 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today we're going to explore monochromatic painting But we have a very special figure to do that. That's right I got my hands on one of Miniax Kickstarter models The link for Miniax Kickstarter is down in the description. You can go check that out There are three models in total all with this wood elf type theme I picked this one because she's the most sinister of the bunch and I just really liked the figure and thought it was super cool and I want to tell a story about This woodland being who goes through and is part of the unseely court and is sapping the life From the other creatures of the forest But I want to do so through one color. We're going to explore one color monochromatic painting in this case it will be green and Just because we're painting all in green doesn't mean there's not lots of ways we can explore contrast Variance and keeping the piece to a high level of visual interest. So thank you to Scott so much for sending this along and letting me paint it and This is going to be a really fun challenge. So Let's get into it. Let's strict techno man sir. That is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V style All right So we're starting with a nice big selection of greens and some other colors are gonna mix in when you're doing monotone There's two ways you can go first You can get out every green paint you own and every single tone and try to integrate them all Secondly you can start from just sort of one green and then start mixing in other tones like Let's say you want to lighten it or darken it shift it more to the brown tone at its Complementary colors to get a neutral yellow it out. Whatever what I've decided to do here is both So what we're gonna do is we're gonna first get all the colors on the palette I really want to walk you that I don't normally show setting up my palette cuz who cares But in this case I want to show you sort of my thought pattern So I start by taking all these different greens and getting them out there and in fact by the end of this I will add more greens to this this won't be the end of them and So as we get all these greens then we're gonna go ahead and get out all the other colors as well and I want to make sure that there's plenty here to mix into the You know into the the greens so I can go from a very bright color to a very dark color to a Complementary desaturated color all over the place depending on whatever I need We start by of course setting out some skin Progressions this is gonna be my initial pattern Mixing in the whole red to get a deeper color and then into the lighter ones to get even lighter colors and progressively lighter values Now none of these are super interesting But they'll serve our purpose for our initial sketch that we need to do on the skin All right So now it's time to start blocking in some skin and I'm gonna show you most of this through the face Since it's kind of the most expressive area with lots of different volumes on it I'm starting from a very dark dark dark green tone here, and it's gonna look silly at first. Don't worry There are multiple challenges. We're gonna need to cover first I need to understand the light placement and I'm going to do that effectively with the greens and then progressively lighter mixes I'm value sketching over the top of my zenithal because I need to be precise with where I'm gonna place all these tones and then Eventually lay in the other hues. So all my initial work is just about capturing light Nothing more. I'm not too worried about how this is ultimately gonna look or how smooth it is I'm just trying to make sure I understand where all the volumes are what needs to be bright What isn't I did this relatively quickly this only took a few minutes 20 or 30 minutes to sort of sketch out the colors across the whole figure because I was being rough and fast but it was about understanding with a Progression of the greens. I'm gonna use exactly what needs to be bright and what needs to be dark now Why didn't I just rely on the zenithal because the zenithal is not precise enough and I have a specific lighting scheme I want to use here The zenithal helped me as a guide to made the figure easier to read So even though I'm covering it with many layers of opaque paint It still helped me to see the fig to make it more visually accessible as I'm putting these down Once I have my Progressions and sort of the bands of color in place And you can see how rough that is especially down there on the leg and things like that around the eyes and that's fine I don't I don't need it to be smooth right now But once I have this full progression in place and take it even brighter than it needs to be and that's one of the keys When you're gonna work in this sketch style always sketch brighter than you're going to finally aim Because you want to be able to knock things back use glazes bring in other colors Bring in other shades as you mix those other hues and bring other colors into it that will darken it You want to make sure that super bright value shows through Hence why I'm pushing this sketch so far. Now. I never that none of this is pure white This is all just going up to the brightest white ice yellow Or sorry brightest ice yellow light green mix here one of the challenges here with something like this especially with skin is that Skin has a