 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. And today, we're going to unlock the mysteries of highlighting, and we're going to tell you how to highlight anything. Let's get into it. The strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style. Highlighting is one of the challenges you face when you first start your miniature painting journey, and frankly, it persists and stays with you for a long time into that journey. Highlighting can often be challenging because when we're dealing with all of the disparate shapes and forms and just general oddities that sculptors put on miniatures we paint these days, we often run into the question of, well, how exactly do I highlight this? Why do I highlight this? How much do I highlight this? All of these things are what we're going to talk about today as I break this down into basically sort of five different rules or guidelines that you should follow when you're thinking about highlighting. Guideline number one, we aren't painting color, we're painting light. This is the most important thing you can understand in miniature painting. It is sort of an ephemeral lesson and difficult to understand, but I'll make it very easy. On the wall behind me over my right shoulder, left on your screen, I think, but it's up here. You can see where the lights are on my wall. Now I have a very warm light and a very cold light. If you look at the white wall above the warm light, it looks very yellow. If you look at the wall above the cold light, it looks very blue. And that's true for everything. When you look at somebody in a black shirt on a very bright day, that black shirt doesn't actually look black. It looks gray. And the reason for that is pretty simple. The amount of light that's flooding in there is bouncing around off of that very diffuse substance and making it look gray in your eyes. Same thing is true with a red car. Red car will often look orange or pink or something like that, depending on the sunlight it's in and stuff like that and how shiny it is. So when I say we're not painting color, when we start painting, often the thing is, hey, what paints do I need to use to turn this? The exact shade of green I want. And in the end, that's actually the thing that matters the least. Because that's all just a particular bottle or learning how to mix colors or something like that. I'm not saying it's not a challenge. Just that, in fact, it's pretty pointless. Because a miniature with perfect sort of color match but no contrast will look like crap, regardless of how accurately you chose to color match it and made the blue pants blue. This is really about value. How bright or dark something is. And when we talk about this, we often talk either on a one through five or a one through ten scale. And you can see this in why we zenithal things. If you're familiar with zenithal highlighting, that's establishing a value sketch, right? So setting your highlights and your shadows before you apply any colors. Contrast comes out of the difference between tint and shade or tint and shadow, right? Between the highest highlighted color and the lowest shaded color. And in that, it creates readability. It creates credibility in how the miniature is read. And most importantly, it makes your miniature look really cool. Highlighting itself is so important because we're painting things that are an inch tall. So we have to over exaggerate the light to more realistically blow out what is happening if we were to take the thing and make it be six feet tall or ten feet tall or 20 feet tall or however big the thing we're painting is supposed to be. All right, now that I taught you the most important lesson, you're probably asking yourself, yeah, that's great, Vince, I get it. But so what? How do I actually apply that? Well, let's start by simplifying everything down to its absolute base form. In general in miniature painting, we assume that the light is above us. So it's the sun or the lights in some kind of room or something like that. And in fact, most of the time as we walk around in life, light is coming from above us. And so that's how we tend to render our miniatures. Not always the case, but often. And if the light is above us, we're assuming that it's both above and relatively diffuse. Think walking around outside on a partly cloudy day. And that's basically the light. We're generally aiming to paint with most of our miniatures. When we're painting that, that means that we highlight towards the top and the sticky outty bits. The top and the sticky outty bits of each individual volume on the miniature. OK. Now we just use an art word. Let's get rid of that crap. What do I mean by that? All right, your figure has a head. It has a shirt. It has some pants. Let's just say, OK, the head, apparently this figure has no arms or legs. Or I guess he has legs in the pants. The top of the head, the top of the shirt, the top of the pants. Simplest form. The highlights go to the top of each individual element of your miniature. So if you have the miniature wearing a helmet, and then he's got some armor, and that armor has individualized plates, a highlight is going to get pushed toward the top of the helmet and toward the top of each plate. This is the most common way I see people go wrong is they highlight in the middle or toward the bottom or in some other place. Now toward the top, and it will feel weird, but push the highlight towards the top. Wherever there's a change of element in the miniature, then we push the highlight towards the top and the sticky outie bits. A sticky outie bit is just something that breaks the