 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about doing textured cloaks. So there are many ways to do this and today we're going to talk about line texturing. This will give you a more satin effect. You could of course do the same thing I'm going to do here with stippling with dots and that would give you a more silken or sort of velvet effect. There's lots of different ways to do this but we're going to talk about a way to make cloaks more interesting. So here I have one of the new chaos warriors in my new scheme and he's getting close to being done but we have to do the lower part of his cloak here. What I've got so far and where you start is I basically establish just a simple gradient with the airbrush. It goes from black to a just slightly lighter gray. That's it. All I want, you don't need a big thing with this, in fact you can do this off of just a mono color scheme so even if you don't have an airbrush and you're just base coating it with a brush, perfectly fine. You can start from a single color but you want to start from the deepest shadow that you're going to have on the area of the miniature you're adding texture to. So our goal in the end is to look something like this. Here's one that already had it happen. You can see how it's got the texture there so when you turn it around the highlights catch the various, hopefully what looks like fabric, the cloth of it. So here's another one. You can see that's actually the same model but there he is, you know, done so this is kind of what we're going to look like. And the goal is you can see we're trying to create the light and the highlights not through just flat applications of the brush like we normally do. You know the normal way we paint treats paint like it's just a uniform thing that goes on like we just apply it flat. I want to make this brighter. I hit this with a lighter area. Painting is a great way to create much more visual interest and separate the various types of material on your miniature. So for example up here on this top part that's more ragged I used more of a stippling when I blended everything together so I was stabbing with the brush right whereas down here we're going to make it more cloth like. So what colors are we going to use today? Well they're already on my palette over here. So I'm going to use a little Orchid Light from Nocturna Fantasy Pro set. Just a very light purple. If you love purples like me this Nocturna purple set is actually really wonderful. And then I've got some Dalla Rowney FW Pains Gray ink that's right here. And then we have a very sharp brush. In this case I'm going to use a size double-ot. You don't have to it's just I happen to have it. It's a good control. And then we have some Flow Improver, okay. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to start by moving my paints all the way and then we're going to start to bring our homeboy back over here. We're going to get some Flow Improver in our brush. We're going to make a little pile of our purple over here and then we're going to work a bunch of Flow Improver into that. Okay so we want it to be nice and thin and controlled. So once we've got that down, we're happy with that, which that should be about right. Okay, I'm going to scoop my palette here slightly so I can keep him more in frame. This is a very difficult thing to paint, sorry about that. On camera, I apologize for the shaking, my chair hit it. Because what we're going to do is we're just going to come in, we want it to be rather intense. We don't want it to be super thin but we want it to be flowing. That's why Flow Improver is our way to go. So we're going to come in and we're going to just start pulling little thin lines just like this. We just take the tip of our brush and we just do tons of little slashes. And if they're not quite perfect, it doesn't really matter. You want to have the Flow Improver because you want these to be little razor thin scratches. I'm going to start from up here, then I'll kind of go over it but this time I'll hit a little bit more. Let's go to the other side. You want these to extend slightly even into shadows. You don't want a hard drop off, okay? Because if you drop off completely, it's going to feel very fake. Like cloth doesn't change like that, it doesn't have light, doesn't hit light like that. It's not a hard reflective surface, it's not metal. There are soft transitions in cloth. So hence we're going to get both sides of a change like this, we'll just push more shadows. Plus when we do this and end the brush in the center, it creates this build-up of light. Okay? So we'll do a little bit up here, highest point for our highlights. You notice how I have my hands locked and I'm just sometimes I'll even miss. That's okay. The goal is to just barely be touching the miniature. Taking just the very tip of this tiny brush and we're just going to do lots and lots and lots of slashes. Now the key with where you place these is in general, just think about it like if you were going to highlight it with a, you know, with a standard technique. If you were going to come in and take your brush and apply some highlights, where would these largely go? Right? Well, they go on this raised area here that is foot's kicking back. It would come out here on the bottom where that light is, maybe