 Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style. Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. And this one's a little different. I'm starting talking to you all because today's story is about failure and how to push through. And I think this is really important. I think the perception of painters, especially once they achieve, I don't know, some level of skill, is that they don't fail anymore. That you simply know how to do a thing and we just go from starting to done, and oh, it's so perfect. And look at how easy all of this was. Because all of you really see just the end product. You don't see what happens, all the futzing and failing that happens in between. And it's hard for us to admit failures, any of us, all human beings. So recently, I decided I wanted to build this guy. And more importantly, I decided I wanted to do him for Golden Demon. So the skill level is pushed very high. This is a competition piece. And the video you're about to watch is me failing at one of the most critical elements on this guy, the skin. But then how I pushed through it and managed to redeem the piece and get it to somewhere I was really, really happy with. So what I want you to take away from this video more than anything is two thoughts. First, everybody fails. You shouldn't feel bad when you fail. It's okay. It's going to happen. You need to accept it's going to happen. And you need to learn from it. And two, that you can push through. You can still redeem jobs. You can just keep painting and you can get to a place that's good. You don't have to strip everything. You don't have to be frustrated. You don't have to start over. You just keep painting. You work through those happy little accidents and you get yourself to a good piece. So with that little introduction out of the way, let's get over and take a look at Cragnos, The End of Empires. All right. So we begin with a pretty basic Xenothold model. And right away, I'm making a wrong choice. So I'm starting by, these are oil paints, and I'm laying down a nice dark shadow color. What I'm using here is some shadow brown from Optalung 502 combined with Phthalo Blue. And this is a dumb choice because Phthalo Blue, I forgot how strong it is. In addition, I'm also using the Winton Oil Colors Artist Magenta, which I forgot how purple it was, which is also very strong and potent of a color. And so as I'm establishing these shadows, I'm using two extremely heavy blue colors that are really, really, really strong and intense. And my thought for him originally was I want him to have quite pink, cold kind of skin tone. We'll see how that looks to get him nice and pale. Then I'm building up into sort of more traditional flesh tone. So I used a pink flesh and then a light flesh and a basic flesh and all of that. As usual with oil paints, this looks very ugly. If you want to see how to paint with oil paints, you can watch the video linked up in the top right, right now. You can see you just placed some very thick paint on there, establishing the various values and colors. And then the goal, of course, at the end, is to bring this all together. I'm just working my way up to these very, very light colors, getting into the very light flesh, which is effectively a near white color. And at this point, I'm not yet aware of the train that is speeding toward me down the tracks because I simply forgot how my tools work, apparently. And that happens to all of us sometimes, and it's okay. So with all of these basic paints applied, just making sure we have all the nice highlights in the areas, you can see I laid in some more of a mix of some of the pink flesh there to kind of smooth things out and get more of the high highlights on really pushing up how much of the neutral flesh tones are on there. Now it's time to draw it all together. So I grabbed my blending brush, which is a nice big fat, like this is a size 10 brush, it's dry, it's never touched white spirits, and I'm just working all the paints together. And this is where we go wrong and where we're going to start to talk about the failure. What I failed to account for was just how strong the phthalo blue and the magento were going to influence this whole color scheme. Because my other colors were so neutral, were so basically not adding any tone to it, anytime I get any part of that dark phthalo blue or magenta into anything else, it immediately turns everything purple. And that is not the scheme I was going for on this guy. I did not want him to look dead. But as you can see, as I'm bringing this together, I mean, first of all, it's so much fun to blend oil paints. Let's just take a moment to acknowledge that using a big blending brush and bringing together all your oil paints into a smooth blend is one of the greatest things you can do in painting. It's so much fun and relaxing. But the final tone that I achieve here is not at all what I was going for. And it's not going to look good on this guy. And as I continue to blend it out, it just becomes this purple, dead nightmare. So here's how he looked after he was all blended out. Basically, he looks like a corpse. This isn't what I wanted. And I just, it's not going to sell on this guy. I looked it and thought, I don't know what I can do with this. And the paint is still very wet because it's oil paint. It's going to take a good day to dry. And so I said, Okay, this is a failure. I did this all wrong. Now let's start fixing it. So the first thing I did is I stuck with the oil paints. I just kept working. I grabbed more of my neutral flesh tones. I grabbed a couple more red and red brown tones and said, All right, we're going to work this out. So I started by applying new highlights over the top to reintroduce more of the neutral colors I wanted. Now I'm using more of a straight red, not a magenta, but a straight red oil paint. And I'm just creating a little line around all those things to add more warmth into the shadows, kill out that blue by bringing in more red. Okay. And so I just worked that down as a layer, basically just laying more wet paint over top of wet paint. Because these are oils, you can do just that. You can just keep working. If these were acrylics, I couldn't keep working over the top in the same way and have them blend into the layers below, but I could keep working. I could just keep adding paint over the top. And in fact, you'll see when we get there. Now we go back to the blending brush and between the reds and the flesh tones. Now we have something that looks a little more alive. You can see how as I start bringing all those colors together, the red is influencing the more neutral flesh tone that I got out here and reapplied. But a fun thing happens. This is where we have a happy little accident. Those blues and heavy purples, I still kind of keep some of them in the shadows. And they still kind of influence some of the shadows. So they end up looking like cold blue shadows or the blood, the colors that sit underneath skin, the veins and stuff like that. Then I apply more. I like where we're going now. We're getting somewhere. We're moving positive. Different blending brush, but I take more of that neutral flesh tone, apply it on top, and now I'm just smoothing it into the other layers of paint. But you can really see the difference between his torso and everything else. And