 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're gonna talk about doing full big Luscious freehand. I'm very excited about this one. Let's get into it The strict techno man sir that is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V style Recently our pal squid mark reached out to me because he knows I love knights and just generally Imperial knights renegade knights Titans the whole deal. I just think they're the bee's knees They're a very fun thing to paint and the other thing I love doing is painting cool freehand on the individual knight plates And he had a little challenge for me as part of a video series He's doing where he wanted to put together a bunch of different plates painted by different folks and I said sure I'm happy to paint one and When he told me the theme that it's gonna be this wonderful renegade knight lots of chaos parts What could I be but very excited about it? So He gave me a chance to paint up a plate today. I'm gonna take you through that We're gonna do a big scene I'm gonna talk about how I use all the different tools back and forth and how you construct Effectively something that's completely covered in freehand basically painting on a canvas, but on on your miniature And we're gonna talk about how even if you're not a very good freehand artist, which I don't think I am How you can sort of build up and build up and get to somewhere good using every tool in your toolbox This one's gonna be a lot of fun. Let's head over to the desk and get into it My goal in this video is really to show you the entire process And I'm gonna start out here with something on this that I think is the most important thing you can do Which is lose the fear when you're doing this kind of all over freehand You're going to necessarily work over top of other Elements you've done the you're afraid of quote-unquote ruining or messing up So I have this beautiful wonderful blend of this magenta on the plate, which would have been fine And then I just stipple dry brushed all over it Let's just ruin it and that's fine because when we're building up an entire canvas sort of freehand It's complicated freehand any kind of big complex freehand you're doing You're gonna be putting layer and often layer upon layer of this stuff over top of it So you have lots and lots of chances to re-correct as you go So after I did that I'm then going over to the airbrush, and that's the other thing to talk about here You certainly don't need an airbrush for any kind of big freehand This just happens to be a pretty efficient way to then fuzz and smooth out some of the stippling I did and change some of the color tone for what's ultimately I want to be a kind of spacey type thing The next thing I'll say is when you start out building up your elements You don't have to be accurate or precise Because you're going to be working on top of what you're doing so frequently You can be pretty messy pretty experimental in the early stages Hence my just random dry brushing like I didn't know where I was going I just kind of did something look cool Then I airbrushed it to get it smooth and to sort of hide some of the stipples But not all of it but to make it look a little more, you know visually flat and more in the background Now I want to do a sort of glowing outline for where I eventually want my figure to be So I'm not trying to worry about the exact position of the figure. I'll dial that in over time My goal right here is really just to lay down some some general glow fill out a space Then I'm going to come in and start sketching the sort of outline of where this thing will be and This first initial sketch is going to look absolutely terrible To be clear my initial little sketch of this guy looks like such a childish drawing. It's almost comical Okay, but by the end we will get to a good place knowing that this guy is going to be effectively a sort of black void Amongst this light pattern. I don't have to worry about it being too exact or doing something great but even if you were Doing a you know sort of much more realistic humanoid figure If your initial swing at the thing is pretty cartoony or comical or doesn't render correctly That's okay You'll be able to keep working back and forth and back and forth throughout the process and As you build up your image you're able to then sort of hide some of your previous sins But one of the ways to think about this is what is the farthest away thing? In your image so think of how Bob Ross would paint most of his stuff He starts with the sky the horizon the far away things then the clouds go on top of the sky Then the rocks are in front of there Then the sort of trees last and so on and so forth right so he's coming toward you toward the viewer And that's much the same thing we're going to do here when you're building this big canvas freehand You're starting with the things that are most far away So for me that was this background and the sort of glow and things like that and then we're working our way in and Forward to the the items the next thing you need to remember is it's it's not a one and done It's not you have to get these things on one shot one movement of your brush and so on Refine refine refine is going to be the name of the game as you constantly paint over top of your previous work So as I'm laying down these initial black lines here for like this pillar and for the guy I mean it looks absolutely silly my chains look silly the guy looks silly You know, it's all just be pretty comically dorky But as I continue to refine it over time and work on it adding more layers more contrast more depth more elements Into the image you will see that we actually get to a pretty good place so again here I'm running back to the airbrush because here by the way, I'm using my My key infinity And this thing is, you know, absolutely a surgeon with that point two needle in there So it's very lightweight It's very easy to control and you can see how I can do these very thin spaces like these horns But I'm not actually trying to be super precise I actually want there to be a little bit of fuzz to the outside of his form because he is in the end going to be this sort of shapeless void emerging out of this This sort of hallucinogenic landscape, right? think like the side of a Van in the 1980s basically is what we're gonna end up with here But and again, you don't have to do this as an