate response to that is always what a terrible waste of time because you can spend all the time you want and you still won't have a perfect miniature. There's no such thing. One's never been painted. And the reality is your miniature probably is fine either way because especially when it comes to army painting you just don't notice that level of detail. So here I have one of my the figure for one of my pistol ears. He's going to be writing on a motorcycle here like we've got motorcycles are done so you can see. I shouldn't say they're done. This particular step is done over there. And so I'm working on a bunch of these guys. Here's what they look like when they're all done. Grab him there. These guys are real teeny tiny. Here he is. Here's our finished guy while we're aiming at and by finished I mean everything except the metallics because of course I always paint all of the non metallics first and then I varnish the miniature and then I go on with the metallics. So what I wanted to do today is we're going to speed this footage up in a moment. I'm going to narrate over the top and I'll try to explain what I'm doing as I do it. But I'm going to show you how I go through painting stuff like this. Like there's 10 of these guys. They're all bikers you know it's a battle line unit for my army. It's not one of the big pieces I'm super excited about you know like my converted gun hauler over here or something that's you know a bunch of madness nonsense. This is just some guy that I need to get done. So I've got all the colors already laid out on my pallet. In fact I've been working on my wet pallet for a while. You can see it's an absolute nightmare of a mess. There we go. Look at that. Look at all that paint just squidging around over there right. And who cares because it's just going to have to do. So what I'm going to do here is you're going to paint basically the whole thing. You're going to watch here real quick as I go through it all and I'm going to speed this up a bunch and I'll talk over the top. And I'll tell you about where I'm cutting corners. Okay. And why I'm making the choices I make when I want to paint a miniature like this and I'm not going to try to do my best. All right. Okay. So here we go. All we're going to pause right here and then we'll come back with a sped up footage. Okay. So let's get into it. A lot of work to do and we're going to do it pretty fast. That's the goal here. Working your speed muscle staying efficient. We're going to start with a base of some dark blue from pro acrylic mixed with some holdra blue from scale 75. This paint is quite thin as per normal. When you're working ironically with very dark colors, they're more transparent. So they will show more of the paint coming through. That is to say in this case, I want that zenithal that I laid down to still be a presence. The other thing I'll say is I'm so I am working quite thin with quite liquid paint and I'm using a lot of it in a large brush. So this is a size two Raphael 8404 and you'll notice the whole time I do this base of the blue. I basically don't go back to the palette even once. Maybe one time. I don't know. But the point is, is that I'm working with a healthy amount of paint in the belly of the brush so that that way I can easily lay down my full base tone here. Now, if one is our highlight and five is our lowest color, then I want to be basically making sure that I'm starting at something like a four with a color like this. The reason I'm starting so low is so it does show a bunch of that zenithal through. That will mean later when it comes to highlighting, I already have a step of that done and I can just build on those existing highlights, right? If I started higher, if I started more in the mid with a three, the more blue comes toward middle blue, the more opaque it becomes and that becomes a big challenge because then I'm covering all of my work and I have to build the full highlight and the full shadow. So when I want it to be good, good enough as opposed to taking a lot of time to very carefully build each individual little highlight and layer, I'll work with a darker color first. Now that's not going to be universally true across all of the miniature. Sometimes I will change what I do. As I proceed on with this blue, what I'm doing beyond the base coat steps is I'm working in more Adriatic blue and so you'll see me layering that element in there. What I'm just doing is slowly mixing in that Adriatic blue. I only do about four layers total. It's not really that many. I push a little bit of a darker color in the shadow, a little bit of black into the deepest shadows like between his legs or in deep folds or creases in his pants or something like that. So I do still establish that five. But for the most part, what I do is I'm building up and that's just introducing that Adriatic and slowly increasing amounts. And then eventually for my final step for my one, I bring in a little bit of proacryl bright ivory. And all in all, it's a very quick process because I'm working with a big brush and because I can hit those areas quickly because I'm working thin and it will tend to blend together. I'm trying to use the high opacity of the highlights to my advantage where I'm working with them in a much more controlled fashion. If I were to rely on sort of building up very thin layers or sorry, building up thicker layers where the colors were more intense, frankly, what I would probably do if I were doing something like a full competition figure, that means a lot more time spent glazing and stuff like that where I've got to very carefully bring it all together. Something like this is going to be much more efficient for a unit where I can just slowly build up that blue and increase the amount of it, of the lighter color there as I work and it only takes few layers. You'll notice I pay special attention to things like edges and to areas where the light is really