 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today, it's time to get inked. We're going to talk all about tattoos, how to put them on your miniatures, how to do both simple and complex tattoos. Let's get into it. The strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V. A lot of our miniatures, be they fantasy or sci-fi, often have occasion to have some cool ink on their skin. And tattoos are a really fun, easy way to make your model pop. I think a lot of us are afraid to do it because we put a lot of work into the skin and then it seems like we could mess it all up. This video though is here to help. Don't worry. Tattooing on your miniature at least is a very simple process where we just apply some very quick and easy techniques to make something that looks cool and interesting and makes our fig visually pop. And with a little bit of simple techniques repeated over and over, we can even make something that looks stunning and complicated but was actually secretly very simple to do. So let's head over to the desk and we'll take a look at exactly what it takes to paint some tattoos. All right. When we're talking tattoos, it's important to start with color. If we're dealing with normal sort of Caucasian skin tones, then you're going to want something in the blue, blue, gray spectrum. Darker skin tones can use the same thing, but it often looks better if you go a little either darker than the average skin or brighter than the average skin. So if you're dealing with like an orcish green skin tone, then having something like bright white tattoos, the key here is contrast. Now, you also want there to be some skin tone in there. So I'm mixing the ink with the paint to increase the flow. If you don't have ink, you can use a drop of flow improver and I'm putting in a little bit of the pink so that there's a little bit of the skin showing through. Tattoos aren't completely opaque. When you begin building up your tattoos, you want that paint really flowing. So again, here, I'm just using water and the inclusion of the ink to do that. But you also want a nice, fine, sharp brush. Here, we're going to start with just a simple maw, like the the maw, which is just a bunch of triangles kind of in like a raw or angry mouth shape. And of course, our our inked participant here is none other than Larry the Ogre. He's happy to get his tats back. The key with the doing sort of simple shapes like this, you can all paint a triangle is to start thinner than you actually intend the shape to be. So when you do your initial triangle, you make sure you're always working smaller, whatever shape you're working on, you start smaller than you want the actual outline to be. Then as you clean it up and proceed, you can then continue to sort of build it up and out, fill it in, straighten the lines and get everything looking clean. If you start really big, then you have to you don't have anywhere to go and you have to come back to your skin tone to shrink it, which you can do. But it's often complicated if you have a blended skin tone. If you start very thin, you can build out no issue. Now, working the tattoo into the skin is often an important step, but you can also use the same technique to make the tattoo seem old or faded or like it's, you know, it's got some some wear on it like the person of the sun. Here I have my original flesh tone. I worked it into a very thin glaze and I'm just going to give a light cover. A very, very thin light filter is all it's necessary to make the tattoo feel like it's really seated in the skin. The thicker the glaze like what I'm doing here, the more it will make the tattoo seem old and faded and worn. You can also then reinstantiate some of your shadows after the glaze where the tattoo would be naturally darker and have blue shadows to it instead of the normal skin tone shadows. So here I'm just taking back a little of my original color again in a very thin glaze and wherever there's recesses and depressions in the skin, I'm then going to go ahead and build back some of those shadows in. But the key here remember was just doing simple shapes and then building them up and out and smoothing the lines, laying the extra flesh tone on top as an optional step to either make it feel like it's more integrated or older. Now if we want to talk about more complicated tattoos besides something like just the shape like a face or a maw or a skull or something simple like that, you know, if you're looking at more like a Maori style tattoo, really the key there is for any of these sorts of complicated tattoos, it's just lines and triangles and dots built up over time layer after layer on top of each other to create a lot of visual confusion. So there's no part of this that's actually tricky. It's just building a lot of little individual items. So here I'm going to use a mix of dots, straight lines and swiggles, nothing more than that, all things you're more than capable of doing to create something that has a high amount of visual confusion. If you get up close and look at the thing, it will look strange, certainly. But if you're looking at the figure from any distance or just holding it in your hand, there'll be so many different lines and dots and elements to the tattoo that your brain just says, yep, that's a full complicated tattoo. And you can just sort of keep building this out around the figure, do entire sleeves or have it extended out on the chest like Jason Momoa in Aquaman or something. But it's all just lines, little triangles like you see me doing now and