after all of that re-blending, here's where I got to. Good. Somewhere, but still a little too neutral. I had to apply so much neutral colored paint, so much traditional Caucasian flesh tone that I accidentally then made him boring. So failure number two. We went too far in trying to counter out the purple because I had to get a lot of counter colors on there. Now we got to balance it back out. So we're going to get out the airbrush and we're going to glaze tones back in. This is a little thinned down Rykland flesh shade. Just kind of spraying it in there, starting to lay down some colors. This is acrylics over the top of the oils. This is after the oils have dried. This is more than 24 hours later. And then the model was varnished with a matte varnish just to make sure that all the acrylic paints are going to stick. Not for any other reason, just because it helps the matte varnish helps the acrylic paints adhere. So now I'm grabbing brown tones and red tones. And what I'm doing is laying those into the shadows. I used so much neutral highlight to bring it up that now it's more about creating that tonal variation across the skin. So I have this very thin. The Rykland flesh shade itself, which is already very thin, was thinned one to one with thinner. These inks are thinned six or eight to one with thinner. And I use both red earth from Daller Rowney and burnt umber from Daller Rowney to get more red and red brown tones into the skin. And I just keep working thin glaze after thin glaze all around the model over and over again. You can glaze so fast and so smooth and so effectively with an airbrush. You don't have to worry about it pooling or anything like that. And now you can see we're getting into some much, much nicer skin tones. But I want to bring those highlights up as well. So here I've loaded up some very bright flesh. This is Harvester Flesh from Scale 75. It's a very bright pink flesh. And I'm just hitting those high highlight areas, re-carving them out, making sure that all those super bright areas that I wanted on the model are really accentuated. Again, so quick and easy on a model like this to work up those high highlights. So now a little more of the same thing. I added in just a drop of white into my mix to get even a little more brightness. Again, just slowly working up those highlights. Remember, this is a competition piece. So we've got to go all the way. If this was for me and my personal collection, something that wasn't for competition, I probably wouldn't go this far. But when you're doing a competition piece, you keep working through the failure until you get to something good. So now that I have that nice and highlighted, I go back to Burt Umber, Inc. and we're going to reintroduce some brown tones back and forth and back and forth. And even though I failed twice, first making him look like a dead zombie with all this purple gray ugly flesh. And then secondly, because I pushed too much neutral tone in and made him look basically flat like he's a Kendall. That's okay. We just kept painting. And you can see how with the Burnt Umber, I have this down. This is an eight to one ratio. So eight thinner to one drop of ink. And when you apply like that, you have to use very little air, very little pressure, light touches. You can see how I'm using the airbrush almost like a paint brush, pushing it in, pushing it in, pushing it in, very light touches, just barely rocking the trigger back. And I'm just getting these super light filters over the skin, adding this tonal variation and this visual interest into the piece, right? Doing the same thing on his face, all the areas I can see there. Now you'll notice at some point here, I did paint a base coat down on things like the armor pieces and his hair. And I did that because to judge the final skin, I need all the elements that are touching that skin, not to still be in that neutral gray white that was my primer. I need to understand how the skin is going to look, contrasted against these other elements that are on the piece. So now it's time to get into the brushwork. Yes, finally, we're doing normal acrylic brushwork. And here I'm taking very light flesh. Again, this is harvester flesh mixed with a little bit of ice yellow. And I'm just laying it in there as a nice soft glaze, making sure that those highest highlights and things are well picked out, the muscle structures well defined. I'm doing things like going to the scars. He has a lot of like veins and scars. He's clearly, you know, this ultra muscular combatant. And so I'm making sure that all those little areas are picked out and stand apart from the rest of the tone, really popping them up another level. Now we're going to bring those back down in a moment as I continue to refine. And the other thing I want to say here is that as I worked on this model, I kept going from the very broad into the details. I started with that huge blend across all of the flesh and I didn't like it. It was awful. But I worked it through and got to an overall flesh tone that I thought was a good base. Then the real work begins. And so going in and getting like the detail on his face, you know, making sure that that has lots of each little detail picked out. All the different soft blends and highlights of the folds and the ridges in his face need to be still the center of attention, right? So we have to go in and do that nice, tight work. By working this from very broad like that into the specific, I was able to slowly draw the whole thing together into something that I liked. Here I'm taking again a thinned down Rykland flesh shade and I'm using the brush because the airbrush isn't a perfect, precise tool. And I'm using that to again, just introduce some extremely soft tones, lots of touches like this back and forth, making sure that I'm getting to where I want to be turning that failure into, well, hopefully success if we keep working. Now one of the last things I'm going to do here is I'm going to go ahead and take things like those scars and all of that and pick those out with a little bit of ink. And finally I want to go ahead and add in a nice soft red tone. And that red filter is going to finally make him feel completely alive. Again, this is thinned down now, but this magenta ink from Daler Rowney is already very transparent. So this is then six to one and I'm working in extremely thin filters, covering the area over not the whole space, just doing light glazes off the highlights of the muscles to add in that red tone that makes him feel so alive. And finally we get to somewhere that I really like. So there you go, you can see he's all done. And I really like how he came out. Uh, I'm going to show you some beauty shots here in a minute. We'll do all the pictures, the model. Now this is going to be without the copper parts finished, because if you want to know how I did all the vertigris and everything, come back next week, because next week we're doing a deep dive on bronze vertigris. Really excited about that one. So thank you all so much for watching. Enjoy these pictures of the skin, now redeemed post failure. And come back next week for the last part of it, which is all the metal, the oxidation. And as always, I thank you for watching. Hit that like if you haven't already, subscribe to join us on your hobby journey. See you next time.