going to catch. Even having a few, there's a reason why GW does so much edge highlighting in a lot of their work. It makes a miniature pop. It makes it look very pronounced and very readable. And I'll use some of those tricks here. I don't go around and edge highlight everything, of course, but where I see there are edges that would catch light or would stand out or would create a contrast of light to dark, I will do so. You'll also notice when I apply a lot of the higher blue up into the armor that you'll see me jab with the brush and that's usually to capture something like stippling where I'm working with something in that armor. I wanted to have a little texture to it. Texture is the great cheat. So you'll see me use it throughout this project on things like the leather and on things like the armor. When you want to do some blending and you want to have things look good, but you don't want to spend a lot of time, a simple texture can be an amazing trick because it can add, when you stipple, you can be very rough. You can be very fast and yet it will still look very natural because it's not perfectly blended and it's not supposed to be. It's supposed to show some of the inconsistencies because that's what's capturing the texture. So the next thing I do is go to the gray and the boots and things like that. Once again, I start almost at my darkest. So there I'm starting at a four once again. And I'm just going to slowly, by the way, that very dark gray color is secret weapon rubber. One of my favorite tones mixed with some Citadel Abaddon black and worked down to a pretty nice dark gray. Then I'm just going to slowly introduce in more rubber and then the final touch adds a little bit of bright ivory. Using the same paint, the same universal highlight. That way what happens is there's a unity to the whole miniature. It feels like it's in a similar light, right? So you'll see me work across the colors using that same bright ivory that being a sort of universal highlight. I often go back to here because what I find is that it produces a nice, nice rich effect, especially for tabletop miniatures where you get a similarity of tone and it makes the miniature feel like it's in a holistic light. This is something, by the way, you can import into display painting. When you use a similar tone, like in this case it's a yellow, white, a warm white, but you could do it with a glacier blue or an ice yellow or anything. There's lots of different tones you can do this with. When you use a singular highlight like that, it makes the miniature feel more unified and like it's under the same light. Alright, so that's going to bring us to the end of this little section. So when we move on, we're going to take a look at some of the other parts and we'll see what we do with those. Okay, so continuing on, I laid down a nice thin layer of rhinoxide over all the leather. You saw me do that at the end there of the last section. And now, once again, I'm just mixing in bright ivory. That's going to be my highlight color throughout this, as I mentioned. And you're seeing how, in this case, I'm tracing all the edges very carefully, just doing some quick edge highlighting. However, I'm also mixing in the texture. So you'll see me do things like just quick hashes and scratches and stuff across the leather. You'll see me catch the edges. And if I fat finger it a little bit, fat brush it, and kind of go over the edge a little bigger than it should be, I'll just go back in and put some hash marks and scratch marks over that area. Easy peasy. What this does is it gives you the advantage if you don't need to be perfect. Again, what we're aiming for here is good enough, right? Perfect is the enemy of the good, but at a deeper level, perfect is the opposite of done. So I just slowly keep increasing the amount of bright ivory mixed with rinoxide, which, by the way, I highly recommend this combination for your deeper, darker leathers. Rinoxides are really wonderful color because it has a lot of purple in it. It's very purple-brown. And when you mix a sort of yellow-white with a purple-brown, you get this really nice move to the middle because the yellow and the purple are contrasting elements. So it feels like a natural contrasting highlight to the deep shadow. In the same way, by the way, that you'll often want to have cold highlights and warm shadows or warm highlights and cold shadows on something like flesh tones and other standard fabrics. It's just a great trick when you mix in a warm-white yellow into something that has a lot of purple into it. So continuing to move around the miniature, obviously I'm going to be hitting all of the areas with this kind of touch. You'll also notice that I apply a wash to the actual flesh. Now, I'm not intending to actually wash the flesh. I don't use washes over flesh most of the time even on quick paint jobs as a last step or a middle step, but I love them as a pre-step. And the advantage to doing a wash right away on an area like this over a zenithal is it kills out all that blue-black that comes in with the zenithal and instead adds a bunch of red-brown. And that red-brown becomes a great base for me to work the rest of the flesh tones up. So you notice I wash it and then while it's drying, I move on to other parts. So for example, I need to turn the little stripey stripes on his arm white, so I go on to move on to do that. The advantage of that is there's no reason to stop working just because you apply to wash. Keep going. Do a different section of the mini. Work on something else, right? And once I've got that white, the white stripes are done very simply. They're just the bright ivory, more or less straight. And then I add in a little heavy body acrylic white to hit the highlights, to hit the edges, that kind of stuff. Keeping it very simple, okay? And then once that's done, I can eventually come back to the skin because it's dry, and then