airbrush. I could have just painted all this It just happens to be faster to use the airbrush But as I start to fill things in and you don't just have these goofy outlines, you know things start to come into shape Which is the next thing I want to talk about Let's talk about outlines and things like that in your actual freehand In general, you want to avoid hard edge lines on most of your stuff But you still need to often do those and sort of a dark gray a dark black gray like I'm doing here Just with with the initial pillar just because you kind of need to work somewhere to understand the space you're working within to create the lines to Then work within But then as you put more paint down on top of it You'll often seek to cover up most of that black line if you've got like sort of a very faint very small Black line around things. That's that's no issue at all. You can have this sort of outline around things obviously comics and other You know 2d rendered arts and you have lines to them You just want it to be thin So as you're working on your other elements, you'll be slowly sort of thinning those out Pushing against them and you can see how not all my lines are perfect and very far from it as a matter of fact That pillar has this unbelievable bulge in it things like that And it's no problem Again, we'll have plenty of chances as we go To consistently redo reformat and refine what we're working on All right, so the next thing I want to do here is talk about Adding details one of the things that's interesting about doing this large freehand Is that you really want to avoid any sort of area of the thing being? Lacking visual detail and What I mean by that is the more little elements you add and as we go on through this particular piece You're going to see me add lots of little tiny dots and details and elements all over the place that sort of Create visual confusion The more of these different elements you have going on the less people's brains will focus on any of the Inconsistencies or inaccuracies or rough spots in your freehand So the more Different and differing elements you have going on Layering over top of each other, you know, you're painting a figure In front of a fiery background with dark clouds and birds in the sky and dead bodies on the ground and You know with like banners hanging low after a battle and things like that sure Like the more of those things you continually add The harder it becomes for the eye of the viewer to focus in on any one individual element and notice Any challenges you have with the the the overall piece And you can see here I'm laying down these big energy beams that are effectively coming out of our our sort of dark prints stand in here and Just kind of laying them down these do a couple things one They are going to be very bright and draw attention and help outline the figure They'll be good contrast Which is another thing you do want to still focus on having all those elements of contrast and you'll see that a lot as we Go through the rest of the project But also they let me cover over some things that I just wasn't happy with like that sort of forward void Just looked kind of messy and not good. And I was like, oh, well, let's just put a big beam of energy over it and call it a day As well, you can do things like add little minor subtle variations So even though this guy is basically this sort of dark void I'm just touching kind of some of the edges with this light purple now again I will end up covering most of this up later on Fading it back out, but it's one of those things that can help me sort of establish where I am And and give the figure just more depth By constantly just adding in different colors and layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of paint on top of it You help to sort of confuse the viewer and add this visual confusion this visual depth Uh that will prevent their eye from locking in on any one individual thing Now, of course, we can't talk about this kind of freehand without talking about happy little accidents I went to this blue to sort of cover this little space in the chest I ended up not liking it and I'm going to cover that over later. You'll see it disappear But when I did so I realized oh geez this figure is way too dark and doesn't have enough light Aside it to make it stand out So I just kind of tested a little bit of it next to it and really liked how it looked as far as energy goes on the side I was then able to go get the airbrush back out take that same light blue And start really punching in some highlights that not only helped define the shape Of the figure the the void But also added more of this really nice color Complete happy accident. I had no intention when I started this of having that super light blue in the image So when you see those happy little accidents jump on them get on top of them Now the other thing that can help you Uh, you know sort of as you're thinking about how to build your freehand Is just think logically about what the thing would have in the world as far as detail goes So for example, let's talk about this big giant pillar that's over here Well, the pillar would have a bunch of carvings in it It would have cracks because there's this energy hitting it and it's old and whatever So I can do all of those things and again It's not about nailing any of them perfectly on the first try As you get down into the small detail you'll see here my lines. Look at that That is a terrible straight freehand line. That's that's completely awful But we can fix it through additional paint strokes later And the more of those little elements you add The more it makes the thing feel realistic Regardless of the overall sort of quality of how well you're nailing it Same thing here right by drawing up some of this light lilac color From the low end of the the figure again I noticed it helped sort of carve out the black and you can see the bright blue is now really Has really shaped the figure and you can see him in the void much more clearly now All right, and that in the same way I thought let's keep going. Let's punch that up more Let's have some sort of magical energy So I just took some of that blue mixed it with some white and bang bang Look at this now. We've got some little like star energy magic stuff going on again I don't know. I don't know any of this things are it's just more visual confusion more