 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about a different way to use your airbrush. So I'm painting this big wonderful, basically a statue here. This is of Sarah Angel, this is a statue that was made back in the 90s that someone was nice enough to give to me. Sarah Angel was always my favorite card in magic and I have a penchant for angels and I thought this would be a fun figure to use a completely different sort of style on. So what I've done here so far is what I would think, what I would describe as sort of extreme value sketching, right? So you can see how I've placed my highlights very carefully where I want them so I've gone around with a whole different range of colors and exactly what colors I use or brands or stuff like that doesn't matter, it's irrelevant, you can use anything, any brand, any stuff, it's just undercoating. But you can see how you, you know, we've got highlights here because I want the light coming down from the sunlight, she's holding her sword up to sunlight. And we've placed highlights, you know, here and here, where they'd catch, basically I sketched in all the values, same with the lower part of her here and her legs and stuff like that on her hands, right? And then I brought that down into reds and then you'll see even in the shadow colors where we've introduced blue tones into the flesh where it's falling away into shadow and so now it's colder and over here and so on and so forth, right? She has a big set of wings, by the way, that normally go on her back. So there's the giant set of wings there beyond massive. So today we're going to talk about how you can, why this is a fun way to paint. Now I'll say this generally works best on larger scale stuff. So in general, you, this is going to be a great trick for things like monsters and big, large models, maybe some upcoming Sons of Behemoth, for example, we're talking about a Giants. This is a good strategy for stuff like that. This is very hard to do on a 28mm miniature if it's just a human sized infantry person, though you can still do it. But I would say it's going to be, you have to be a surgeon with your airbrush. But for larger stuff like this, which this is about the size of a big monster, she's about the size of a Warhammer monster, be it like anything out of 40k or Age of Sigmar, any kind of large colossal creature, this is a great way to do it. So I'm going to set myself up here and we're actually going to airbrush over here a little bit so I can show you a little more clearly and cleanly what's going on rather than going to the booth. So I'll be back in just a moment after we set everything up. So here we are, we've got a little piece of paper I can spray over, so I can both show you stuff and so that I don't ruin my cutting mat. But we've mixed here a nice mix of elf skin tone from Vallejo Game Air, just a nice neutral, kind of bright skin tone, so this is in the upper area, it's a more pale skin tone, which is what I wanted to start with. We've went with this, which was already, by the way, this is already a thin mix for the airbrush, and I went 5 to 1 thinner to paint, okay, using my standard mix of thinner and flow improver, and you can see that gives us something that looks like that, which I don't even know if that shows on camera, but I assure you it's there, see if you can see it on my glove maybe, and you can see that light catch there, alright. So it's very thin, that's the point. So what we're going to do then is come in, and we're just going to start working that in. I'm going over the highlights completely, let's bring her down here so you can see what I'm doing, and effectively what I'm doing here is glazing with the airbrush. Now you'll notice that as it stands right now, I'm not moving these colors much, you can still see some real hard lines between everything, and that's okay. That's just fine. The trick is, glazing with your airbrush like this is so much faster and smoother and easier than trying to glaze with your brush, like it's not that glazing is a real hard technique, it's not, it's something you need to practice and you eventually get the hang of, but just speed-wise, there's no comparison here. I can apply a thin, even controlled coat very quickly, I can work my way around the figure, let it dry, and then keep coming back. And the goal here is to make sure that we're still capturing the light, getting the benefit out of that undercoat, but we don't have to be so complete about it. Now I'm not trying to cover everything with this first coat, you'll see as we go on. My goal is to knock some of the, basically, kind of knock the color out of everything. What I'm effectively doing with this skin tone is just harmonizing everything, bringing it all together a little bit. It doesn't need to be completely covered, we're not trying to just use this one coat of flush tone to bring everything together. Okay, so you just work your way around, applying multiple coats. I cover most everything, but I am focusing in on especially those transition areas where I want to start bringing stuff together on the highlights, where I want to get them into a more flesh tone. You know, they were originally coated with white and ice yellow, and, but again, anything would work, any kind of high highlight, and this just helps me slowly start setting these color tones in place. Okay, so I'm going to keep working here, and then I will come back, and you can see, I'm just going to put a little coat on. It's very thin, it doesn't have much of an effect. I let it dry and I come back. I'll do the same with her legs and everything else. So there's where she started to go now, and you can see there's still some very hard lines there, but you can see how instantly that's really snapping into place, right? See how much smoother already that looks. So I'm going to keep working my way around the model. I'll be back in a moment and I'll show you what we're going to do next. All right, so