plane. So assume you have this sort of flatness to your miniature. This is the top that we're highlighting. And then if you've got a piece sticking out down here, then this will also gather some light. The top and the sticky outie bit. It's really that simple. That's a good rule of thumb that honestly will carry you 80, 90% of the way through most of your miniatures. If you think about something like a space marine, they tend to have a lot of very sort of flat surfaces like that. So you're just pushing highlights for the top of each surface. The top of the helmet, the top of the shoulder pad, the top of the chest plate, the top of each leg plate, knee plate, shin plate, foot plate. They have a lot of plates. And then if you have anything sticking out on that armor, you highlight that as well. The top and the sticky outie bits. Easy guideline, easy to follow. Let's go a level deeper with our third guideline. So for here, we got to talk about shapes. Now, most miniatures we paint are constructed out of three basic shapes, spheres, rectangles, and columns. So that's most of our shape, most of our miniatures. And you might think yourself, what figures are you painting, Vince? Well, let's go back to our friend, the space marine. A space marine's head is basically a big circle. It's a sphere. It's the top half of a sphere. His shoulder is a sphere sitting on top of a small cut column. And his legs and arms are basically both columns. So that's a very simple example. Space Marines have a very simple silhouette. But even if you're talking about the human form, you'll see that your forearms tend to be column shaped. I suppose more if you work out a little, so push those plates. But all of those sorts of things, those three shapes tend to form the majority of our miniatures when they come together. It might be soft. They're not going to be perfect geometric shapes, of course. But by using the simple rules of thumb for how we highlight those, we will then get a map for how to highlight each individual element of our miniatures. So what are the rules for those? OK, so let's start with spheres. Spheres, we highlight towards the direction of the light the top. And they will tend to have a soft, diffuse spread of the light across into a deep shadow with a bounce light on the bottom side. That's the basic way a sphere looks. If you have the whole sphere returning to something like our Space Marine shoulder pad, this means that we push the highlight towards the top and hit the top of that rounded shoulder, just like a sphere. A rectangle, and of course, assumingly squares, you might think at first are pretty rare in our miniatures. But actually, they show up a surprisingly large amount. So this usually means things like guns often have are made just of a bunch of rectangles on top of each other. But also think of every strap, belt, holster, things like that that you've ever painted. All of those leather belts and straps that wrap all over our miniatures and annoy us are just very long rectangles, OK? And each one of those is going to have a basic premise. So with rectangles, we're going to pick and highlight basically the plane that is facing the light. You can think about this where whatever the side of the rectangle is that's facing up is going to be the brightest. Whatever the one is that's facing down is going to be the darkest. And then the side ones are a mid-tone. Easy peasy. Rectangles will also often have bright edges. Because they come to a very sharp edge, light tends to gather on edges regardless of what particular material that thing is made of. So we will often need to edge highlight those rectangular shapes to capture the light correctly. Finally, the most tricky, and I think the one we run into the most problem with when we're painting our miniatures is columns. Columns are unusual in that if you really think about it, it's sort of a sphere stretched way out. And because of that, that means that the light is going to be down one side of the column. So the whole thing working its way around, you're going to have the light on one side of the plane, and then it'll get softer into shadow, and then back to light on the other side. Easiest way to think of it is a cross running through the middle, where opposite sides both have light, opposite sides both have shadow. So a cross, an X. And this is most obvious when you look at something like a space marine's leg. You're going to run a highlight basically down one side, have it opposed by two shadows, and then have light on the other side as well. So basically it's going light, dark, light, dark, and so on. Back around. Columns often pop up on very natural forms as well. Usually like arms, legs, and so on and so forth on the human or even monstrous form. Often it's just mixes of columns and spheres. As such, when you have a sphere, a big bulging muscle, you push the highlight towards the top. When you have a column, a long forearm or something without a lot of definition, then you want to run a streak of light down that space. All right, guideline number four is don't use white or white alone to highlight. Using a pure dead white will often make your miniature feel dead, feel washed out, and feel like it's not actually in any real lighting situation. The real world doesn't have much dead white, even completely neutral lighting. We hopefully have it at our painting desk, but in actuality it's fairly unusual. Instead, using something that pushes more into the yellow spectrum for warm highlights or cold spectrum for cold highlights will add a lot more visual interest to your miniature. So what's a warm