I can start laying down my skin tone. Now, as to skin tone here, what I actually end up using as a base is some Vallejo model color beige-red. It's a very pinky sort of Caucasian flesh tone. I love it as a base flesh tone, especially when you want real pink skin. I also, you'll see me mix in some very dark red there. So that's actually whole red. That's a color that I use on the actual motorbikes that he's riding, and as well as to base coat the red sections that you see me base coat. So the tubes and the little lights and things like that, the light over his shoulder. That's all based in whole red. And I mix a little of that into the skin as well. Creating that unity of colors where you're working with a more limited palette and integrating the colors into each other as you make your way around can be very valuable. By doing that, what happens is you end up having, again, a more unified feeling to the miniature because people can see the same colors throughout. When there's a little bit of whole red on the bike and whole red in the skin and whole red as the base to the tubes, everything sort of comes together. The highlight on the skin is pale ivory. Sorry, bright ivory. I apologize, from Proacryl. Yet again, staying in those same tones. Now, you'll also notice that I do use an intermediate filter there on some of the skin, as I often do. And if you've seen previous skin videos, you've seen me use brown glaze from Warcolors. I cannot recommend this enough for when you want to add a tan sepia tone to a skin. You'll notice that when I work with the skin, I'm working quickly. It's a small area on this guy. He's got a big bald head, and he has like the part of his face that's not covered by the mask. So I'm just working fast, wet blending it all together, going back at the end, and I tie it together with a Glazer 2. Jobs are good. I'll also hit the eyes with that same bright ivory, making sure they have a nice dark line around them. And then I put a little dot in the center just with some good old fashioned Abaddon Black. We don't need to go farther, especially when we're trying to be good enough with the skin tone in the eyes. With the red sections, I treat them much like the blue. Again, anytime I'm doing the transparent colors on this miniature, I will often work from the darkest tone that is the most transparent up to the brighter tones. Again, using that Zenithal as much as I can to do my best to already preserve some of that light that's coming through. So in this case, what I'm doing is working from that Vallejo model color whole red up into a little Proacryl Burnt Red, into some bold Pyrote Red also from Proacryl. And I'm pretty sparing with that. Now a few times when I want something to really, really pop, especially like you'll notice I do it on the light, the little headlight over his shoulder, I go back in, hit it with a little ivory, and then I let that dry completely, so give it a few seconds. And then I come back in with a thin version of that bold Pyrite Red over that quite bright pale, or sorry, bright ivory, and that bold Pyrite Red then really pops. So that brings us to the end of all the non-metals back in a minute. Alright, so there we go. That's all the non-metallics done. You can see how I worked through everything sort of methodically, kind of thing by thing. I knew what I wanted it to be. You saw how it was generally starting quite dark and then working up, I started more with the mid-tone. Now why did I do whatever I did? Depended on however I was going to bring it all together. So in the case of like the wood or the leather, I knew I was going to be glazing it, and so there was going to be, so I wanted to start in the middle and then work up and down and then let the glazes dry everything together. In the case of like the blue, I knew I wanted to build it up like cloth and have certain layers or a stipple on the armor and whatnot, so I started from the darkest and worked up from there. That's the way to do all this stuff and this is far, far, far from perfect even in its current state. Now I'll show you how I do the metallics next and then we'll come back and we'll do a final wrap up. Okay, so back in a moment. Alright, back to voiceover and so now it's time to apply some metallic paint. The first thing you'll note is that I did in fact switch brushes here and I've switched to a brush from my RAF 8404s. You don't want to use those with your really nice sable brushes with a metal paint. In this case I am still using a sable brush but it's one I really I find actually handles the metallics quite well which is the Bombwick igniters from Creature Caster, from Pro Acryl, from Monument, whatever the appropriate name is. I actually like these with metallics even though they're sable. I haven't seen it do a lot of damage to them but these are worth a purchase for me in that regard. I just, I find they handle metallics well and give me the control I want. But let's talk about our metal strategy. We've got to work quick, but we've got to make it look nice. So how do we get good enough? Well, the answer there is we start with some Vallejo metal color steel. That's right, it's our old favorite Vallejo metal color. If you know me, you know I would never use a different metal paint. I mix that with some Vallejo Game Ink Black, quite a bit of it. So this is about three drops of metal color to about five drops of black ink. And so I'm starting with something very muted which has a fair amount of matte tone with it. I apply that as my base coat all over. The next thing I do is take just the regular steel and you'll see me work quickly and just hit the highlights, right? I'm hitting the edges of things, the broad surfaces that are going to be reflecting a fair amount of light. Often you'll see me wipe the brush or something and just smooth the edge a little bit, right? Or kind of work it down to where there's not much paint on the brush and