 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about dark elf or drow skin If you're a fan of D&D like me I've been playing D&D now for more than 30 years Then you probably have a love or maybe a hate of one dritz dewarden or some other of the drow characters We've been introduced to throughout those novels over the years Dark elf or drow skin is really interesting because it's sort of this dark color It often gets rendered in lots of different tones from grays to purples to very deep magentas and sometimes blues Now the method i'm going to show you today is certainly not the only method for rendering This type of skin, but it's one that I think produces some of the most visually compelling results And I think looks pretty darn cool. So Let's get into it Let's strict techno mansor that is vincey vief. Let us get to the technique and learn it vincey vief style I say it all the time, but I really mean it here Uh, you don't need these exact paints the paint list here is the paints I happen to pick the keys to this kind of paint job are a black a deep purple A light purple or purple blue and then a couple of mid-tone grays That's it. Use whatever range you like. It's fine Uh, in this case, I won't always scroll the paints up top because I just used them in a lot of combinations as I was working my way and feeling my way through this So I apologize, but I have no idea exactly what I'm using at any given point in time But what we're going to do to begin here is Really work up layers and I'm starting very soft Because I want to work with a controlled light pattern over this muscle over these muscles So we're just using a standard layering technique and as I'm going I'm taking the black purple And I'm integrating in a mid-tone gray Now let's talk about muscle structure As I'm doing these layers our standard rules apply we cover more than we think we need to Because we're going to have to put a lot of layers on here So we're always covering more than we think we need to don't push only toward the top of the muscles The next thing I'll say is you connect the muscles where they're facing up toward the light Notice I'm not highlighting each muscle structure Individually I'm not making little muscle islands And no I don't just mean a really fun place to hang out on the weekend I mean when you just push the light toward the center of each muscle we don't want to do that As we're building this drow skin tone I'm going to try to place him underground so I want a cold Bright Highlight, but I want it to be very directional coming in from his left side And where the light hits it's going to set his skin and make it quite bright Because it's this bright cold light whatever he happens to be near underground The other thing I'm going to do as I'm working is I'm going to over highlight everything So you'll see me take this to a pretty high layer And that's because I really want to understand and set those lights accordingly Don't ever be afraid when you're trying to understand your contrast to go too far Over highlighting is the least A bad problem you can ever have if you notice you've taken too many steps up You can always wheel it back with some very soft glazes But then you still have that great range of contrast in there And it will only help you smooth all of your blends As I work toward brighter and brighter highlights I now cover less and less of each muscle You'll notice here as well as I'm getting strongly into the midtones I've brought in a pink tone Now I've brought in the pink tone because I've decided that's going to be my interference color If I just went purple to gray it would be boring Skin tones have lots of different colors in them That's what makes our eyes recognize them as skin They often have lots of browns purples Ochres blues And here to keep this character visually interesting We're integrating some of that pink and some of the high purple tones are going to have some very light blues Or cold whites which will feel blue So that way we go from cold through a slightly Middish pink middle tone down into a warm purple black shadow And by running that entire gamut We create something that's visually compelling and interesting Now as I get to the very top highlights That's where I'll start doing the individual muscle groups But only at the highest highest highest highlight And that's because I want there to be connective Light between the muscles We don't have our deepest shadow ringing every muscle The shadow of the upward facing angles of a muscle Is basically a slightly darker color than your highlight or at worst a mid tone One of the things about working in this particular color palette that I'm working in Namely these purples to light cold grays As I've said this is trying to capture the Like a cold almost underground light an artificial Cool light source is that these colors don't blend very well They show your blend lines really really easily So a lot of the work we're going to do here is going to be through things like glazing And that's because in the end we have to bring these very Tricky colors that want to show the layer lines All together and we can do that through glazing the darker tones Because the darker tones glaze easier than the brighter light grays Which will naturally show the transitions in a pretty ugly way So even though this looks kind of ugly right now Don't worry as we continue to move forward. We're going to refine this all and bring it together Speaking of bringing it together as I said, yes, it's in fact time to get out our old friend glazes Now here my glaze is a red violet. This is actually the the golden So flat red violet. I do know that And you'll notice I'm being pretty heavy-handed with this glaze Running from very near the highlight all the way down and in fact on the lower muscle structures I'll even run over the highlight. I work with several different Thinnesses opacity levels of the red violet throughout this And you're going to see me continually work back and forth back and forth I'll admit that this guy's skin was actually really challenging Because of the nature of the Extreme gamut of light. I'm trying to run here trying to run value from A near white that