 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about reflected light, specifically motivated reflected light. So here I'm working on Larissa, oh what's her name? This girl, the anniversary model, Larissa Shadow Stalker. This is such a cool model, like this is one of the coolest storm cast, if not the coolest storm cast they've ever made. And she's also by the way, just as a slight aside as we're going here, this is the best sub-assembly model I've ever seen because I'll bring the back of her in. You can assemble this whole part and the shoulder pads the way they attach, it's not split down the middle like some of the early storm cast or anything like that, it just slots right in and hides the seams. Really nice. Anyway, we're going to use the front part here for this example. So she has this very shiny reflective celestial indicators type scheme is what I'm going for here and often times I see people when they're trying to do sort of high non-metallic metal type schemes, highly reflective surfaces, they'll have the light and shadow placed correctly or something but then they ignore secondary lights and that's reflected light. On any surface, light doesn't hit a thing and then stop, it bounces and so what's happening is as light would come past her and impact the ground, it would bounce back up and hit the bottom sides. So what you actually have when you're dealing with non-metallic metal is usually two sets of highlights. So you have a primary highlight which is your primary light here. And then you have your reflected light which is generally going to be, you're going to go from middle to highlight, like I'll just use her chest here as an example. So here's the actual highlight. That would be opposed by the darkest dark, right, it's the terminus of the light and then as we got to the bottom here of this arc right in here in this area, we would have this reflected light. So it would need to be coming back up and be sort of green again, right. And the key is the reflected light is never as strong as your highlight, you're not putting another area of white down here but it should be something like your mid. So again, if we just use my standard one through five scale, one being the brightest area of your miniature and five being the darkest area of your miniature, the reflected light areas need to be like a three with maybe going to a two if there's a sharp surface to catch something. It's kind of the easiest way to define it. But in this case, we're going to do something fun, we're going to do some motivated secondary lighting. So here on my palette, I have a bunch of oranges. Specifically, I have some burnt orange and orange from Pro Acryl. I have some contrast griff hound orange because it's one of my favorite oranges. And I have war colors fluorescent because it is also one of my favorite oranges and it is hyper bright. So fluorescent, regular orange, burnt orange contrast. And what we're going to do is down here on her sort of foot and leg because that'll be the easiest part to show it off, we'll go Darren Latham style and we'll just do the leg. We're going to go ahead and show how those reflected lights should look because the key is I'm going to have her. There's a cold light coming from this direction the way I'm painting it and then there's going to be warm motivated up from here as she's assumingly fighting against this sort of against this fiery waste of chaos or whatever, right? So what's going to happen there in return is we're going to see sort of the normal motivated light happen here on her foot and so like that. And I haven't finished all of the the shading and smoothing of the blending of the primaries and that's intentional. Like this is still quite rough and that's all right because I want to get my initial highlights or my initial reflected lights in there and start working them into the mix so I have the full lighting picture. So I got this to a place pretty fast and then said okay now let's get those secondary lights in so I can kind of balance them, see how much light is being cast in various places and so on. Now when I do the back, when I do the back of her here, obviously her cloak, which is going to be white, is going to pick up a lot of that, you know, some of those undershades will also have to be reflected there. OK, so we're going to start with just our burnt orange here and we're actually going to also use just a little bit of our Green Stuff World Master Medium, which I quite like as just generic medium. I've come to really enjoy it. We're just going to get a little bit of that on the palette. OK, we're going to get a little of that. We're going to grab some of that burnt orange because it's rather soft. You can see it's not very, not very intense. And what we're going to do is we're going to find our shadows here and we're going to remember that same trick. So it goes from the highlight down here at the base of the foot up to the, you know, up through the shadow and then we want to pull that orange into that area. So again, when I'm doing this, you'll notice my brush is always moving in the direction I want that light to go. OK, here on her foot, the reflection is going to be pushed toward the top so that the dark is there. So we just push a little orange there. There's a little star thing here. I don't know if you can really see it, but she has like a little star on her leg. Let me see if I can focus that a little sharper. There we go. There you might see it. Sorry about that. So I would normally run a line down this leg where it would be catching. But unfortunately, that's going to kind of be halted. So it's going to put a little bit in there. Now, the knee is an interesting shape because technically here, the reflected light on a round surface happens sort of on the bottom is where it gets caught. And that's the trick. Every shape has its own sort of way it reflects light. By the way, if you just sort of Google around for images of how light reflects on different shapes, Kujo made a great video about this. Kujo miniature painting made a fantastic video where he walks you through all the shapes and shows all that off. I'll link that in the description because you should absolutely watch it. And frankly, he made, I would say, the seminal video on it. So no reason for me to try to recreate the wheel there. But you can also just Google around for images of it and you can find that what that looks like. And then we can't forget about this little piece here because this is pointing