 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and you know what blending? It kind of sucks. It's hard. It takes time and frankly it's often not very fun. And blending is only a challenge because we've sort of chosen in miniatures to make acrylic paints our home. Acrylic paints are great because they're durable and they dry quickly. And they're rough for blending because they're durable and they dry quickly. So today we're going to talk about a different way to blend that doesn't actually rely on blending at all. Instead, we're going to use the nature of acrylic paint and brush strokes in our favor. We're going to figure out why we like these brush strokes, why these brush strokes are good versus the bad brush strokes we see when we first start painting. We're going to use lots of simple, easy, repetitive motions and we're going to get something that looks awesome and grimdark and worn and tattered. So what I'm painting here is one of the mages from Kerr City. I've replaced his face with a skull so now apparently he's the guy from the cover of Led Zeppelin. And exactly the paints I'm using don't really matter. But I started with a whole red and this rest of this video is just me integrating deck tan into the whole red. That's it. There's basically two paints other than a late glaze of some black you'll see. But all I am doing in this video is creating texture. Instead of trying to blend and create layers, I am just creating lots and lots of tiny sharp thin lines. So I have my paint flowing well, a little bit of flow improver, but other than that it's just water and a sharp brush. And I am just repeatedly creating lines in the areas of my highlights. So instead of trying to layer those areas or glaze them up and take forever or whatever, I'm using relatively thick paint. It's still certainly a strong layer consistency and a very sharp brush and I'm just drawing these lines. Now for the most part, I'm covering less and less each time. But not completely. I'm covering randomly less. So every so often you'll notice my brush will kind of jump and go a little higher. That's not a mistake, that's intentional. And that's because texture when we pin it to the highlights, individual threads might be stuck up a little more. The roughness of what we're doing will look more organic and natural and random if it's not a perfect series of sequentially smaller thin lines. Things don't wear evenly. And so by making it more spiky and irregular, it actually not only helps it to blend, but it creates visual confusion and makes it look more natural and realistic all at the same time. Now you might ask yourself, Vince, why are we focusing on the highlights? Why are you only moving up in your colors? Why did you only add the deck tan to the whole red? As opposed to say adding black and doing the same thing in the shadows. Well the answer there is because light is what would bring out the ability to see the texture. I mentioned this recently in my Ultimate Guide to Leather video. You can find that linked up top. But effectively we only see the texture where there is light to reflect the texture. So all we have to do is focus on the highlights. The shadows would effectively mask any of that texture. And we want the shadows to be a little more boring, to contain less visual information. Because that then creates further contrast with the highlights. So as I'm working on the miniature, you'll notice again each time just more and more deck tan, more random lines, more jumpiness where I don't always use the exact same coverage. But in addition, sometimes I don't even actually mix in more deck tan. Sometimes I just use the same paint multiple times, but vary exactly where the lines go. Because the acrylic paint is also transparent, that means that you can use the same color, the same mixture, the same blend or whatever of those two paints multiple times to achieve different effects. So I actually am not always integrating more deck tan. Sometimes I'm just doing a full pass around the miniature, letting it dry, and then doing it again. And when I do that, especially because I'm not trying to trace the same lines, every time I do these lines, they're random. Now if you feel like you go too far, or you jump too far, you didn't make your initial lines broad enough, you can always go backwards. You can grab some of your mid-tone, here I grabbed an earlier step, and I'm just reworking the edges. Again, randomly, different patterns, but bringing it all back together. No blending, no layering. Here I'm taking my highest highlight, basically almost a pure deck tan, and I'm just touching those very edges, those light catches of texture that would be just at the very edge of the wear of the cloth, where it would get the most torn and ragged. Now when we create all of this, it's going to desaturate the miniature. And that might be good sometimes, but we often need to bring the color back in. So here I'm back to my original whole red, I worked it into a very thin glaze, basically a filter, and I'm just running it over everything. Well, almost everything. Notice that I'm not applying it to the highest highlights. I'm basically starting in the mid-tone, and then pulling it towards the shadows. That re-instantiates some of that color tone. I'm also focusing more on the shadow side of him. So here I've integrated a little bit of black into the mixture, and I'm working on even less, just another glaze into the shadows. Here I'm trying to remove visual information, hide the detail, create those strong shadows. Now I'm really going heavy on the shadows on his left side, because as you'll see at the end, he has a little OSL on his right side, and when you create OSL you need darker shadows. But by just doing some quick, simple glazes, not only does it make the texture feel more natural and more blended into the surface, even though I never did any kind of blending at all, it also then helps to express and reduce the visual information in the shadows and create more strong contrast. So that's basically the key. My last step I'm doing here is just taking some dark brown and putting it around the edge, adding some dirt to the bottom of his cloak. Things like dirt and the visual confusion you see me here, so now I'm taking just some deck tan and just dabbing it around, just dabbing it around. Little tiny dots making sure I have the bottoms of all the little tears highlighted. Those extra dots and visual confusions, those tiny little hashes and stabs, then further sell the illusion of the blended cloth without you ever doing blending. As the eye gets confused by all of these different little tiny details. So there you go. That's the finished model. I think he came out pretty cool. If you like it, give it a like, subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future, but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one, and we'll see you next time.