is to say the glacier blue as my highlight All the way down to a near black this sort of purple rubber black That's such a massive transition on the skin Getting everything properly balanced was really challenging and took a lot of back and forth work What you saw me using here is Readjusting those individual colors. What I noticed was that despite everything I said There was still too much sort of of the deepest shadow The deepest tone Hiding on too many muscles that were too highly exposed to the light So what i'm doing is taking a lot of my mid-tone working those up and then Retoning refiltering all of the color that you see and then glazing back over it again Now the advantage to doing this work On skin of doing all of this back and forth You know you highlight up you adjust you adjust you tone you glaze one direction You glaze the other direction over top and then back and forth Is that it makes skin look very natural Because skin has a lot of very subtle color transitions. So I earlier mentioned it has a lot of colors in it It also has a lot of very subtle soft smooth transitions If you're not dealing with sort of older skin that might have liver spots or something like that Then most of the color changes that are happening on skin are happening in a very subtle soft and smooth way And repeated glazes over the surface going in both directions Can really help you sell that effect So now we're going to go into super speed I wanted to actually find a way to put the footage of all of my futzing work in here So I tried this and just recording it. It seemed like it works Okay, as people have asked to see more of you know the specific painting So this is at this is 30 minutes of work in 50 seconds. So there you go But you can see how I'm working back and forth pushing up glazing down glazing in the middle And what I'm doing is just getting making sure that all of my tones are exactly where I want them The light is placed where I want it making little minor adjustments One of the keys when working on a display miniature like this Is you work from the largest to the smallest So I started on those big volumes the overall shape of the miniature the whole Run from light up top to dark at the bottom And as I focus in here in futs, I'm focusing on smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller details Case in point here. I'm using a thinned Carrie and Berg crimson the citadel wash, but I'm not using it as a wash I'm using it as a very slight filter to again add in just a little bit of crimson red color Back into the mid tones of the skin And I'm doing that because red is the color of life And so having even a slight red tone on our skin just subconsciously makes it feel alive adds more visual pop and makes it more interesting Now as a final step, this is a drow. So I need to darken this all down just slightly But we're not going to get out big paint. We're not going to do a normal glaze. That's right. It's an airbrush glaze This late in the game. We're getting out the airbrush. Your airbrush is an amazing tool for doing these kinds of environmental shadows Here I have some Payne's gray thinned way down one drop of thinner to Uh eight drops or sorry one drop of paint ink to eight drops of thinner And I'm just doing a couple thin passes. You notice my angle. I'm rocked way back I'm almost operating a 90 degree angle to the miniature just almost completely perpendicular to it And just shooting up at those shadows catching those muscles and this is so so so thin That it just applies the lightest natural shadow over everything My final step here is to glaze in the opposite direction So here I've taken a little bit of the glacier blue make sure the tiny amount of that brain-eater azure And I'm just glazing that up to the highlights smoothing that out If maybe a little bit of that shadow fell whereas it wasn't supposed to This is sort of my final smoothing step Now as a point of fact, I did go back after you're going to see my final work here And I did futz with this a little more There's always more futzing than what I can capture on camera just tiny little blends here and there But this is really the last sort of major step where I'm addressing all of the volumes I didn't focus on the face in this one because he has a really hard face to paint on camera between his hair hanging down on the knife in the way But I spent a lot of time fixing the face as it's way over highlighted here But there you go You can see how this back and forth work helped us to get a smooth realistic drow skin So there you go. He's all finished. I'm going to go ahead and run some pictures of him over the top as I'm talking here at the end I'm pretty excited about how this guy came out He looks like a killer in the under dark ready just stalking through tunnels after his prey I really like how the light seems to fall on him. I think that was a success here Obviously as I said at the beginning you could utilize lots of different color palettes here So please don't think that these exact paints are the only things that you could use The important part to remember is to have hues of some kind in there You could push this much more into the blue spectrum You could push it much more into the magenta spectrum You could even gray it out some and have it more charcoal-y All of those would be fine But using real hues things that are on the color wheel as opposed to just trying to make the skin a dark Sort of volcanic glass color or something like that Just isn't going to carry the same visual impact or interest The other thing to remember is that as we did here with lighting light often has a big impact on What colors the skin is reflecting and so think about how your light is going to play across your figure No matter what scale they're in there's always a story to be told So with that I'll say thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate you doing so I hope this was informative if you've got questions about maybe other recipes color combinations or anything I didn't answer drop that down in the comments below. I always answer every comment and question But I thank you so much for watching this one and as always we'll see you next time