lot of different hues to it lots of different tones We're used to looking at skin and our fellow humans and seeing quite actually a wide array of Desaturated colors regardless of the individual skin tone. There's lots of oranges and purples reds Blues all these types of things occur in skin tone naturally Especially when it interacts with ambient light say you're looking at someone under moonlight versus under artificial light Something like that So what you'll see me do here is play a lot with the skin tone to really try to set those tones Create those subtle transitions and make sure things stay interesting while still all staying in the green spectrum, so Let's keep going Now this next part is going to seem completely insane But I'm effectively using the bone the sort of buff color Which is a slight bit of green into it and placing it off the high highlights because I want to work in a little bit more of that yellow brown white tone that is buff and It's helping me to set some other interference colors This I think is a way that most people don't think about painting of sketching out a value transition in a color and then Adding in these different hues and then bringing it all together at the end But it really does help especially with something like skin. I generally wouldn't do this if I was doing it I don't know like a robe or something because it just doesn't have the level of color variation and Variation of hue that you need to see in skin. I need to make this interesting even though it's all green So as a result, that's why I'm working in now. I've moved up to an even brighter color with more ice yellow mixed in You're gonna see me work some pink into this, you know all these different tones I lean much much heavier onto the like the mix is mostly those non green colors It's just a little bitty bitty tab of green in it And I'm doing that because I want to get those other Colors mixed in to provide that critical tonal variation that makes us recognize something even if it's completely green as skin Then I'm gonna come back in as you see me doing here with a very thin green glaze Now this is my original green mid-tone just turned into a glaze And I'm just gonna glaze over the figure For the most part I'm glazing over everything just very lightly very thin Now you might ask yourself This is a lot of trouble you're doing here Vince is all this worth it Why so much effort on the face on the skin? Face and skin are the areas of the model that people will tend to look at the most So I'm paying a ton of attention to the thing that is gonna catch people's eyes first as humans we are trained to look at faces and We recognize things that don't look right in stuff like skin even when it's an alien color Because we've spent our whole life looking at other human beings shirts Claw you know clothing and stuff like that it can look like a million different things We don't have the same biases and preconceived notions. It doesn't matter what skin color it is We have expectations about how light interacts with it about sheen and about the variation of hue We're gonna see across it as such it's taking them So my my attention is being mostly drawn to that skin and to that Face especially especially doubling down on that but all of it's getting touched And you can see how now what I'm doing is working on a mid-tone mix so it's not quite as green It's my first one. It's got a little bit more of the colors integrated and working those around Now comes a really really important step I take some of that yellow ochre mix with just a little bit of thin green and we're gonna give that a nice little glaze But this time I'm not hitting the highest areas this time I'm pushing around the mid-tones about 60 percent of the model 60 70 percent of the model I want to get that rich yellow tone into the miniature because that yellow tone Again is going to be that feeling of life of warmth We tend to recognize Living beings as having warm tones in them in other humans That's often reds and purples and things like that Browns but with a being like this that has green skin We want to make sure we work in those strong yellow tones Because that will make it feel more alive like it's in sunlight like it's in a real light situation And it's something that's really there and alive and existing So working in that yellow glaze not only hides some of my inconsistent blends, which is hey, that's pretty nice Because it's just another glaze of the top to help smooth things down But it also increases the tonal variation and makes it feel more alive It's a really potent color. By the way, those kinds of yellow glazes those work over basically any color skin tone So that's just a great tip for the future Regardless of what skin tone you're painting and you can see how I work it all the way around the model here again Not covering the whole thing about 60 percent is what I'll lay down and then you'll see me feather it out Into that other area to sort of smooth out the glaze In the parts that are darker. I work a little heavier version of it that way It hints it more because when it's the very dark green or stuff like that It's not really gonna have much of an impact So I need to get in there and get a little bit more aggressive with it be aggressive be aggressive Next up I'm going to start working down some of my shadows These are the light