just kind of feather the edge. That's just to get all of that worked together. Finally, what I do is I take a little Vallejo metal color silver and I thin that down just by having some a small amount of water in my brush wicking out the excess liquid and then I just hit all those highlights with the silver. I'm making sure I'm capturing everything that's really going to pop. The top edges of the metal, the very edges of pieces that where light would gather, but the goal there is to work quickly again and just have all those areas nicely reflective, bright showing that and Vallejo metal color silver reflects like very little else. And that's it. It's a simple process. I'm not going to add a lot of color glazes in and stuff like that because again, we're going for good, not great. So let's go to a wrap up. Alright, so there you go. Metal's done. I feel like he looks pretty good. Now, there's a final step I'll do here kind of off camera that's really not going to be anything I would record. But it's just sort of final cleanup. So one of the things I do at the end even when I'm trying to do a job quickly and I'm not painting to my highest level I'll still spend five minutes and I'll rotate the model slowly just look at anything make sure I don't have any paint where it shouldn't be there's any final details I missed it's just always worth giving your minis a final five minutes to just really make sure you're not doing major work you're just like checking yourself making sure there's nothing else you need to push now that you see the mini all together and generally you'll you'll get it fixed that quick. So I wanted to do this for two reasons I'd say especially as you progress with your painting you're going to find that you just you can't spend the amount of time you want to spend on a single model or on some of your nicest work on every piece especially things when you've got you know 10 or 20 or 30 or 60 people to do in a unit. My average time for a single model is probably something like 40 to 60 hours and I'm not going to spend that on every trooper in a in a line like that would just be madness I would literally use my mind even if I shrunk it to doing unit at 20 hours a piece it would just be overwhelming so instead I go for something like this and I wanted to show you exactly how I attack it painting wise you saw how I break it down into its constituent pieces and I build everything up and I have a simple set of colors I can execute on knowing what you know sort of results I'll get I keep my color palette limited I have everything there I have all the colors I want to use ready to go so that's basically it you know there's final things like I didn't do the inside of the glasses as you saw me mention because anytime I do something surrounded by metal like a gem with a metal ring around it I'll always save the gem for last simply because you risk too much spending a lot of time getting nice blending done a little bit of metal pink it's over it and you're like oh ok and that's like too small to really wipe efficiently so at any rate stuff like that is just kind of things I leave toward the end but for the most part I'm pretty happy with this little dude he's a nice pistolier we've got a whole bunch of different crazy pistoliers built this guy looks more sci-fi because of his head but you know here's another one that's more he's still got the suit but he's still got his little you know pith helmet or whatever it is so you know I got a whole bunch of crazy pistoliers made for my unit of bikers but I'm happy with him now I just got to finish up the bikes finish up the bases there's still plenty of work on these guys you know in the end all told like the bike plus the base plus the guy it'll probably be about 4 or 5 hours per model which is a lot like I'm not gonna lie that's still a lot but it's a lot less than I would normally spend on any single model and my point here is you shouldn't feel bad at all about setting yourself the same sort of goal find the set of strategies that you think are gonna produce a figure you like I don't care if it's 4 hours or an hour or 20 minutes I don't care if it's all contrast or doing something more like you saw me do here okay the point is that set your target for where you want to be with your painting satisfied with that output right or be happy with it as I say my running tagline is be happy never satisfied but in this case I think you should you should set yourself to be satisfied because you're not trying to push yourself in the same way now that doesn't mean you couldn't pick a thing on these guys you know maybe you pick something like the blue and you're gonna work on blending your blue great that's deliberate practice so you can still grow and be fast using these kinds of strategies will one get your units done two you'll be much happier with the output which is great and three you'll still find yourself improving but if you include that one one single element of deliberate practice so there you go folks I hope you found that interesting to watch my actual process of how I go about painting like a trooper like this like I said I will go through a little cleanup step just to make sure there's nothing else needs to be cleaned up and I'll throw a picture of the whole unit up at the end but thank you very much for watching this don't forget to hit that like button it really does help it helps other people find these videos in this channel which is deeply deeply appreciated by me I love teaching people about the hobby and anything you can do to share or like or anything like that that gets it more out there really is wonderful so thank you very much subscribe for more videos you get notified for them if you've got suggestions for future videos drop those down below in the comments same with any questions or follow-ups you might have from watching me work but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time