directly at the light source. So it's also going to have a little bit of that orange. Now, in the initial pass, our orange here is going to be pretty weak. And that's just fine. It looks strange because suddenly we just have this bright orange, which just makes it look brown and kind of dirty. That's no problem. Because we're going to have to go back and smooth all that together. But we'll do that later. The key right now is we want to get in there. We want to understand and just place some highlights. OK. So again, then now I've gone to the sorry, I've gone to the brighter orange, the just regular orange, as it were from Provapril. And now we're going to come in to the tops of those areas where it would really be catching or wherever the light would be the strongest. And we're just going to drop a little bit of that bright orange right in there. So that way we can see that fiery reflection there. Now, part of what sells an illusion like this is when you can't see things that don't have the reflection, right? Your eyes are very well trained to spot inconsistencies. So when it's not reflecting up there, it looks different. So we just put a little orange in there. That little thing would catch. OK, so now we're going to get our highest highlights. Grab a little bit of that medium. We go to our fluorescent orange. This is specifically like this stuff is radioactive. And it's just for the actual edges. The light catches. The points where it's a hundred percent on. Now, the key with this that we're going to do is just like we normally have our edges. Remember, all these metallic edges are going to be highly reflective. So that's where we grab our bright orange as opposed to going to something like white or whatever. And I had already edged them, edge highlighted them because I wanted them to be caught here and to make my life easier. So I just kind of edge the edge highlighted them with a whitish color. And so now we're going to come in and we're going to make sure we catch all those edges. So for example, here on the bottom of her foot, this part, this part of the foot right here is facing up. There we go. Sorry. Touched it with my brush. This part of the foot is facing up, but the bottom side, the underside of it is not. So that underside should have a little orange fire catch on it. Right. Same, by the way, with like right here on the back side, where it's in that angle that's facing toward it should be orange there. Same, by the way, with all of these ridges on the bottom of her foot, all these little edges of these armor flights would naturally catch this highly reflective orange. OK, it makes a little bit of that regular orange in here to weaken it out into the furlough fluorescent as we get farther away because we do want to reserve that brightest orange, that that fluorescent. We only want that true real hot orange. Where it's the closest to the fire right there at the point of no return. All right. So you can see now how we've got that secondary reflection placed in there, but it's really, really strong, like it's so super stinking strong. Like it just looks like she's got fire on her, which I mean, it's kind of cool, admittedly, but not really what we want. OK. So. So what we've got to do then is go back into our colors that of the rest of the armor, whatever it happened to be. And we need to kind of bring that in line, right? Now, one thing we can do here, that's why I had the contrast paint because I have some of my green, which I'll grab and bring over here to the side of the pallet. So this is just some despair green here that I was using. And I'm going to bring in a little bit of that contrast in with it. And that's really naturally thin. And what it's going to get when we put them together is this green, this very green orange shadow color, which is exactly what we want on the edge. Because remember what sits right on the other side of that reflected lighting is your terminus, your dark point of light. So we go through the edges of where we put that burnt orange, right? And we just kind of smooth each one of those out. We can grab our brighter color, start mixing that into it a little bit as we start to push closer and closer back to the normal armor tone, right? We can just kind of smooth that down with a nice little 50 50 mix and we just kind of keep pushing it around until we get a nice smooth transition between the two. If your orange is too bright, like if that feels too bright, you can always take some of that same shadow color that you made. We can work it down into a nice thin glaze and we can just bring that right over everything and knock it right back into into the colors next to it. Just bring it right back into line. OK, and make that orange a little softer. And that's the key with this. It's a very subtle effect, this sort of reflected lighting, right? Because it's not the type of thing that you can just have that you can you're going to be able to apply in like one simple coat and call it a day because every angle has to tell this story. So like they have the bottom side of this knee right here. It would need to be like it would be catching the light as well, right? So every angle, every side has to tell the same story. The reflection has to be consistent where the eye will pick out those flaws and it will ruin the illusion. So like right here, I've got a real carefully come in and get just the bottom side of that, right? So that way it's reflecting up there, too. All right. So what I'm going to do now is keep playing around with this, push these kind of basic colors around on the rest of the model to see where I like the fire, exactly where I want it to get all my and that's that's just it. This takes there's no exact easy answer. This I think when a lot of people ask for stuff like this, they expect that we'll just step one, I'll do this thing. Step two, I will apply this paint step three, apply this paint. Now I am done. No, that's not how this works. Like doing something like this with this motivated, reflected lighting is a matter of consistently going back and forth and checking the work and seeing how it looks and does it catch and does it not. And so on and so forth, right? So that's what we're going to do. So I'm going to play around with that for a while and I will be back. All right, we're back and I zoomed way in so I could show you really everything in detail, how it's looking. So we've done some more work to smooth it out and I've added the orange all over. And I want to