 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about leather. Now there's lots of miniatures that have just an overwhelming amount of leather on them like this witch hunter guy here. This first part is going to be at a really high speed because it's just mean mixing paints. Often our intention when we have these models full of different kinds of leather is we go to our paints and we try to find every different brown we have. The problem is that just ends up making a boring brown miniature. So instead what we're going to do today is we're going to grab other colors and we're going to take one brown. This is Vallejo Flat Brown and we're going to mix in a bunch of different colors to it to make interesting browns because when we have a fig that's kind of all one texture, one material like leather, you have to distinguish those parts. We don't want it to just be a big mess of a brown leather jacket with brown leather belts and brown leather boots with brown leather, you know, everything else on their holsters or whatever. So instead I took a relatively muted color palette. We're still kind of operating in a Zorn color palette space here just because I thought that'd be a nice mix for it. If you want more information on that, you can go see my grimdark video that's up in the corner. But and I'm making a bunch of mixes of interesting different color leathers. So brown plus that color and then I also pulled multiples of those mixes together. Because ultimately we're going to distinguish these leathers in two different ways. Color and texture. So color is our first option. And here I'm just applying all of my different leathers to the model. This is just basecoating. It's pretty straightforward. But I'm doing so with intentionality. There is method to my madness. Okay. When we're in the first stage here of distinguishing by color, we want to make sure that we have multiple different browns. Multiple different toned browns. So not just base brown, but in other words brown into another color. So it's a red brown. It's a black brown. It's a green brown. Whatever it happens to be. And leathers can be any color. They can be all the colors of the rainbow, as you can see up on the screen right now. But when we're putting these colors on the miniature, we want to make sure that we're still mixing colors that are still have a little bit of brown tone to them. And we want to make sure that we're alternating light to dark contrast remains the king. So now that he's all base coated, you can see we've got lots of lights against darks. Everything stands out from each other. We don't put too dark leathers right next to each other. We don't put too bright leathers right next to each other, that kind of thing. Now we're just going to apply a little simple oil wash. Now this is using some up to long 502 shadow brown. But you'll notice I'm not washing the whole miniature. This is almost a little bit more of like a pin wash style. I'm taking that oil paint, and I'm just touching it into all the places that there are recesses. This will be a nice unifying shadow color for our whole miniature. So anytime there are elements that are touching against each other, the stakes against the coat, or the backpack against the jacket or whatever, we're making sure there's a little bit of wash in there. So we get this same nice dark shadow color separating all the elements. When we have these different things, different leathers all together, the key is we need to make sure they're well separated. Now we're going to talk about texture. The second way that we distinguish our leathers. Texture on leather is really fun. I've got some pictures up in the corner right now as I'm working of what these look like of, you know, real life leather items and what they look like. And as you can see, old leather gets really textured. It has all these wonderful scritches and scratches and hashes and dashes and dots. And so that's what I'm doing. I'm taking in sort of ivory color, the same cloudy sky that I used for my mix. And I'm just randomly patterning it and be random. Now I'm taking a dark black and I'm doing the same thing. But I'm creating some interesting patterns like you notice how I put the dark right above the light there to make it look like it's a little bit of a depression. Effectively, we're going to use the textures in place of blending and highlights. And this is the wonderful thing about working in leather is that you can really just focus on the textures and create all of your highlights without any need to blend. If you're someone who finds achieving smooth blends pretty difficult, who cares? You don't need to blend well when you're working in highly textured items. So I apply that texture everywhere and then we apply a glaze. And you're going to see this repeat lots of time. So here I'm taking a thin down version of the original red base coat. And I just texture over it, or I just glaze over it. I'm sorry. Now I am going to glaze in some light shadows because the shadows will have less texture. And you think to yourself, well, why is that fence? It's still leather. It's still have the same texture to it. Ah, it would. Listener out there, imaginary person in the future. It would have the same texture to it. But you won't see it because the light isn't reflecting off of that area. It's