a little bit up here because there's like a curve to it, right? Stuff like that. Just think where would my highlights normally go? And then instead of doing just a flat highlight like with the side of your brush, instead you're going to come in and you're going to do a little bit of this sideways streaking. Now sometimes when I see people do this technique, I notice that they don't, they take these lines all the way into the deepest shadows. You actually don't want to do that. You don't want these lines everywhere because what you're trying to capture here is the thread that this cloak is theoretically made of, the thread that this cloak is theoretically made of is catching the light at the highest point, right? So where the light would be reflecting, instead it's catching those individual threads. So with that in mind, why are shadows shadows? Well, they're shadows because they're shadows. See it's amazing circular logic, meaning that there's no reason, there's no light reflecting down in there. As a result, it's not going to catch any light. So we do all our little lines. You notice I'll often make them, they spread as we go down. So like it's thinner at the top and wider at the bottom, again just like my normal highlight would be. Same thing here. We don't want that harsh edge. So we come in from the other side and we get our little lines going that way too. The key is just lots and lots of very, very, very, very, very thin lines, just super thin and lots of light focused on the top. If you really want to pop it up, you can add something like maybe a little white or a little glacier blue. So like for example, I could take, I have a little bit of glacier blue over on my palette off-screen, take some of that. You really want to see ultra high highlight, then you can take some of that and you can come into sort of the middle part of these lower areas where the light would really catch the thread and you can just kind of in the middle there, you just do some real thin, real thin scratches. This is just a long, slow process. You can also place it on one side of a fold, it's just that, and that'll make that side seem a little brighter. So it won't have the biggest effect, but the key is it will punch it up. You don't want, you want these little hashes to be very close to one another. You really, your first instinct when you start doing this is going to be to leave a space between the hashes because you'll think to yourself, well if I don't leave a space, you're not going to know it's hashes. It's going to seem just like a solid piece of paint, but that's not true. The human eye is really good at picking up texture, even when the paint is together. Okay, so there's step one. All right, so now we take some of our purple, we're going to move it over here, get some fresh stuff, get a little flow improver. Great. Okay, then we take a little bit of our blue-black ink, let's just mix some of that in. So now we get this slightly more gray shade. Okay, not a huge jump. We want to be very slight, okay, but you can see their original color, new color. Pretty slight change. Okay, then we come in and right next to our original lines. We do a second set of lines and we overlap our first one just slightly. Now I can hear you out there in TV land, you're like, my God, Vince, why would a human being ever do this? This seems like the least efficient method for highlighting ever. And on one hand, you're not wrong, believe me, I hate myself for doing this to a unit of guys. You know, I made this choice when I started working on the army and now I regret it fully. But that's okay, we're in it to win it. But the reason you would do it, honestly, this is the kind of thing I do more on competition pieces, characters, you know, display models, something that I want to really stand out. Adding these textures helps to break up these large flat areas. If you're a person who's not comfortable with freehand, if you say to yourself, you know, I know I've made a ton of videos where I say, really, actually, look, freehand is pretty simple. You can do it. You just got to get into it. And if you're the type of person who after those videos has just said, you know what, Vince? No. Look, you don't know me, you don't know me. You know, I don't have any talent, any artistic skill like that. I'm not putting together some freehand. The problem is large flat areas of the same color are really boring on your miniature. One of the ways we tackle that is by doing value contrast. So we create blends. But the reality is even that's pretty boring, unless it's doing something really cool and original with the color, unless it's really moving in an interesting way. Also people often, I, you know, have trouble doing those big sweeping blends over large flats. One of the fun things about this is it's actually makes blending super duper, duper easy because I just keep coming over all my edges and that's the trick. All my lines are crossing over the previous line just slightly. So like here on the bottom, I come up and the key is I'm never not covering over my own line. I'm starting and maybe 20% of the new line I draw is over the old line that I already created, right? So it will, if you do this enough, it's actually one of the fun things about texture is it's the cheaters blend. You can