show you what the the the reflective light looks like both in the motivated lighting color and in a non motivated lighting color. So I did the back, obviously, because the flame is coming from this direction. So here you can see how we have the deep shadows. You know, right? And then the orange is there. So it's a very subtle effect because we don't want her to be, you know, completely inflamed. Like the idea is that her armor is catching some of that light, right? And you'll notice how in all the cases. It'll go from a bright through the spectrum into the sort of terminal point and then up into the reflected light, right? And same here where like the lights coming down, it's going to hit the top of her knee. We go through a dark shadow and then into the actual light reflection. And then back here to this thing that's facing up and is going to catch that then the bottom edge of it reflects orange. So it's a lot of back and forth where you've got to make sure all your edges like you can see this edge right here, right here, how it has a little bit of the orange coming up from the underside. And I'll have to carry this through to everything else. So like when I do the this gladius here or whatever, right the underside of this and this edge and down here will also need to catch it. The key with the brightest orange is you want very little so like in this case, I'm doing fire, but it could be any secondary light source because I'm using this is I think it's just a nice contrast with this sort of turquoisey green color of the vindicators. But whatever the regardless of the color of your light, you want the very brightest of the reflected light to still be weaker than say whatever your your highlight is. So whether you're doing a normal secondary reflected light of the ambient light coming down, hitting the ground and bouncing back up or whether you're doing a motivated light source like this, the brightest your secondary light should get should be far less bright than the highlight your actual motivated light source is doing. Assuming you're working with you know this kind of secondary light. Now there's another version of this where there is no primary light source where she's lit only by this motivated lighting. That is a whole another video and a whole separate that's a whole separate ball of wax. But let's flip her around here and you can see on the back side where this is obviously not exposed to any of the flame, right? So the normal highlight is up here on her leg. We pass around through a shadow because this is a standard. The leg is basically a standard cylinder. And then we get to the secondary reflection point, right? Where that is motivated from here even on the flat. We tried a little bit of having two different reflection points. You can see it here on this leg where here's the primary light coming down and hitting and then under here it's I don't know if you're actually going to be able to see it on camera or not. Let me see if I can turn her. You can see there's that very weak secondary light right in there, right? So it doesn't always need to be strong it just needs to be present. And you can see how a little bit of that orange passes through onto the back again in the deepest shadow here in this part of the leg because she's standing like this against the fire and when you look at that there's just that little bit that's poking out there that would catch some of that orange, right? So you want to make sure that any of those light catches, edges, the brightest spot, that's where you hide that brightest color like here on the edge of her foot where the storm cast feet have this very sharp angle down the middle, right? So you have that kind of a thing. Now looking at that at that angle it looks kind of silly like it looks a little bit too intense that transition from that orange to that dark so I might have to go and adjust that I might have to bring up some of this lighting here like all of this is constantly looking at your work like that rotating it and making sure that you have all the elements working in sort of this balanced harmony they don't it does not showing up real well on camera but like each one of the abs has a little dot of orange here in this lower corner away from the the environmental lighting down into the motivated light for whatever reason that that orange just will not show I can't figure out why but it's there I promise and then you have to carry that through to everything else so that's sort of your secondary reflections the real key to remember is the shape of the thing so like the the cylinder is a nice easy example practicing on legs is actually a pretty good way to learn like space marine legs and stuff like that storm cast legs because they tend to be just pretty straightforward cylinders in a lot of cases which means you're going to have a primary light that's going to go down through a mid tone basically your one into your two right three four and then like on a top shadow like this I probably go to four then we come back up and through into the highlight for the reflected light and then down all the way back to five and you can see underneath there is where the darkest light is or the darkest shadow sorry but though practicing on those kind of columns as you get those rotations is the way to sort of the best way to kind of practice it learn it get it internalized and it's a fun trick because it feels realistic when you can directionally look at the light and say okay I see where all of it's happening you know for example and you've got to really look around the model because you can see like right here she has a little bit of orange under the bottom there you got to find all those little places where light would bounce your brain is going to be really really good at finding things that are incongruent and making it look fake and it's tough because when you're the one painting it you're so close to it it's often hard to tell so my best recommendation if you want to try something like this with reflected lighting whether it be this style where you're all in the same tone or whether it be this style where you have a motivated source of a reflected light is to just it's okay settle in place your lights like that's why I started by very roughly placing in those lights right because I didn't want to I wanted to make sure everything kind of worked as far as where was it going and then from that point it's just refined refined refined and that's what I'm going to have to now