elements in the in the overall piece to sort of Distract your eye and also make it look cool. It's also serving a really important contrast function at the same time Now it wouldn't be a piece if we didn't get out some pure pr122 also known as magenta And we're going to go ahead and just kind of add some color to these elements here for these little star Like the eye glow or whatever it is and the heart glow. I don't know these little these little stars Remember the key here is that you can slowly reshape The image no matter what you're working on think about how you can layer things over top of each other When you're doing these big images like this, there's often chances to have Everything you add on top start hiding the sins of the lower levels For example in this case, I was able to lay the little lightning bolts over the top Or things like that or the star field over the previous level All sorts of things like that that allow me to then hide Areas that I wasn't super happy with from the previous level So you can keep working back and forth and no matter what the picture is you're aiming for You can eventually get to somewhere that because of all the different levels of things you've added The layers and the visual confusion looks compelling cool and overall fun The magenta stars and the variation of those kinds of little elements Teach us another very important lesson here And that is with all of the elements of our freehand we have to have the same tonal variation We would expect with the normal figure What I mean by that is when we're painting a three-dimensional figure We've all been trained to do things like add shadow and highlight To create that variation of both value and hue that makes the thing read as credible and more realistic Well, it's exactly the same here on your two-dimensional images And they don't always have to be just variation of value Adding in changes of hue or color can also add the same realistic effect But if you look at the chains that are in the lower part You can see I've rendered them in that sort of non-metallic style and it's funny If you ever want to really learn non-metallic just paint it in 2d It's actually so much easier in two dimensions than it is in three to be completely honest Uh once again, I'm getting back out the airbrush here But the goal of it is exactly the same Using this orange and this peachy tone and eventually magenta I want to add some variation of color into these little energy beams So they appear to have More travel more visual interest on the actual piece What that's doing is again creating more space for the eye to move around the model and making it feel More credible more realistic and like there's a real light real depth real shadow in whatever our image is Now in this case, I actually go overboard and add way too much orange And that leads me to you sort of one of the big and final lessons I want to talk about when you're doing this sort of large freehand Which is you are going to mess up You are going to screw it up. I made so many mistakes that I didn't like in painting this thing You know what I did? I went back and changed it I painted over it You're not making any permanent changes when you do these things You can always go back and repaint It's very easy when you work thin when you're working in these nice thin easy layers and glazes And things like that on the miniature you could put 10 20 50 layers of these things on it. You would not hurt anything. It's a big flat canvas Think of how bob ross painted with his oil paints. He wasn't exactly working super thin Right. In fact, he often used the texture You don't have to do that here though. You certainly could there's nothing wrong with it But you'll constantly fail or make something you don't like or it won't be quite right And that's okay. You'll see that like by the end of this I end up I don't like that lightning bolt where it touches the pillar So I extend it on to the pillar and then adjust the light accordingly I don't like the exact tone of the the bolts. So I glaze back and forth here adding more different tones Into the actual lightning bolts subtracting out some of that orange upping the magenta and then glazing it all back together Working on top of what you do Failure or screwing things up in your eyes is perfectly okay when you're doing this. It's fine And the key here is to continually just look at the piece and let your brain tell you where it looks wrong Where something doesn't seem to work For example here as I was working the actual light lightning Whatever this thing is these energy beams I realized that the pillar wasn't reflecting the light and so I thought oh, what a fun chance to add some more color So by adding in some more light and then of course some more shadow Toward the lower part of the pillar. It makes it feel very bright Adding in more value change more contrast and that was just because I was sitting here staring at it and went Wait, why doesn't that light reflect on that pillar and it just occurred to me and we moved on Same thing. I'm going to add it down to the chains below add some of that color and tone and reflection down into the chains Right and so just constantly refining refining refining going back cleaning up adding on top of the layers you did before And uh looking for those spots where your brain is telling you Add more here add more layers more color more value transitions more tones And just by continually layering that stuff on on top of itself. You'll have an extremely successful piece So there we go, uh, that plate is all done ready to be shipped off Back to squid mar. Uh, I do hope uh, he enjoys it. Uh, this was a lot of fun to do So thank you very much. Emil for reaching out. Thank you for the opportunity to paint this. It was uh, Really a great time and hey, I I love doing cool scenes dedicated to slanage on Night plates as if you watch this channel, you must certainly know by now But if you liked this, give it a like Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions drop those down below I always answer uh every comment left on the channel If you want to take your next step on your hobby journey, you can do so through the patreon link down below Our patreon is focused on review and feedback and just answering questions and helping you out on your journey But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time You