be terrible at blending and with stippling and hashing like this, you can get amazing awesome blends. Now it's going to take time, but it'll look better than just a flat blend because it will actually have more visual interest. It's doing more with the eye and it's making the surface much more interesting. And as a result, we'll like it better. People's eyes go, haha, I see what you've done there. I enjoy that. I am a happy eyeball and that's what we want, right? We all want happy eyeballs. So now guess what we do? We take a little bit of that. We repeat. This isn't really a magical process. It's pretty much the same thing. So now I'm slightly darker. And then in between that, guess what the next step is? If you guessed drawing thousands of tiny little lines with light brushstrokes repeatedly, I'll give yourself a no prize. You are correct. That's what this is. Now one of the fun things about this is it's really hard to screw up. The reality is you can just keep doing it over and over and over and over again. If you make a mistake, if you jump too far, if you make too much of a, you know, like if it's too stark, cool, just go remix a new color and guess what? Put some new lines right in between the two lines you already did. Easy peasy. It's really not hard. Like because you're not trying to make these big moves, but instead you're just working in these tiny increments, it effectively makes it a technique that's almost impossible to actually screw up, which is awesome. It's a great trick for those people who want to create visual interest, but don't really want to, but find, you know, blending with acrylic paints, since they're naturally bad at blending, who find that challenging. So it's just a great way to go about small turn things. Like I said, it really does add a cool interest to your miniature. Here I'm doing it with these colors because I'm working over black. I'll talk for a minute about your color selection. Your colors, as I said, the base of your cloak should, or whatever you're working on. You can do this, by the way, I'm saying cloaks, but like that's just the most common place you're going to do something like this. You could do this with pants or shirts or, you know, any kind of cloth fabric. Okay. All right, let's mix one more, just a little bit darker and just hit a few of those center areas and then we're pretty much going to be good. So one of the, if I was working in alternate colors, if I was working in, say, let's say I had a red cloak, I would do this whole thing in various shades of brighter red and then actually white at the highest part. And then you'll see how we'd bring it all together at the end because I'm going to do the same thing here. If I were working in blues, I would just use lighter blues. If I were working in greens, I would just use, you know, lighter greens and then up to yellow or flesh tones or something like that. I wouldn't probably use white at the highest. Here I wanted these cloaks to have like a somewhat purple sheen to them. I think a light purple, if you're working in black, either a light purple or a light blue just makes for a really nice sheen on a cloak. It's much, much, much more interesting than white. It's much softer. It blends easier. Like in general, white is just a very visually uninteresting color and doesn't really do a lot for you. Excuse me. Okay. Now we've got all our little hashes on. Sorry. Okay. Let's see if we can zoom in a little there and really get that. I mean, this is teeny tiny of a work. Nope. We're at maximum. Okay. That's fine. So that's what you got. All right. Now comes the magic of how we bring it all together. Before I do that step, I'll take one more moment to reflect here. You can keep doing this. Like if you want to keep popping up some of these things, you can come in here and grab a little more purple, maybe a little bit of that brighter color that I had. You know, I could like reinforce and go over, creating multiple layers back and forth. Like if this were a competition piece, I would do all of these hashes about three times. Okay. So I would go in, I would do the lightest color, then I would hash over it with the second color again, then the third color again, then the fourth color again and then I would just repeat all of that. So if it were for competition, that's what I would be doing. And the reason because each hash is close, but it's not right up against each other. So when each time you're covering those previous layers, one paint is transparent, or translucent, sorry. And so it's showing a little bit of the previous version through. And two, every time you're overlapping just slightly, you're getting slightly softer tonal changes out of there. Each time is creating a little bit more visual interest. So when I've done this on like competition capes and stuff before, you know, Primaris captains and things like that, I'll just sit here and do this for hours. Where I'll just literally do all the lines and then do it again, then do it again. And each time slowly working those little lines until it's just this like little perfect cornucopia of tiny hashes. Okay. So but in this case, we're not doing that. We're doing an army. Gosh darn it. And if I'm going to get these slaves darkness on the table before the new book comes out in, you know, 2029 