 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about universal shadow colors. So sometime back we had talked about universal highlight colors with our friend Sunny Skin Tone there, but this week we're going to talk about universal shadow colors. And much like with Sunny Skin Tone or a bright Caucasian flesh tone, you can highlight any color with that. And today we're going to show you how you can shade any color with one color. I think it's an often times a habit that people will just go to a darker version of an existing color, but that makes your fig less interesting. So today we're going to talk about colors you can use to shade anything in the same way that Sunny Skin Tone is nice and bright and warm. And we can use that as a nice warm highlight color for any of our existing hues, right? Because it has this feeling of being out in the sun in a warm day, which is where we tend to put most of our figures. We tend to show them, especially our army stuff outside, right? So they tend to be out in the bright sun in warm light. That means that you have cold shadows. A nice simple rule of thumb is if you've got a warm highlight, you've got a cold shadow. That leads us to Payne's Gray. Now this is Daler Rowney. This is FW Ink. Payne's Gray. I consider it one of the best investments you can make in the hobby. And that will give you a nice universal cold shadow. There are other options. Here I've got a nice Ellendil Violet, as well as a Gothic Crimson. Violet is a nice deep purple color. Deep purples can also work, so if you like that feeling a little better, it'll be a little bit of a warmer shadow, but it can still work. And it will work with basically any color in the color wheel, any hue. You can use a nice deep violet for it, as long as it's deep enough. You may need to mix just a little bit of black into it. Something like Gothic Crimson here from Reaper. This is a great super deep red. There is a little bit of blue in here, obviously that's the Crimson influence. But it also works well as a warm shadow color. I'm just going through these to show you that you've got options. The trick with warm shadows is those tend to work better if you have figs with cold highlights. If you have people in icy settings or something like that. But today we're going to focus on Payne's Gray. And here I've got the shields from the previous time when we did our Universal Highlights and we've got a couple new ones. And we're just going to go through and we're going to take a look at how we can shade everything out. So let's get a little bit of that Payne's Gray. I've got one of all of my primaries over on a palette, nothing too crazy, just a red and orange, a yellow, green, blue, and purple. These are all from Chimera, same thing. I'm going to start by just setting some of the normal color here. So this is just straight red. And when we lay down that nice straight red, you see that Chimera red really has a wonderful bright, intense, highly pigmented sheen. So it's great. If we work in a little bit of the Payne's Gray, then what we can get, because the blue hits the red, it's going to make a sort of natural purple, a natural shadow color. What's great about Payne's Gray is because it has a little bit of blue and a little bit of black, and it's quite dark, it ends up being this wonderful, desaturated shadow color. And you can see how that just forms a wonderfully natural shadow. Payne's Gray is really amazing because one of the challenges I've always had in doing natural-looking shadows is trying to figure out what is that shadow actually doing? What is it actually? You look at like skin in shadow or something like that, and like what color is that? Well, usually it's that tone with a little bit of blue and black infused in. So here with orange, and again it's going to work great with orange because orange is going to hit the blue part, the blue being complementary. It's going to create a nice natural shadow to it. So there you can see I worked just a little bit in, and we get a really soft subtle shadow, but I can also go stronger, right? So in all of these cases you might be asking, Vince, what's the ratio you're mixing at? Well, I'm not really mixing in any particular ratio. As usual, I don't rely on recipes, but I will tell you that it's probably two or three to one of the paint to the paint's gray. But I'll warn you in advance that's going to vary highly. In this case, because Chimera is so highly pigmented, I'm able to not use much of the ink. That is to say I can go like three to one. If I had a very weak color, like if I was using something from Citadel, I might need to go to something like five or six drops of the paint to one drop of the paint's gray. So here we do the same thing with green. Works really well, nice and easy, nice dark green shadow. That one's just a slam dunk infusing a deep blue black into green. It's just an easy cold shadow, same with the blue and the purple. So once again, and here, actually, what we're going to do is we're going to kind of flip the script just a little bit so we can really see these colors. Because as it is now, I'm just placing the base colors down because the these two colors are very naturally transparent, purple and blue. So they show the under shade really strongly. So to really show just the strong shadow, we're going to invert it here on this one. I'm going to turn the lit part that I had, you know, sort of zenith old. We're going to turn that into the shadow just because that will really help actually show the effect. If I work dark on dark, it's going to be very hard for you to notice the shadow difference. So instead, let's go ahead and set down both tones, a little purple, a little blue, OK. And the trick with them is that they are you can see how they are so translucent. They're letting a lot of that initial color underneath through, right? And that's going to be great for showing off our shadow. So now let's take a little bit of the Pains Gray, which, remember, is a dark blue black and mix into the blue. It shouldn't be too surprising to know that, yeah, this one is a slam dunk. This one's easy, right? Very easy shadow. You see, I went quite heavy there and then that's OK. I can feather out that edge and we're good to go. The trick with Pains Gray is that on blue, what you're mostly going to see is the black because the blue itself is already being covered by the shade underneath. So it will feel a lot more black when you put it over blue. Same with purple, actually, because anything that has that that strong blue component in it, like the violet here, you're going to feel like that black is a lot stronger. OK. Whereas if you look at a color like orange or red, the blue will come out a little stronger and you'll get a bit more of a purplish tone. Pains Gray is really a great universal shadow color. It can be used on all your your normal hues. Now, I hear what you're saying, fancy skip yellow. I did that intentionally because I wanted to show you the main tones. Yellow is a little bit trickier. You can certainly do it. We'll show you in a moment. If you don't have Pains Gray ink, you can use something like Secret Weapon Tire Black here or there is a color called Abyssal Blue from Scale 75 that's very similar. Or you can just take a very deep blue color and mix it with a dark black to get this kind of an effect. But I think the ink is worth the investment for most people. If you buy a bottle, it will last you basically your whole life. But I use it in more or less every project. It's an easy universal shadow color. It really makes your shadows feel naturalistic. That's the advantage. When you're working with something like oranges or reds or, you know, I didn't do it here, but skin tone, it can often be hard to get natural feeling shadows. But that Pains Gray just feels like a shadow. And here you can see how the blue and the yellow really comes out. Like I'm just using a little bit of it. This is mixed at like one to eight or something. And but you can see how we get this wonderful natural shadow. It just looks like that yellow is literally put out of the light. And that's what you get. So there you go. That's universal shadow colors. If you like that, give it a like. Subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, drop them down below. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time. Thank you very much, everybody.