glazes as we've worked through these paints. They've gotten progressively thinner my initial sketches were basically layers my My secondary colors that I was adding were very thin layers now. We're down into very very thin glazes And this is basically whole red with just a touch of the deep green integrated when put Over its complementary color of green it acts as a absolutely wonderful Natural shadow and again working in those red tones makes it feel more alive All right in between shots that I obviously blocked out the rest of the colors because I needed to get an idea of what I was Dealing with here, but all I did is lay down a base tone of the different greens and sort of blocked everything And you can see that's that's what I'm doing here is just turning these belts into that sort of phthalo green I used no blacks and no whites throughout this so These dark brown boots are just complementary colors mixed together to get something near black In fact, let's talk about black. How do we make black when we have no actual black in our palette? Well, here I've mixed phthalo green phthalo green Which has a little bit of just sort of a blue green with a deep hole red and what you get is a wonderful black Approximation there's a little more color and visual interest than normal black using colored Blacks I guess what I would call it like black tones, but they're not they don't actually have any pigment that is black in it They only have actual colored pigment in them hue Is a great trick your dark color your ultimate shadow color is much more visually interesting But it still serves the same function. You can see how now that everything's lined how much cleaner it looks The next way we're gonna create contrast I'm sorry my hand is right in the way the light unfortunately the next way we're gonna make contrast is through texture since I don't have Color hue available to me to make contrast We've got to do other things now Yes, I can still work value light and dark and you saw me doing that a lot with the skin with this rough Cloak robe things she's wearing. I figured it would be scuffed up. She's walking through the woods and it's a leather So I laid down a bunch of just scratchy scratchy dots hashes lines just rough Texture no skill to it just took a thin brush and started chopping at the thing making tiny hashes slashes dashes and dots Then I'm gonna glaze over it with a nice Transparent green you can see a lot of that gets covered up a lot. That's okay We're gonna do that multiple times. We want to create a lot of variants and that small amount creates that visual Confusion that extra noise It helps us balance it out And you notice all my highlights are really rough. I'm not trying to make them smooth on this Even when that the thin yellow green I just used to start creating my highlight over the top of the previous scratches I did Was very very thin and roughly applied Now I just start integrating more yellow white or more yellow bone actually Into the green mixture and again just rough Slashes hashes dashes and dots right that's all it is my highlight here is done completely through texture This is a great trick for something like metal if you have problems with non-metallic metal One of the great tricks is to just highlight it through these kinds of slashes and hashes and stuff You don't need to be smooth. It will look realistic Once again going back to the glazes to smooth it all out and off camera I went in and did more of the hashes and dashes and stuff Again just to pop the final highlight a quick note on the progress for this piece almost everything You see me doing on camera. I repeat again about two or three times off camera So I'm just not gonna record me doing the same thing three times but repeating the same process helps to add to both the smoothness and the density of the translucent paint Texture is also what we're gonna do with the wood now here over this deep brown wood Which I made by just mixing brown and dark green We are going to basically just catch a lot of little lines and striations of like wood texture She has a wood arm and sort of a wood skirt I'm not the one who made her fashion choices, you know, I'm not telling her. Do you want to tell her? And I do that evenly all around the thing to create the texture now to bring the green back into it I'm just gonna lay this green glaze Over everything over the whole shoot and match all that texture that I just did The trick is the deep brown will basically not react to this glaze at all because it's so thin and transparent But the bone color that I use to do the tracing absolutely will The problem is it doesn't respect the light and everything needs to heed the light So once I've done that I go back in this time with a not just the pure bone But with a bone mixed with the green Very thin mix of it and I start creating more sharp lines and Reinforcing the existing lines around the areas that would catch light and with a structure like this I think it can sometimes be confusing for people Don't think of the thing like it's little parts think of it like it's one smooth volume So that arm I'm just thinking of it like a big arm and highlighting it accordingly Now I want to deepen the shadows so I go back in with a second glaze and once again same thing Don't think of it like a little bunch of individual lines. How would you shade the