or whatever, then I better have, I better have some finished units. So let's talk about what we do now. So we've got all our little hashes. Now we're going to grab a bigger brush. So I'm going to move from a two ought to a straight two. And with my big size two brush, I'm going to just take some of that blue black ink that I've got over here. I'm going to turn it into a blade. So let me bring this back on camera. You can see I'm just wicking it off over here. Let's see if we're in the right place. Test it on the back of your hand. Yep. Seems good. Let's grab just a little bit of flow improver because we really want that to move. We want that to flow down in the crevices as you'll see in just a moment. Okay. Now let's move the palette back. Now we start in the deepest shadow with our brush and we just do a light glaze up. Now I'm not going to glaze every bit of the cloak. Instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus the point of the brush toward the deep recesses. So that's where the paint is gathering. Then I'm going to rinse the brush. You need to lick the paint or whatever or just rinse it off like I did there. Then I'm just going to take that and just feather it out nice and lightly. Push that around. Make sure we've got a nice even application of that glaze. By putting that colored ink over there, now in this case I'm using like the Dollar Rowney ink. If you don't have that, it's no problem. You could still certainly do this. You can do this with just black paint. You don't need this special ink. There's nothing magic about it. I just like the way the tone works when you put a little bit of a slight blue-black color over this purple. I enjoy that. You can do whatever you want. Straight black will still produce an awesome effect, okay? Nothing magical about this particular paint. We're always keeping the tip of the thing toward the area where we want the darkest shadow because that's where the, when you're working with a glaze, that's the part of it that carries the most pigment. We always pull toward the shadows. If I'm ever pulling a color, I'm always pulling toward the shadow. Okay? And there you go. That's it. That's really all there is to it. Then you can stop there. Now, one fun thing you can do, as I mentioned, if you had like a red cloak, right? I would have done the high parts in white. I would have glazed the whole thing with red a few times just to snap it all together. You can do multiple applications of these glazes. If your lines are a little thicker, if you're not quite as practiced and your lines end up a little thicker, a couple glazes will bring it together. But that's really all the secret there is. It's a very nice technique. It's, you know, I'm not going to call it fast, but it's not the most painful thing in the world. It's a great way to make fabric and these big open spaces look way more visually compelling than they would if it was just some normal highlighted thing with nothing else going on. In my mind, to be completely honest, this was so much easier than trying to do this with a brush. Now, that is to say, like, I mean, applying normal highlights, like I came in with some gray and traced it and then smooth and smooth and smooth. That just, it takes forever, especially when you're working with like black to white. It's going to be a very frustrating blend because you're dealing with on one half very transparent colors and on the other half very opaque colors. They're always difficult to blend together. Whereas with a technique like this, it's fun. You know, you can just get into the zen of it. You just focus in and you start doing your happy little hashes. Think of this like the sand garden of miniature painting. You're not, you know, you're just pushing that sand around, just making these beautiful lines in the sand. Just lines in the sand over and over again. And it is relaxing after a little while, I promise if you think about it like that. But there you go. Gives you a nice look of cloth that has a texture that's catching that light where the highlights are. Keys, a simple gradient of paint that doesn't change a lot between steps. Ultra thin hashes with a very sharp brush, hence flow improver is quite valuable. Your lines do not go all the way into the shadows. The deepest shadows should not have any texture in them because there is no light in there or, you know, a minimal enough, there's not no light in there. There's some light. You can see the thing. But there's very little light in there. And as a result, you, you're not going, it's not going to be reflecting the texture. Okay. So there you go. That's how you do textured cloth, specifically in this time we're talking about something like satin. As I said, if you wanted to do it with, to have it look more silken or crushed or something like that velvet, you would just do dots instead. An even longer process, but still just as doable. So there you go. That's how you do that. I hope you liked it. If you did, hey, give it a like, uh, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you have questions, drop those down in the comments. I'm always happy to see that and I always answer every comment. Uh, if you have suggestions for future videos, feel free to drop those down below. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time.