 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we are going to talk about painting black armor. So obviously with the new Slaves of Darkness as well as perhaps the Sisters of Battle all either here or on the horizon depending on when you're watching this or in the past. Black armor is very much in vogue. Everyone's wearing black this season. So we're going to talk a little bit about how to paint it. I'm actually going to take you through two completely different methods. First one I'll call the speedy method. If you've got a whole lot of stuff you need to knock out fast. I'm going to show you how to get fast, quick, tabletop ready black armor that will still have a really nice amount of contrast to it. And then we're also going to do more detailed black armor. So we're going to split those up into two sections. They'll be time stamped below so you can go down there and click to it if you feel like it. But here we have a chaos pony. This is obviously a knight's cast of the cast knight's steed and this is the old one not the new one. And so I thought what a perfect guy since I've got a couple of these still lying around what a perfect way to do it in advance of the new stuff as of the time recording this I don't have on my new cast of yet. So this guy has been Xenothold in the standard method that is to say he was black gray and then gray and then white from above. Nothing too crazy. And then back here on the back I went back in and I just did a couple coats of Abaddon black from Citadel which is a nice satin black just because I'm going to show you a more detailed method and I needed to have that blacked out. But we're going to start up here on his little pony head. Let's talk about the paints on the palette. First off right there Abaddon black F4 mentioned right next to it although it looks the same it's not. We've got some Daler Rowney Payne's gray FW ink. We follow that up with some Vallejo model color Dark Sea Blue. And then over here on the side we have some Reaper Maggot White. Okay, let's before I get into the actual painting we're going to just talk about the Fundaments of Highlighting Black. For black to look like black it needs to be at least 50% and preferably 60% of the surface should be black. That still leaves you 40 to 50% of the surface to play with in other not black colors and we need to do something with that to make that visually interesting. If you look at this bottle of black paint here you can see how much of it is reflecting my lights from above. Now that's kind of a plastic thing on the outside so it's very shiny but I can pick up 10 different things. How about the tip of that cap again notice how much of it is reflecting other colors getting polluted by light from what's around in the room and so on and so forth. When you highlight your black don't use white that's the temptation you want to go straight to white don't do that. It will only one white goes chalky easy it's harder to manage two it will make it less visually interesting because you're already dealing with a not color in black. Black is the absence of color it is boredom in paint form okay. So how are we going to make it more interesting well maybe we're going to use a green white like maggot white maybe we're going to use a blue white like Balejo Glacier blue maybe we're going to use maybe we're going to use a warm yellow white like ice yellow from Balejo by the way these aren't these are just examples any bright color like this would work maybe we're going to go real crazy and we'll use something like a salmon rose so this is like a very light ish flesh tone which can also add interesting shades of red since the blacks actually tend to be made from blues and so we're naturally cold this can add more warmth into your highlighter mid-tone. The point is pick something interesting for your highlight don't just use white okay alright so we're all on the page with that we all agree cool so let's let's do the speedy method so speedy method first we're going to start with a little bit of our pains gray or sorry our pains gray and our dark sea blue so we're going to take some of that dark sea blue we're going to pull it up here on the palette and we're going to take a little bit of that blue black ink we're going to mix it in there so we get a nice mix of the two we're going to grab some water get that in there you want to get this nice and thinned down because we're going to work it into a glaze and if you have any questions about glazing you can go see my how to glaze video that will be your guide okay we're gonna take so I've got some master medium which is what I just showed the cap of from Green Stuff World it's a really nice medium I like for thinning paints you can use glaze medium from Vallejo you can use you know Lamia medium whatever you want okay does not matter so I'm just using a mix of that and water so let's get that over here we'll make kind of two different consistencies of it one that's very thin and one that isn't so now I've got two different piles at two different levels of thickness two different levels of coverage and we can test that as always by taking our hand we'll take a little bit of that and put it on there and you see okay that's about what we get out of it so it's still got a nice medium tone to it let's take this one the very weak one you see that one super weak perfect okay so again this is the speed tone so here we go we're gonna start with the middle one here the sort of middle tone sorry that's really reflecting my light where it's sitting