a deep shadow. Hence all the little textures and scratches and hashes don't really show up as well. So by glazing in those light shadows, we relegate the texture and the reflections, which is what we're seeing. It's the light illuminating that texture to the highlights. Now I'm going back in with the ivory again after my glaze. And I'm reinforcing some of them, focusing more on the highlight spots like the raised area of the cloak, the edges of the cloak, places where there would be. I do put a little bit up into the shadow again. And you might ask, why am I doing this multiple times? Well, because leather wears very unevenly. And so by doing the texturing, then glazing, then doing a little more texturing, and then glazing, we create the illusion of old leather that's been worn for a long time, that's been scuffed and roughed multiple times over the years. Now let's talk about leather belts. With coats, we can just be super random. We just doughnuts. Just stab and dab all over the place. But with belts, we need to be a little more precise. We pick one side and we just do the hashes, little thin hashes of varying length, very, very important. They need to be of varying length. Do not go equal with all of your hashes. See how I'm varying them so they look like an earthquake thing? An EKG? I don't know what earthquake thing is called. Yeah. And then the other side, we just put little tiny touches on. We make it smaller. So we lean most of the scratches to one side. Once that's done, we then run a little bit of a dark glaze down the center of the belt. I'm doing this to both the sword hilt and the belt because I think both of these would kind of be the same consistency and wear in the same way. Once I've got that darker element in there in the center to really create that contrast of light, dark, light, dark, then I'm just glazing over it. This is a little bit of Sarah from CBA basically, just to bring everything together. And this is sort of the key. We texture and we glaze. And because I'm glazing over it, I'm making the the texture a little bit brighter than I otherwise would. I'm not just using one step up. I'm going multiple steps up for my highlight. Now let's talk about things like bags. Things like leather bags and other used items are going to tend to wear not only on the edges, like belts, but they're also going to tend to wear wherever there's folds, wherever the thing normally folds together. That's where we want to apply our texture. So you notice how I focus around the edge. And then I focus around wherever the folds happen to be those areas where it's going to most often get crinkly. That's where we want to focus that stuff. Now sometimes if you just use a half step, or you've got really, really rough leather, you don't always have to glaze over the top. In this case, I am but I'm being very thin. This is a thinned down Sarah from CBA mixed with a little bit of the yellow I had originally. But it's very, very, very thin. Because I just want to tone filter that texture but still leave it very much a strong thing. Okay, gloves, leather gloves. If you hate highlighting gloves, which I generally do because you try to get them smooth and they have all these weird bends and it's annoying. leather gloves are so much easier. Notice how in all this painting, I'm being really rough. I'm stabbing, I'm stippling more than I'm trying to achieve a smooth layer. That's another wonderful part. If you've got shaky hands, or you find blending tough, it's so easy because we just stipple and stab. But notice that I'm focusing this again on the highlight areas. With gloves, you want to focus on the edges of the glove, the highlight sort of volumes like the area where the light would hit, and then the bendy parts, the knuckles, the fingers, like these things would bend really regularly and crack. And you want to make sure that those have lots of highlights on them. Again, it's about creating that contrast. We did it first with the color, alternating the light and the dark colors. And now we're doing it in a more small volume with the texture, alternating light and dark textures, creating lots of contrast of light, dark, light, dark, light, dark. And that makes all of the elements stand apart. Now with the center area of his chest here, this dark leather, I'm going very minimal. Not every piece of leather you have needs to be weathered equally. They can be different materials. They might have different exposures. You don't need to make them all equally worn. There's, you can have that contrast to contrast of wear and weathering, bringing all of these contrasts together makes for a stronger overall visual impact. The final thing I'm doing is just going in and touching any little areas where maybe the glazes took it down too much really focusing in on the edges, just touching those edges very slightly again, a stippling stabby, dabby type touch to make sure that I'm focusing the light, creating that strong contrast and moving the eye around the figure. And there we go. That's all the leather between color and contrast. You can create all of that vibrancy you need. I hope you like that. If you did give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. And as always, if you've got questions, drop them down below. But thank you for watching. And we'll see you next time.