spend many hours doing is just you know touching each little area making sure every blend is smooth making sure all the edges that I want to catch that should be catching have appropriate lighting on them all right we're back sorry for the quick jump there I actually shot some of this and then decided to edit in a third portion here so I wanted to show the model and my continued work with the lighting so as you can see I've added in the rest of the colors and you know we've worked on all the other elements here and continued to bring that fire up into the other parts and I just want to kind of talk about the continual adjustment when you're doing something like this so one of the things you'll notice is that the leg has a lot more orange on it and we've gathered a lot more of it towards this edge because as I thought about this it's much nearer to the source of lighting so I wanted to touch on a couple important elements to keep in mind here as you're readjusting this one of the things people often try to do when they just start painting as they see a cool osl effect and they're like I want to do that too how do I do it how do I what paints do I use and it's like no no no no no the like I encourage you to try stuff like this it's awesome please do that's how you learn I'm just saying that there's a lot to think about this is you know one of the more complicated effects you can try to replicate and so I want to point out a couple different interesting elements here one you need to think about the proximity of the element to the motivated light source so in this case the fire is coming from over here on this side where the tip of my brush is so things here in this area should be more orange than things say over here or up here all right because as the the light moves it's getting weaker as it travels up right similarly you need to think about the surface texture of what your what your surface is so for example this very shiny metal which I've said through the the highlights up here is highly reflective needs to very much reflect a bunch of this fire whereas this soft leather of the of the the sheath on her sidearm right not as much because it's it's a very soft color and it's a very dark color which is the next thing you need to think about right if something is white it will show a lot more of the reflected color if something is dark it naturally absorbs more light in the same way that you know in general something like the black of this paint brush is going to it's real glossy but like there's a lot you're not getting a lot of the color of the world around it but if I held up a shiny you know sort of white object it would show a lot of the colors in the world so you want to think about what this is the non-metallic gold if we look under here you can see is reflecting a lot of it and you notice that down here at the bottom part it's reflecting brighter than up here at the top part where the angles are facing the fire similarly here where we have this tabard that's kind of furling out right here we turned this into the orange and we had the light gather around the edges with these these edges being the the most highly lit parts right so and that's just what I've tried to do is to carry this all the way up so you can see how like these two of this little these things have a name and people have told me the name and I just can't lock it in my head these little leather strappy things these two because they're in the path of the light and not blocked by the rest of the tabard they're catching a little bit of the orange this one's not right same here all the way up and like looking at this I realize I need to increase the orange on the bottom of this tabard handle a little bit I don't quite have enough there because it's barely it in reality there's a little bit of orange but it's not showing very well to you on camera but it needs to be soft because again dark color you know moving away from the flame that kind of thing so that's the kind of considerations I'm continually as I'm painting these other elements I go back and I readjust the reflection on the armor I glaze in a few more layers of the orange or the dark orange brown and I see how I like the look of that all right so one of the key elements is just a what material is it reflecting off of be what color is the reflective surface and how well is it going to show the light so a dark matte object should have the lowest amount of reflection a bright white highly reflective object or something in that light color should show the most of the of the color right and then see how close is the object in question the portion of the manager in question to the actual to the actual source of motivated lighting those are the things you want to keep in mind now of course I've only got her done with the fire I also did the back part here we'll go ahead and line her up on camera see if I can get her in line there do do do do do there you go so now what I've got to do is basically take a picture with the two of them kind of layered together like that and then I need to figure out where exactly the orange is going to fall on here so probably what it's actually going to mean is me pulling them off their little sticky bases putting her together getting a good picture of what that looks like so I can then sketch out the lighting and put it on here this is where we come to a tricky phase because I've got to match this which currently has no orange on it right to this which has a bunch of the motivated lighting and again this is a white sort of satiny cloak so it's going to reflect a whole lot of light coming back so still quite a bit to do all in all but that's okay it's a fun project I hope this was very helpful for you in thinking about reflected lights and motivated lighting I hope this gave you a lot of interesting elements to think about I know this was a little long and kind of rambly but there's just a lot to unpack here this is one of those techniques that's a lot less about the application of the paint and a lot more about the science and the theory behind the paint so at any rate I do hope you enjoyed this one give it a like if you did subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future we have new videos here every Saturday if you have a suggestion for a future topic go ahead and drop that down in the comments if you had any questions on this drop those down too I always try to answer every question but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time bye bye