that's my overhead light so at any rate we get some of that up in our brush as always when we're glazing most important step is we wick off the excess over here can't have a bunch of paint flooding the zone we're gonna go ahead and hit the tops of his head here I'm gonna go ahead and start I'm gonna assume the highlight kind of goes like this around the backside so I'm gonna start there and I'm gonna pull toward where I want the shadows okay nice quick glaze pull it right down there with that blue tone easy peasy right nothing too complicated so far let that glaze dry which takes just a few seconds because they're fast right if you have different color things are like up here where you'd say the darkest part be at the top we'd pull toward the top you're always pulling toward your deepest shadow okay because that's where it's gonna deposit the most paint alright once that first layer of glaze is dry we go get a second one again we wick off all our excess okay and then we're gonna do the same thing yet again we're gonna pull it right down toward the shadows I'll cover just slightly less still basically just the same thing just pulling it toward the shadows okay easy alright so now we let that one dry for a second two quick glazes no problem slap it on there bing bang boom now we're gonna take a little bit of that Payne's gray ink we're gonna bring it over here we're gonna grab a little bit of that Abaddon black we're gonna mix it in there so we want a little bit of a mix of both leaning toward the Payne's gray and grab some water thin that out that ink is very pigment rich so we've got it we've got to be aggressive with it I'm gonna grab a bunch of our medium we're gonna go in here review the same thing again you'll see why I'm making a thinner one here a moment okay now again same thing I've got one real thick one pretty thin awesome or sorry thick is the wrong word it's an ink based thing it's not thick one still that's gonna provide decent coverage one that's going to be very very wispy okay and again same thing we test on the back of our hand so we'll start with the heavier one we work it off let's give that a shot nice good level of darkness we want and then we test the lighter one you can see that difference there perfect exactly what we need okay grab our medium one here yet again as always with our glazes and look how much of that just wicks right off of there right easy peasy bring up our horse again where he's all nice and dry and now we're gonna start about 50% down remember the 50 to 60% rule we're just gonna pull that darkness right into the shadows and here on this part we're gonna pull it straight up we're trying to get that nice dark black to be gathering in these areas if you're having trouble hitting a spot you can always rotate it a little just get that nice and spread out nice and smooth okay all right so you can see then we're gonna let that dry get another layer of that now that that and glazes dry real fast that's the advantage same thing again about the same amount of space pull down in there always pulling toward the spot we wanted to pause at the paint by the way if you have an airbrush you can do this all with an airbrush if you're comfortable so if you have like a bigger area you're doing you can do this exact same technique with just airbrush glazing and it actually becomes real easy real fast because you can you can just really control it down okay all right so now that's where we're at easy peasy so far finally take a little bit of that medium straight in we're gonna go right into our black we're just gonna get it flowing with the medium still grab a little bit of ink just for coverage but we're mostly leaning toward black this time and then once again here's our horse and we're gonna just go ahead and in that bottom area there we're gonna apply that more or less full black so now we got that nice dark deep area there so you can see it just looks like black with an ultra high reflection and if I went around and sort of did the same thing up here like if I black out this top part so you so you're not getting your eye sorry polluted by the extra white you'll see actually how different it looks that's one of the interesting things about something like this is that your eye is very sensitive to other colors being around and so we'll we'll notice like if there's a bunch of white up here it won't look as dark but you can see once I darken the top part look how much more like black armor that looks just instantaneously okay alright you're now you're probably asking yourself but Vince for why did you have the maggot white oh what an excellent question imaginary viewer your final step is we come in here we grab a little bit of whatever's left of our medium take some of that maggot white you can do this with some flow improver if you've got as well or just a steady hand because you're gonna come in and you're gonna just very carefully hit those edges nice and light we're gonna re-catch every one of those edges the interesting thing about using colored whites is that even to the eye they'll still appear as mostly white like when put against a very dark color like this your eye isn't actually very good at disambiguating that color consciously it just knows that like it's seeing something that's more visually interesting so then we just catch every edge of the armor we want to especially make sure we get these bottom edges here the opposite of the sort of the opposite of the the darkest part because it will look the black will look darker if set