our first layer of glazes is dry, and you can see how a lot of those edges are softened, but still quite visible. And that's all right. The key with this trick is not to try to use one simple layer, one simple glaze, in the same way you don't use a normal single glaze when you're working it to solve all your problems. You don't use it here either. So this time, what we've done is we've gotten some Vallejo model color beige red, and we've thinned that way down. So this is about a six to seven to one ratio, and once again, we'll show on the back of the hand here. That's about what I'm ending up with, so very, very faint. And now what I want to do is stay away from those highlights, start drifting into the sections that I had a little bit more pink colored. Start softening some of those edges, especially down into some of the deeper colors here, where I've got a little bit more of the purples and blues showing through. I'm going to hit just the edges of some of those highlights. So basically, instead of, I'm not trying to cover everything. So for example, on our arm right here, where there's a highlight right here, I'm going down below that, hitting the edge of it, and I'm coming up here to the top. I'm carrying that right up. So I am covering all of my shadows, but again, just slightly. A lot of times I'll talk about the integration of red tones, blue tones, greens, purples, all this stuff into skin, and you need all of those to make skin feel natural and organic, because our own skin has tons of colors like that in it, especially depending on the ambient environment we happen to be in at that moment. But what I don't mean is you get out your bottle of blue, and you just start slapping blue on there. I think this is one of the most challenging things, especially for newer painters who are trying to make really organic-looking skin tone, is they hear people say, well, I worked in a lot of blues and greens and reds, and they're like, what are you talking about? My blue and green and red, I put whatever's there in the pot, and they don't have the mastery of desaturating or thinning it, or stuff like that to know exactly how to translate that. This gives you a much more natural way to work that, honestly, because with your airbrush, you can be a little bit more, sorry, I'm just trying to work something that's going to be difficult to capture on camera here. With these kinds of glazes out of your airbrush, you can be so much more controlled and careful. It's just very thin paint. All you really need is the trigger control. You see this is how much my finger is moving, from here to here. Watch, that much. That trigger goes a lot farther than that, but I'm not going to move it farther than that, because I'm not looking for a whole bunch of paint. There's another thing that I think is often challenging for people with their airbrush. They flood the area when they have a very thin paint. You don't have to. Just nice little controlled bursts, and then here, just going straight for air. Dry it off. Little controlled burst, dry it off. Little controlled burst, dry it off. Then we just repeat, and I'm just very slowly working that finger back and forth. One of the hardest parts about this is just control. I don't mean control of your airbrush, that's fine. I mean control of your own instincts. Because your instincts will be, I am not seeing enough change fast enough. My airbrush is meant to be a speed tool. All right, and then you're just, you're going to create a big puddle. If that happens, it's okay. Just stop, let it be. Don't try to do anything to it. If it's real wet, you can kind of wipe it away quickly with your finger or something. But for the most part, the right answer is you just kind of let it be, and then you come back to it later on. Just kind of dry it, and then you fix it later with your original paints. It's okay. It'll happen. Happens to everybody. Happens to me all the time. It's no big deal. The goal here is nice, repeated, thin applications of paint, right? So now we can come back up top. See, we still have kind of a hard line there. So we're going to focus in on that some, dry it off, and I'm just going to keep working this glaze around, and I'll be back, and I'll show you what we do next as we continue to, you notice I'm working down. Started at the sort of high glaze, and we're going to keep getting darker. So back in just a moment. All right, so now we took our previous mixture of that beige red, and I introduced some contrast volu, volupus, volupus, I don't know, this pink color. It's a really nice color actually for, for deeper skin tones. And again, here, we'll show you where we're at as far as thinness goes. So real thin. And now what we're going to do is we're going to come in and we're going to just enrich some of those low tones with this hue. And again, every time I do this, I'm focusing on the particular lines, the transition areas, the places where I want the color to soften what I'm doing. Right, and the key is I can just keep working that application of that color. Just nice and gentle. Just build it up real slow. I can test how I like it. Like right here, her knee, I don't love how that highlights looking. So I can, I can sort of reshape it with the shadow, come back to that a little later to fix it because we're going to come at the back with highlights at the end. But you see how when I put this very thin, transparent contrast color over all these other colors, not only does it first fade the line, right? But also, it adds, it acts differently depending on the color I'm putting it over. So you get a different effect when it runs over the purple than when it say runs over the, you know, the base purple than when it runs over the pink than when it runs over the high flesh tone or, you know, whatever. And that's a really nice effect because skin is translucent. We don't think of skin as being translucent because we don't generally see our own organs