arm? Well, you'd put the shade along the bottom of the surface Okay, well, that's exactly what I do here. It doesn't matter that it's made of a tiny bunch of time tiny little branches We still treat it as one volume This is just me drawing leaf texture on her tiny leaf leggings This is a very hard thing to film. These are extremely tiny little lines Because I'm trying to do the veins of leaves in there But again adding this small amount of texture to a very, you know Small area just helps to set everything apart and always have something to discover when you're looking at the piece Let's talk hair Okay, so she has green hair doesn't matter what color hair is Her hair is dark I laid down that base coat and then effectively gave it kind of a deeper Wash with my original black color you saw me make just to kind of create some deep ridges in there Now as I start highlighting it, you notice the first highlight color I do I'm not just tracing the strands. I lay it down thick and Wide in the area where I want the light to catch and I didn't change paint colors there This is just a second application of the same paint color in the shadow areas of the hair I trace the lines in the main area where it's going to be lit You see how I apply a full thick brush stroke. I want this tone down in the shadows Whereas in the shadow areas this becomes the highlight as We progress up, which is what all this is going to be me just progressively doing lighter and lighter colors I will start making thinner and thinner lines covering less and less and less Not only just Horizontally in the hair but vertically as well. This is the thing people often miss They go up when create the light line of the highlight But where that light sheen that light spot is catching like a Pantene bottle Your mid-tone needs to be the shadow and You can set that when you initially lay down those mid-tones as highlights in the shadow area by tracing the strands You just apply it as full completely covering paint in your highlight areas As you progress up I cover not only less and less width wise in the hair How wide are the highlights? I keep shrinking them But also I keep making them thinner vertically just tracing thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner individual strands making sure that I've captured The the light feeling like it's getting thinner each time right The last thing I do here is just take some of my original green and just kind of glaze it back in place to smooth Everything out some of that phthalo green and as I do this I'm also going to go ahead and reinforce some on the other side I have most the light falling on the left side of her because that was the visually interesting side But I realized I had sort of under highlighted this side. So I just go back and complete the same progression Now comes a real challenging question Most things you can tilt towards the color green like the way I tilted the wood You know her hair or something like that. It doesn't feel a lot of place But when we come to certain things like gold gold simply feels like it should be some color that is gold So as we look to deal with those we have to think about how we don't alter the color itself We still leave the gold having a yellow hue to it But how we integrate that green into the larger color without Overwhelming it and that's really a way that you can express The wholeness of the hue in a monochromatic piece So you can still have those other colors or other elements here and there but you integrate green Maybe it's as a shadow or as a highlight Maybe it's as just a pop color could be things like, you know, you integrate it in through weathering anything like that There's lots of interesting ways to work color into your painting and doing so only makes the piece more visually expressive more compelling and more interesting Green gold, how do we do that? All right, let's talk about the nature of gold Non-metallic metal in general is recognized through its progression of containing lights darks and lights falling in the correct places We would expect them to more than it is by its color Even in the case of gold and as a point of fact although gold doesn't weather or stain or oxidize and so on and so forth It does look different depending on the light. It's in and the ambient Surroundings we have very green light. Assuming that she's in a green forest. She is a green model So my initial tones. I'm laying down as these yellow were all these deep yellow greens And I'm working them to focus again the light on the same area That left side of her face where there's the light of the hair the stronger light on her face And it will also be the stronger light on the gold But I'm still giving all of the bars whatever of this strange necklace attention So I work my way up Progressing through adding more up to bone and then slight touches of the ice yellow But I always have a little touch of that green integrated in The other important thing I want to point out to you here is that I'm heating the edges every time We recognize non-metallic as having sharp edges So I'm always tracing those out keeping those strong as I progress I'm also applying them to the tippy tippy top of it of each bar You see how there's those little light catches right around the top One of the most powerful things you can do in creating non-metallic or just model painting in