against a little tiny sliver of light as all things like contrast is king and we screw up your edge highlighting like I just did because I'm doing this at an odd angle where I dragged a little bit of paint it's no big deal so let that dry and go grab a little tiny bit of our black paint if you saw one of my you saw my edge highlighting video you know one of the secrets to edge highlighting is not to stop with just the edge but whenever you make a mistake you go back in and you just clean it up so there we go we got a nice easy blend looks like this highly reflective black armor and you're easy if you want to add some more color this is where the very light color blue glaze comes in you can come in with this which is just a nice light filter that has almost no impact and you can sort of take it over everything and it'll just add this nice blue tint to everything this is just a light filter there you go now you got a little bit of color in there too because it'll actually show a little more with the dark sea over the whatever you have there that's your speed method to me it's super fast and I think it actually gives you a great looking result like when I look at that I think that yeah that looks like super reflective armor that you spent a long time on doing blends but of course we didn't we spent like eight or nine minutes doing lens and you know they were just quick laces and I could have done the whole horse and it would have been easier because every layer would have definitely been dry so that's your speed method now we're gonna move to the horses behind and we're gonna look at the lengthier method of doing black armor where you want it to be really high highlighted and smooth blends and contrast and stuff like that so I'm gonna pause here while I reset my pallets we'll be right back alright we're back we're ready to do the more detailed version so right up here you can see we had our speed paint area you can see how that reflection looks I went ahead and did a more detailed version off-screen so you can see kind of the idea of having this softer fade and you can see how in this version it's more soft in the way it smooths out and I could still probably glaze that back more whereas here there's a little bit of roughness to it well let's talk about the techniques we can employ so here on the other side of the horse I've got this part just ready and blacked out in this part I'm starting normal down here on the pallet we have some ice blue we have so that's our sorry glacier blue from Vallejo we have some salmon rose from also from Vallejo we've got some dark sea blue from Vallejo got a little dollar-roundy FW paints gray ink and finally some Abaddon black okay so we can start from a black base coat or not it doesn't really actually matter and let's talk about why black is super challenging to work with when you're trying to do a detailed blend something like this you're going from black to white so you're literally crossing the highest amount of contrast and you're trying to do it in a very small amount of space because remember let's say 60% of the thing still needs to be black in color right because if it's not it won't read as black like if I if I spread that white and blue out and only this much of the thing and below was black it wouldn't read as black this would just read as a dark shadow of them right so we have to keep the majority of the area in that dark color or something approximating it so like either black or blue black you know when I say it has to be black I don't mean it has to be the exact darkest tone like you have to use some kind of this paint something like a very dark black black green black brown black red you can use a lot of those colors and you can still always be infusing color in and it will sell it'll still look right the key is that 60% number the second thing I want to talk about is just the concept of blending this stuff out this sort of challenge that black presents us requires us to do potentially a lot more blending than anything else and there are a million ways to blend we could wet blend it out we can use some loaded brush we can do all sorts of things and the answer is sure all of those work I see a lot of people get lost sometimes in the technique they get tripped up because they're like oh that's great did you wet blend that what kind of blending did you use I used all of them I used every kind of blending all at once and whatever was appropriate and I don't think about it I have no lights I don't sit down and go hmm shall I wet blend this or will this be a project for a loaded brush no you just you throw it we're throwing paint at it so you can use any of those techniques and they will work any of them there is no right there's no right correct method of blending for this it's about the way you apply it consistently so let's talk about the simplest way we could be getting this which is your good old-fashioned layering so let's just pick a few of these head spots up here we'll start by turning them black okay in this case I'm just gonna do one little coat of it even though because it'll leave it somewhat transparent and that's okay we're gonna go for the layering technique it's the easiest thing to do okay our idea here is we're just gonna put you know sort of shingles on a rooftop type of thing and again I want the light gathered up here and towards the back right so then I'm gonna go into my ink my blue black ink and in this case I'm gonna get everything except that very line against the bottom because this still looks