and stuff inside of our body, but it is, it is translucent. You can tell so if you've ever put, say, a torch or a flashlight up to your, up to your fingers and then been able to, you know, see the light through them, right? That's translucent. If your, if your skin was opaque, if it was like steel, you wouldn't see the flashlight. So by capturing lots of layers of soft, transparent color, we can get this really cool effect that just kind of builds up slowly over time. Okay, so once again, I'm just going to go around, make sure I'm glazing properly with all of this step, make sure I don't miss any areas like I did right there, which I could see on camera, but it's easy to look over. And I'll be back in a minute and we'll do the next step. All right, so still continuing on. Now we've mixed some scale 75 black leather into our mix for our deepest shadows. So here we're going to be very, very careful. Yet again, this is very thin. Here's where we're going to connect those deepest shadows into the other colors. Because this will hide those transition lines for those real nicely. Now, a question you might be asking yourself at this point, it's completely reasonable, so I'll answer it is, Vince, why didn't you just do all this with airbrush? Why isn't this just an airbrushing skin tutorial? Like, why not just start completely with the airbrush? Why do the value sketch step at all? The answer is because the intensity that you get out of working with your value sketch is always stronger. And as I said, skin, that's one, okay, like just the intensity you get out of out of applying some value sketch like that with a brush, it's just going to be stronger. The paint's more intense to it helps avoid that overly airbrushed look, because there's real brush strokes under there still. Even if they're only like there on a sort of micro level, something clicks when when the entire thing is just nothing but air droplets, it can kind of feel airbrushed. This helps avoid that. Okay. At a deeper level, though, there's an intensity and a saturation that you get out of, you know, a layer applied with a brush, you're just not going to match out of necessarily something with the airbrush. Now, let's not say you couldn't do this all and I have done this all with an airbrush many times, but I just love this effect it produces because it feels so rich. The other trick is I especially like doing this with skin. Could you do this with other things? Sure, of course, of course. You know, you could do this with a robot or a piece of armor or something like that. But the reason I love this effect for skin, okay, is because as I said, skin is translucent. It shows lots of colors. It's skin is a wonderful combination of satin and translucent. Just a really odd combination in nature. Okay. That means it's both reflecting lots of light, lots of nature, lots of the world around it, but it's also letting light and color shine through from lower layers. That's a cool combination. And one of the ways we best capture that, okay, is by doing lots of nice thin layers of paint. That's what can help skin feel more reasonable, more, what I want to say, more believable. That's the right word, right? It feels more real to us when we can look at it and see all these different hints of colors, all these different shades that are captured, the nuance of sort of light that's being captured here and bouncing off, but also of color and tone and blood and things underneath. Okay. So now I've climbed all the way down to my deepest shade and she looks pretty good, although she's kind of, kind of, she's gotten sort of a little more contrasty than I want, right? That is to say, she's got a little bit more darkness in her as far as like just the colors are a little too strong. That's what I mean. And that's okay. Anything worth doing if you're trying to make it look really nice is worth doing three times. So now what I'm going to do, I'll show you the sort of final step I do here with the final steps I do with the airbrush. Keep in mind, if I was doing this as a competition piece or something like that, which this isn't, this is just for me, but if I was doing this as a competition piece, I would do this whole rigmarole you've seen me do between the initial brush. I'd go back in and then clean it up with a brush again, tighten individual areas and layers, make sure everything's sharp. Then I'd come back again with the, with the airbrush, then I'd go back again with the brush and so on and so forth. So anything worth doing once is worth doing three times if you're doing talking about competition or display quality. Okay. So that's as deep as we're going to go with the shadows. I'll clean that up a little bit and I'll come back and I'll show you what we're going to do next. All right. So when we started last time, we went down. That is to say, I started with the mid tone and then I took it down. So it was all going darker colors. Now I'm back at the mid tone, that elf skin tone. And we're just going to, once again, I'm at about a five to one ratio for it. And you see how I'm just smoothing out again with that thin glaze, more of those colors that we laid in, just creating more thin layers to sort of catch the light, never focusing too hard, always just nice and light, just trying to work those areas back up. And then what that does is it further desaturates like down here on her leg, you see how pink that tone is, right? So we want to take some of that out, but not a lot. We don't want it to feel crimson or red. She, you know, we want her the skin tone to feel human. I understand she's actually like, as portrayed, she is an angel, but nonetheless, we perceive the color red as being something that's alive. Like that's the color most commonly associated in our brain, sort of with life, blood, vitae. When we see those red tones in skin, that's why when they portray things that are dead, they usually knock that color out. You up the green or