 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about understanding flesh tone. Flesh is one of my favorite things to paint. It's really fun and what we're going to do today is going to be a fairly pinky skin tone but it's still going to stand in for you to understand the basics of how to paint flesh on any model. I really like models with a lot of flesh but I know that's often very intimidating and there's no reason to be intimidated. So the first lesson here about flesh is it's generally better to start darker and build up. So with this model I had Zenithal primed it and then I started with a nice thin glaze of Indian shadow through the airbrush. If you don't have that color or you don't have an airbrush, a simple contrast paint or a wash or something like Rykel and Flesh A could also get you there or a thin glaze of a dark red purple color. Now I've added in a little bit of Dollar Rowney Pains gray and you'll notice I'm shooting at this you know low angle right just bringing shadows up under the muscle structure. This is again just defining volumes but in a very broad way. When you're doing flesh tone it's important to remember first that the entire volume of the miniature i.e. the whole thing from top to bottom is going to be lit more at the top than at the bottom but each individual muscle is also going to respect that volume. So without applied I also applied some color to other areas just because other areas of color near your flesh will affect your understanding how you see the color. But with flesh tones as I said we start dark and we do that so that we can build up. Flesh tones feel very natural when you sort of build them up because then these the darker more ruddy colors slightly show through and influence the higher layers and flesh is translucent it's not transparent but it's not opaque. Stick a flashlight to your hand and you'll see how translucent it is. So I've begun with a mix of the Indian shadow and some Bugman's Glow here which isn't that much different than my thin glaze but I'm laying that down just reinforcing the color. Now what I'm doing is just reinforcing adding a little more Bugman's Glow and you'll notice I kind of go over the muscles. At this point I do still heat some of those low shadows but I'll sometimes connect to the tissue. The important part to remember here is that when you're highlighting muscle structures you have to push the highlight all the way to the top and when you have separated muscle structures your first couple highlights should connect to between the two. So in other words you don't want to leave each muscle just as an island to begin. Later highlights will focus on defining just the individual volumes but you see how I kind of crossed the line there from the muscle of the shoulder to the muscle of his back. That's because I want to draw those two together with these early layers. Not each muscle is going to carry the full shadow by bringing them across at the top of the muscle structure. You then create the next level of volumetric beneath the entire miniature. So now I'm working in pink flesh. I've gone up to just Bugman's Glow and then now I'm integrating pink flesh basically just taking these half steps up. These initial layers are quite transparent when you're working with these so you're not going to see really huge jumps. And as always you all like I'm working quick kind of wet blending these in and that's fine. You can work fast with these initial layers but do keep in mind that you won't have a good idea of the final color until everything settles and dries as all these paint layers sink into each other as the wetness of the paint evaporates and they get more dim. It's going to have a big influence on how bright it seems. So then with just the pure pink flesh and then we're mixing in some of the pale pink. Again I'm going with a very pink scheme. If you replaced this with any flesh progression you would have much the same effect. And then finally a little bit of the sunray or effectively an ice yellow mixed in for the very high highlights. You'll notice that when I got to the later brighter colors I didn't connect them. That's where I started to just build out the individual muscle volumes but each time I was pushing the highlight all the way to the top of the muscle structure. Okay when I was doing that I wasn't really worried about how it looked. That is to say using a rough layering technique like that and using basically one layer and a little bit of wet blending you're going to get a rough blend. This is where we come to the first secret of flesh tones. Highlight higher than you think you need to go and then glaze back down to bring them together. Don't wash. Wash just get everywhere. Wash is coffee stain. We're doing a controlled glaze. So I made a glaze out of my Indian shadow and I'm very carefully going over most of the miniature. What I'm not hitting is those highest highlights on the first pass. I then let that glaze completely settle. They will be weaker once it's done. By the way if you want to know how to make a glaze video linked up in the top right now. But once that glaze has dried which it will dry very quick because it's very thin paint and it's mostly liquid it's going to evaporate. I'm then doing a second glaze but this time I'm covering the whole muscle structure. By doing one glaze only about half or not the highest highlight maybe three quarters of the muscles and then the second glaze over everything. We end up smoothing it down. If you still see some challenges you can glaze a third time a fourth time. It's a fast easy process. You can see how now it brought all those blends together and gives us a really interesting tone to our skin. Now if you don't want it to be quite this pink you could glaze with your neutral mid-tone flesh tone and achieve the same result. So no matter what color skin you have to be working in. We're going to continue the glazes here and these will look stronger than they are. That's because they're wet and the light is reflecting back into the camera. But these are actually very thin glazes of my high highlights my lighter colors. The important part to understand about skin is that especially when people are outdoors or fighting which is how our miniatures tend to be portrayed skin is sweaty which means it's not only translucent it's satin. This is one of the reasons skin has everything. Contrast of hue, contrast of value, it's satin, it's translucent. That's why I think it can be so challenging but it's actually just following some simple steps. So now I've taken my highest colors which is some of the pale pink mixed with some of the sunray or ice yellow and I've glazed that over those highlights and you can see how much brighter it looked when I initially put it on as it's drying here in real time on camera. Notice how much dimmer it's getting. But I'm glazing this up to again smooth it out and make sure we have that full run of contrast. The satin nature of skin means it needs to have high reflections. Now it's not as bright as say non-metallic metal or something but if you've got a sweaty person out on a sunny day there's going to be some quite bright reflections and so we want to make sure we capture all of that drama and that contrast it really it makes the miniature pop. Okay once those were dry I went back in within a half step so a mix of the pink flesh and the pale pink thinned that to a glaze and then did the next step down on the volume of the miniature. I also used that to connect over some tissue here so not just doing the miniature or sorry the individual muscles but doing some connection points running a thin glaze over some of my deepest shadows to again connect all of that together. We want to avoid that muscle island syndrome right and by pushing the highlights to the top and connecting the upper areas of the muscle structures we can do just that. The other important element of skin is contrast of hue. Skin has a lot of reds in it we have a lot of reds a lot of pinks a lot of purples because there's blood right under the surface of the translucent skin. So here I've grabbed some magenta but again this is chimera magenta I didn't list that originally I'm sorry but you can use any magenta color you like and or any pinkish type color you can even use rikeland flesh shade and it would work fine. I've once again thinned this to an ultra thin glaze basically a filter and I'm running it along into the deepest shadow starting with about 50% or 60% down on any individual muscle. I am running it into all of the shadows again to add color and tone to what would otherwise be more boring shadows. This adds that touch of vitae of life to the the muscles by adding those red tones you make them more interesting and that's really it. With this this process you can get really bright but contrasting and interesting skin tones. If you liked this give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future but as always I thank you for watching this one and we'll see you next time.