rather dark and still will read as black to people you can actually see when it's glossy and wet it looks darker it's another interesting part about black that I'll mention here just as we're letting that dry if you have something like you can see here let's go ahead and I'll apply some of this blue black ink which is not true black too over the black notice how all of a sudden when it's wet this part seems darker than this part this is a lighter color than this but this seems darker okay that's because the glossiness the nature of the shine in black will make it appear a deeper black like that when you see that paint that's like the blackest black on the market let's I have hyper matte so it actually ends up often looking kind of gray depending on what's going on but either way it looks devoid of visual interest so the point that I'm making here is one of the neat tricks you can do to get really really dark colors in your deep shadows is you can take like a little gloss medium or something like that sneak that into your black in the shadows and it will actually appear darker there than it would otherwise okay alright so back to the layering so now we'll take a little bit of our blue black we'll mix it with some of our dark sea blue right and now what we're gonna do is again we're just gonna come up toward the edge there easy peasy nice little first layer now what we do is let's prepare the rest of this run I grab a bunch of dark sea blue bunch of blue black mix that all in I've got some medium over here on the other side of my palette we'll use okay now let's go ahead and get some of that over here make a second pile and let's bring some of that salmon rose in how it looked too much the key is we want to do these small steps nice let's lay down another one there bring in a little bit more of that rose let's lay down a new pile off of that bring in a little bit more and let's start adding in just a touch of that ice blue as well or that glacier blue as well start fading it out go here and then let's go like that then let's do one more if I was actually preparing to paint a whole thing by the way I would make these much bigger but since I'm just doing a tiny little part so now you can see I've got all my steps awesome okay so now we're just gonna come in and we're gonna say take some of our first lighter step here up and right toward the edge there okay when you're doing this kind of layering it's always gonna look a little bit you're always gonna be able to see lines when you make these jumps it's one of the tricks with black then we're gonna take a slightly lighter color cover even a little bit less I'll talk about how we fix that in a moment don't worry then we go to our next lighter step a little bit less I think you get the idea here then we take our next color now we're covering very little indeed and then finally we throw our paintbrush around like a crazy person we go to our highest highlight here and we're gonna get just that little corner space right and then just as before we need to take our brightest bright color which is this glacier blue and we're gonna make sure we have the edge nice and take the edge make sure it's nice and picked out we especially want that light right next to the dark and if we mess up and get some paint in the wrong place like I did there where I because I have to hold this at an odd angle no big deal we go back to our original black and we just fix that up real quick and easy right now if there if you do have those sort of shingles once everything dries where you can still see the division lines between them if you're not totally happy with it then you go into something like your original sort of mid-dark color you thin that down into a glaze just like we did in the last one just get that nice and thin and then again pulling toward the shadows you just run a few of those glazes over and you'll just hide that right away so that's if you want to go with sort of the traditional layering method and it works you can build up like that you also want to think about in addition to the edges you want to think about things like your your other things that would catch light so for example there's this little rivet right here we would want to make sure we picked that out with a little highlight right because the light effect will sell more if I can see it having a normal effect on everything I could do little scratches and dots or something you know there's there's always lots of different things you can do but the more you kind of add a little bit of confusion of texture of other light elements there the more it will it will sell okay now if you're don't if you're not the layering type and you say but Vince there has to be a quicker way well sure there is of course instead of doing that all slow let's just do it all fast let's go ahead and black the whole thing out well you will get a heavy amount of paint here Abaddon's base paint so it's got a decent amount of weight to it then let's just go straight into the blue pull that up have a little bit more of that straight into our lighter color then let's jump way up here to the top all the way okay we did that real high reflection and we clean the paint off the brush and while everything's still wet just slowly feather it all together then we just let that rest you can see we can get that same effect you know pretty fast I don't quite have the same dark darks because some of my lighter colors got into my darker colors so here what I would do is I would just let that paint dry we just let it