dots. And then occasionally some squiggles to fill things in. And you don't have to do this in one pass. You can sort of lay down a line, build out some triangles from there. If you don't like it, then you can kind of build those out a little more or put in a second line or so on. The key is I had no plan when I was going into this. You just keep building the shape up, extending it further and further around the arm, you know, making sure that it's all in line with itself and then extending out whatever you're doing. So the dots, the triangles, the little circles, the squiggles, whatever it happens to be. By layering all these top of these or all these elements on top of each other, the visual confusion is so high that the brain just accepts it as this sort of complicated sleeve tattoo. Let's say you want to go even more than that. Here I want to talk about one of the keys to doing simple freehand like tattoos. And that is work in swoops in this direction you see me painting in right now. If you're right-handed, it would be the opposite direction if you're left-handed. But the idea here is that is the most comfortable thing for your hand to do because it's how your muscles in your hand want to pull a forward swoop. And you can turn the model around to basically just layer in a bunch of these sorts of swoops over and over and over again. And in doing so, create an extremely complicated pattern. Swooping lines like this are a lot easier to do than straight lines. When we try to put a straight line as part of a tattoo like I was doing on the other side, if you end up with it being off or wrong or your handshakes or anything like that, it sort of stands out to your brain right away. But these constant swoops are much more comfortable for your hand. And if you jump or if you make a little backstroke, that just becomes part of the pattern. But again here the key is the same. We're not going into this with any great design or plan in mind. Though if you do, if you do have a particular design in mind, Google a picture of that thing, find a real image of the tattoo and again, just build it up in these simple repeating shapes until you have it. So think Celtic knots and other similar things. Those are just lines stacked on top of each other over and over and over again. Don't try to paint the whole thing. Just paint a single line, one little happy line at a time. And suddenly you have this big complicated tattoo. Now once again, when I see these open spots, I can then fill in more little dots or more little swoops or more little lines, always trying to work in the most comfortable way for my hand. As a point of fact, because I'm filming this, I have a relatively shallow area where I can work. So it gets a little harder and I have to work somewhat uncomfortably sometime. If I were painting this just for myself, I'd be turning Larry all over in my hand upside down, getting closer, getting farther, choking up on my brush and so on and so forth. But it doesn't make for a very good video when you can't see the miniature at all. As the first say, 100 videos I made will show you. But the key with this is as you continue to build out these individual elements of the tattoo, you create so much visual confusion and so much complexity in the design. It looks like you did something really amazing and impressive and complicated here. So things like tribal tattoos or war paint type of stuff like that. This is a great way to do that because all you need is just repeated swoopy lines and runes and things of that nature. And it looks like this very complicated runic tattoo. If you just want a little bit of highlight built in, you can just take that thin glaze and run it over the upper areas of the muscle, the top spots. Now a word of warning that I didn't do here that you really should and end up paying the price for it. I didn't wait long enough to let the ink dry and so I smudged some of my tattoo. Oopsie do. It happens. A layer of varnish, a quick layer of varnish over the top before you put on your glaze will make sure that it's sealed otherwise just make sure you let your paint and ink really dry and cure which I didn't. But there you go. As you can see it's just building simple shapes and lines and triangles up over and over again. So there you go. That's all there is to it. Remember the keys with it. In general we want a tattoo color that's going to be contrasting to the skin. That's why if we're using Caucasian skin tone which has a lot of orange influence in it, we use something like the traditional blues with just a little bit of flesh mixed in to show the fade. Start simple. Easy designs repeated over and over again can lead to very complex and interesting tattoos. And finally a little bit of glaze over the top can make those tattoos look old or faded or like years and years have gone by of them being bleached in the sun. It really is a simple thing and I hope it helps. If you liked this video give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got any questions, hey don't hesitate to drop those down below. I always answer every question asked in the comments. If you want to support the channel you can do so while taking your next step on your hobby journey through the Patreon link down below that's focused on review and feedback. Don't forget we also do have some cool books through Space Station Zero and Rain and Hell which are fun miniature war games you can play. Those links are down there as well. As always I thank you so much for watching this and we'll see you next time.