something like that. And what happens there is green being the opposite of red feels very dead when it's in skin. Okay. So again, we continue working that around. So I'm just going to do that. You can see how that color is still very much showing in all the cases, that everything is slowly snapping into focus. So I'm going to keep working just a little bit, and then I'll show you the what's probably going to be our final airbrush step. So my final step here that I'm going to do directly right now is I've taken that same L flesh tone, mixed it in with some ice yellow and a little drop of white. And now what we're going to do is we're going to just build back in some of our strong highlights. We're going to find those areas we want to really catch the light. And we're just going to make sure those are brought up nice and strong. Again, this is thinned a lot. So this is something like still all of these have been somewhere between like a six to one and eight to one ratio. So just really, really, really taking it down as far as the as far as thinning goes. And because this layer has a little bit more white in it, it will have a higher opacity once all is said and done. So you want to be a little careful because you can overspray something real easy. But again, if that happens, who cares? Because you can always just come back later and and fix it up. Not a big deal. You can always come back with other tones. We could repeat any step we've done. Again, one of the great benefits of this is that because it's the airbrush working over the normal brush is that you get this wonderful you get little imperfections. I know that sounds weird, like wait a minute, I thought we were trying to do perfect paint jobs. Well, one first no, never, because there is no such thing. So we banish that thought immediately. But on a deeper level, no, because we want things to be slightly imperfect. We want there to be little tiny things out of place. The key is a sort of controlled imperfection, which is tough. And again, because we've got all these colors just crisscrossing over top of each other all over the place. It just adds a wonderful depth and richness. That part of her arm I'm not happy with right there. This part of her arm. I'm going to have to go back and fix that afterwards. It's in a really weird spot to shoot on camera. So ignore this little piece. I'll fix that. That part didn't come out. It's hard to see when I'm rotating it around and shooting it. So I'm sorry, everybody. But anyway, we'll fix that afterwards. Exempting that little piece, you can see now how what we get is a nice, smooth, really, really lustrous, I think, skin tone. All right, you saw how we went from that. I'll hold her here. See, let's get her over on this side of the camera. There we go. And we'll compare this to what she looked like when we started. So here's the picture where she started. And this is where we ended. Now, real time, that whole process on this girl, not counting the, you know, not counting me setting up to shoot and the various things like that took maybe 30 minutes. And she's big. This figure's like eight, nine inches tall. All right. Could I have done this with a brush? Of course, absolutely. Absolutely. But it would have taken so much longer. All right. So why? Why not use your airbrush in the way that it's more interesting and was meant to be used? Why not use it to get a lot more traction? Work on glazing with your airbrush? And see and play with this effect because in the end, it's a lot of fun. If you've had challenges with glazing, but you've got an airbrush, this can be a good way to attack that particular challenge and see some different sorts of results. Maybe you'll have a better look with this type of work. So my best recommendation is go nuts, give it a try, especially if you're working on something big, especially if you're working on something really unique or large, big monsters, big stuff like that. I'll talk about sort of next step stuff. Certain things you're going to always have to fix with your regular brush. So for example, like her fingers on her hand, you know, that's not really set to be airbrushable. There's going to be stuff there. It's just even if I shoot in an angle, you know, I can I can do some stuff with the fingers, but I'm always going to have to come back in there with the brush and clean it up. And that's okay. Some stuff like her face, I'm going to want to come back in and make sure I've got all the different small elements good, like the side of her nose, or you know, the individual elements of her face, that kind of stuff. So it's not like you should feel like this is the end step, but on some figures it could be if they're simple enough. But it can still, this just saves you so, so very much time, right? A lot of times people ask me like, how do I paint so fast? Well, using a trick like this, you know, doing that value sketch took me maybe, let's say 30 minutes. Doing this with an airbrush took me maybe 30 minutes. And then I've gotten her to this point where her skin is, in my opinion, looking pretty darn pretty darn good. And it took me basically no time at all. I mean, an hour on a figure of this size, I think to get to this place, I feel pretty good about that. Could we go farther? Yeah, of course, we will. But that's just it. It frees you up to spend your time doing those other things. So that's a different way to use your airbrush. I certainly hope this was instructive for you. I hope this was helpful. This is a lot of fun to do. I do hope you give it a try or you're interested or you play around with your airbrush some more. It's a multifaceted tool that I think not enough of us take full advantage of. But if you liked this, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got suggestions or questions, feel free to drop those down below. I always answer every comment. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one, and we'll see you next time.