paint we can use? Well, that could be a brighter yellow. It could be something like a sunny skin tone. Anything like that, it could be a buff or bone or ivory color instead of going to pure white. So we can still use those neutral white tones, but we need to decide if they're going to be warm or cold. So by pushing into something like buff or pale sand or ice yellow or even a mid-yellow or a sunny skin tone, integrating those kind of tones is going to make the miniature feel warm. He's out on a sunny day. Whereas pushing into a cold gray or a light blue or something like that, something like a glacier ice blue, that is going to make the miniature feel like it's in a very cold environment. And so by using these two colors, not only do we still increase the amount of hue, the amount of color in our miniature, but also just the visual interest. It feels more real. It feels more credible. So when we're both placing the highlights in the correct place based on the shape or combination of shapes and then using more interesting colors, we start to get something that's a lot more visually compelling and cool. The other advantage to keeping hue in there is when you're highlighting, you're effectively increasing the tint of whatever color you're working with, which decreases the saturation. So you want to be careful that you don't do that too much. Highlights in the end how much of the space they should cover is often a question. And really, that's going to be answered by what material we're working with. So for that, we need to go to the next section. All right, guideline number five. The material you're highlighting matters. Here's what I mean. Right now, I'm sitting here looking at you. I have some very reflective glasses that annoyingly reflect the light. I'm sorry, for some amazing reason you hadn't noticed that yet, but I'm also wearing a very matte shirt that is very diffuse. OK, so let's unpack that. Matte surfaces like cloth and other similar materials do not produce values that are as high, as bright, as intense. In other words, if we think of the value spectrum as going from pure white to pure black, something like a cloth shirt isn't going to go all the way up to number one, up to pure white in its highlights. Almost no matter how bright the light is, because it's a very matte surface, it's very uneven, and so the light bounces all around and creates diffuse, broad highlights. So when you're asking yourself how big should my highlight be, the answer is what's the material made of? If we're talking about cloth or something like that, then it should generally be the upward-facing area, but shouldn't extend very far beyond that. Whatever's literally facing up and then softly transition down back into your mid-tone. It'll tend to be a fairly broad but diffuse highlight, traveling very gently down into the mid-tone over a wide amount of space. So it'll have what we could think of as a big volume highlight. That just means it's large. It takes up a lot of space on the miniature. My shirt highlights, in other words, are going to take up a lot of space here as they go. It's this upward-facing part is intense, and then it's going to slowly over a wide distance fall off quite gently. Now, high gloss or high reflective surface, so this is things like gems or metal, anything shiny, very satin clothes. So you've got somebody rocking a super sweet silk cape, maybe. Those highlights will tend to be very bright, so they will go higher on the value spectrum. We're pushing closer to number one, to the highest highlight, and they will also tend to be smaller. The highlights will shrink and get really intense and then fall away quite abruptly into the mid-tone. So if you think of something like non-metallic metal, metals in general, you have these really, really bright highlights, and then they transition fairly quickly down into really, really dark shadows. And that's because all the light is being gathered and bounced directly back into your eye. It's what we call a specular highlight, but we really don't need to worry about that. That these kind of terms are easy to get lost and in the end they don't matter. It's how the light functions is much more important than the semantics of any words. Because it's such a flat, sharp surface, all that light is bouncing directly in and the other areas to your eyes appear as if they are in deep shadow. That's why we can take something like a non-metallic sword and have it run from very high highlights down to very deep shadows. So remember, the material matters. If it's soft, if it's matte, it'll have broader, more diffuse, but weaker highlights. Whereas if it's glossy, if it's shiny, then it'll have very high value, very bright, intense, smaller highlights. So the combination of material, the color you're using, the environmental tone and the shape is when you put those three things together, you can highlight anything. There we go. That's how you highlight anything. I hope this was helpful. I tried to give lots of examples on the screen here as this was rolling along so you can see this stuff in practice. But if you've still got questions, don't feel bad for a minute. This is a complicated subject and really I could do three hours of talk on this, but I don't think anyone would watch that. Hey, comment below if you'd watch that. But thank you so much for watching this. I truly appreciate it. Hit like if you liked it. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got any questions, as I mentioned, drop them down. I answer every question that gets asked. 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