rest out just like we always do when we're in a situation like this and that same dark glaze let's take that nice black color we had a little Abaddon black we'll thin that down and then we're just gonna pull right down toward the shadows clean the brush on a wet piece of paper or we eat the paint if you're that kind of person then we just feather the end a little bit and boom now we've got this wonderful reflection once again same second verse same as the first we knock out our our edge and make sure that's well defined because it really is the edge that sells it make sure that rivets caught and there we go we got this nice smooth thing pretty fast again we could have done that with loaded brush if you're more comfortable with that the other thing you can do here is in some places you can have secondary reflections so for example you know here I've got the lighter color up top getting caught if you want to get a little if you want to get a little exciting you can take a little bit of say the dark sea blue over here and we could place a little bit of that actually down here on the bottom to just kind of show a little bit of a counter reflection for a secondary reflection in the black grab a little bit of that white we'll kick that up just enough so it's visible we get just a little bit of this sort of L-shaped reflection in here so it goes from like dark to light to dark not necessary but it can be an interesting way to add extra tone and then you know we go back into the black we kind of smooth out that edge around that just that kind of thing little bits of color that you can make it visually interesting you can do all the same thing I just did over the black itself so for example here we could do the same thing with the layers you know we could take from the blue itself sorry take from the blue itself we could say okay this area is going to be highlighted so we're just gonna lay down a bunch of that blue then we could just go straight through and wet blend it through all of our layers grab a lighter one grab a lighter one grab the lightest right and just work our way through that whole lot and then just same thing again kind of bring that all together and we can jump into that black at the edge throw a little version of that on there and then just bring the two together and then again we just let that sit and then we glaze and boom we'll be good to go so there you go you want to do the more detailed black it's you know what what you end up getting is a slightly richer effect they don't look terribly different at the tabletop level you can do all this with the airbrush like I've said many times like I could go back and just do this whole thing I just did with the airbrush like tiny little colors and stuff like that so I would recommend that you use the way that you're most comfortable with but I hope that gave you some good ideas for how to get this shiny black armor that's the kind of things that you would see on you know on Sisters of Battle or on the Warriors of the chaos gods on of the undivided right and so on and so forth so I do hope this gave you some thoughts there as to it's not hard it's often just time-consuming the I want to review just the biggest things about this the biggest deals are one don't limit yourself to just white as a highlight in fact avoid it if you can look at something like your glacier blue or your salmon or your ice yellow or the maggot white I used in the speed version whatever some kind of light color with with an actual color in it some light hue that actually has color to it right remember that for your surface to appear black 60% ish of your surface has to appear black or near enough that the human eye will believe it is right so you and you have to you can push that around with things like these glazes where you get that slowly slowly slowly tinted down glossy black will appear darker than matte black so you can hide a little bit of satin or gloss in the deepest shadows and any blending technique will work but you're going to need to blend you saw hair how on this side I just did traditional layering and these two I did wet blending and now they pretty much look identical it doesn't matter which way you blend it just matters that you do that because you need to run that whole damn it in a very short amount of space if you don't want to go all the way up to white as I did here like if you don't want your people to be this highly reflective let's say you want to stop a little shy and you often see this in a lot of the box art where it'll only go up into sort of a blue range and then kind of like almost a mid-blue and then stop I would still run this whole thing just like I did and then I would actually just glaze back over it so for example we could take a little bit of our our dark sea blue here work that down to a glaze and then we can just go over everything right and then bring that back into tone and that can be a nice way to kind of bring all your colors together it will also make sure that look there's nothing too out of whack it'll it'll bring all your blends together and it'll soften that reflection it'll make it look like it's more of a subtle more matte surface that's just kind of reflecting a bit of color so there you go that's painting shiny black armor I do hope you enjoyed that if you did give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future if you've got questions or suggestions for future topics feel free to drop those down in the comments but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time