general is Constantly be alternating light to dark light to dark popping a little highlight at the tops of your Progressions every time you create a dark if you can create a light right next to it do so You see how I have these little white spots at the top of the gold bars of her necklace Because then that makes that visually pop out if I had only pushed all the light toward the bottom Where it would sort of naturally fall It would actually be much less visually interesting. So reinforcing these lights as you see me doing there is really important Finally to reinforce the green I take some of that green that I have That sort of green yellow and I just re-glaze it into the shadows Building up those deep shadows through progressive layers of green Alright, so there she is I think she's looking pretty good even though she's monotone She's all in green. We can do it. You could stop here if you wanted to do something like this But you know what I'm gonna do now. I know this is about monotone painting, but um This is also a series called hobby cheating. So we're gonna cheat and We're gonna add a pop color That's right folks. This suddenly became not just a monotone painting tutorial But also a pop color tutorial and I'm sorry these details are very small And I have about two inches of depth of field zoomed in like this. So here we are We're gonna add magenta as a pop color and talk about pop colors in general The story here is I want to show that she's drawing the magical essence out of this little being and absorbing it into herself So we want to create a color triangle and that's the most important thing when you're adding a shock color to your miniature That's very different. It needs to be balanced. Her triangle is going to be this thing's heart and eyes her inner palm of her left hand and her eyes all glowing the same color to sell the magical Transference I begin by laying down some thick magenta right around the areas Then applying a thinner glaze of magenta in the broader area because we're playing In not truly OSL, but more of a little magical glow So yes, it is playing with a little bit of light and a little bit of OSL But what we really want to do is sell the effect that this area is rife with some kind of magic That's filling the air that she's sapping out of his dead heart So I start adding in a little bit more brighter colors to the magenta just integrating the ice yellow that I had previously used and Building up the progression towards there The reason I glazed the magenta all around the thick application of it was because I want to create that glow So it needs to end in a soft glaze all light casts Need to end in a soft fade of the color. They can't suddenly end light doesn't work like that With hands when you're doing magical hands You need to basically push the light towards the top of each hand muscle and create a sort of sketch of the hand in the palm My next step is to go in with pure ice yellow and just kind of pop out Each area where I want it to be brightest Now we're not gonna actually leave it ice yellow because if we add it to just white it won't sell It won't look like magical energy. It'll just look like it's something super highlighted or reflecting a tiny bit of light But when we do our next step, we have to lay down white first So you can see how here I pick out each of the individual little pads of the hand toward the top As well as the thumb and things like that Now we take some golden high-flow fluorescent pink, which is a wonderful thing to cover over white It has zero covering power on its own. You have to put it over white if you want it to do anything and or you can use it straight and it can just be like your glaze for your fading glow and Putting that over the top of all the white it will so pop and Suddenly we have these small but aligned balanced triangle of bright pink which sells the magical energy transference Of the creature to her and really helps to make the thing feel more green more alive and most importantly more interesting So there we go. She all came together in the end I'm gonna run some pictures here over the top of me talking as I go through this This was a really challenging piece especially the skin tone But once I felt like I got that in the right place I think the rest came together nicely and you saw how we used both slight integrations of other colors to vary the green But also the application So how we used rough textures in some place stippling in some places Smooth textures in other places, right? How much we varied the amount of highlight Making certain areas of the piece feel very flat like it wasn't reflecting a lot of light Like it's wool or cloth and some people some areas in the in the piece feeling much brighter more satiny more reflective of light There's lots of ways to achieve contrast without relying solely on hue And I tried to explore a lot of that to make the various elements of this piece stand apart even though basically She's just a jolly green elf making her way through the woods slowly sucking the life out of other forest creatures for Endless magical power You know just that old chestnut So I hope you enjoyed this if you did give it a like Subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday If you've got any questions drop those down in the comments as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time You