 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Now, you may wonder why I'm sitting on the ground. Well, I'm sitting here because I'm next to all my slanesh models, which is generally my happy place. And today's tutorial is something that I find eminently frustrating. Today, we're going to talk about painting inner flame, or inner fire, or heat in the center of something. I don't even know what to call it, but we're going to paint it. Let's get into it. Alright, so what do I mean here? Well, I mean we're painting something where the interior is so hot, maybe it's lava, or fire, or magic, or whatever, and it's emanating out. So the center areas are what's lit. This is one of the most common questions I get actually. I get a lot of questions about how to paint this sort of thing. I think because it looks cool in art. There's lots of art from video games, and sort of 2D art from the games we play, of people that have armor, or that are undead, or something like that, and they're sort of fire erupting out from inside of them. And in 2D art, you can render that pretty easily and pretty well. Since 2D art is flat, your brain can wrap its head around light being in the lower recesses in a different way than when something is three-dimensional. As a point of fact, when people ask me about painting like this, my first response is usually, don't do it. Because if you have to ask how to do it, you probably shouldn't do it. I know that sounds like a real jerk rod response, but the reality is that this effect is so easy to look bad. And there's a simple reason for that. In three dimensions, i.e. what miniatures are, they exist in the real world, we expect them to follow the basic rules of light. What I mean by that is, there are shadows underneath light. We expect things like recesses, and the darker parts, the deeper parts of miniatures to be in shadow, to be darker, to be a deeper color. And in fact, that's why if you look at all the washes, things like that, they're all meant to darken the miniature, right? Because the easiest way to paint is to apply a base coat and then you apply a wash for depth. And you're adding that depth, that contrast of value, by putting shadows into the deeper part, where we as humans with human brains and human eyes naturally expect them to go. And part of what this painting does is really invert that on its head. So today I'm going to take you through how to do this, but it does come with a strong warning. This is often hard to pull off, and we'll talk about exactly the challenges you're going to run into, and how you hopefully can resolve them in your own miniatures. So, let's have some fun. Alright, so let's get into it. So, I've primed the model completely in just a neutral gray, and the reason for that is because you don't want to start from black and try to achieve this effect. You want everything pretty neutral, and actually the brighter prime can help, but white is usually a sketchy prime. It can get rough very easily. Just starting from a nice neutral gray is easy enough. I'm then taking the airbrush and I'm using a warm white. This is ivory, and I'm spraying it over all the areas I'm going to want to be glowing. I'm using a warm white because that's going to help reinforce the overall warmth when we get to yellow, orange, etc. A cold, dead white won't look as good. That is to say, if it's over everything. Now, I'm taking some of that Naler roundy white ink. I have mixed this one-to-one with flow improver, and I am just running it over some of the areas and letting it basically act like a wash. I'm not washing the whole model in it. I'm only pushing this down into the areas I know I'm going to want the most heat. I'm also not letting it pool excessively, so I push some in there and then I push it around. Once that's dry, I then take the yellow ink, again with flow improver mixed in. All of these inks are going to be one-to-one with flow improver because I want them to run into the recesses. The key here is the deepest parts need to be the brightest. I'm just running that over everything, making sure in all these areas that are going to be hot, there's a nice yellow, basically, ink that's seeped down into those things. If it stains the other parts, the upper areas, it doesn't matter. You do not need to be careful or clean with any of these steps. Get rough, get messy, it's fine. It'll actually help a little. Now we're going to the flame orange ink. And here the key is I'm doing the same thing I did with the yellow, but I'm not doing it everywhere. So I'm leaving certain areas just with yellow in the deepest recesses, usually around upper spots or joints or things I want to feel the hottest. You're effectively making a heat map, so you want to leave areas near the center of the being or whatever you want to seem as the hottest, still yellow. Everything else gets this flow improver plus orange mix. Now, sometimes that's going to have weird consequences, like it'll run into the eyes of the skull, which feel like they should be glowing, but we can touch that up later, so no big deal. Now what I'm doing is taking a bit of the orange and red, so this is the orange and a whole red mix, and I'm just kind of pushing this in again with flow improver into some of the areas that I want to be farthest away. I'm also taking some of that and covering the raised parts. So you see like the top of the skull, the shin bone, these things that are actually effectively the highest up in the inner parts, the tops of the skulls, all that type of stuff. Now we're just getting this orange, orange, red treatment. Effectively, the farther we go out from the recesses, the darker we need to get. That's what's going to sell the illusion that the heat is emanating from within. Now that we've got that all sketched out, now we need to, and it doesn't look like much right now. I know it looks silly. Trust me, it'll all snap together. Now comes time for a little bumblebee tuna. Let's take our black paint. This is rubber black mixed with just a tiny amount of the whole red, and I'm just going to coat all of the bones. This is a long process. This goes on forever and ever and ever. Now, because of the nature of what this is, where I'm trying to do these careful bones, if this were to be flesh or something like that, like some of our earlier art images, then this would be my next step out from the hot areas. I want mostly this to create the extreme contrast you need. It's also very important that when you're doing this black, that you have it as a pretty opaque coat. So you want to use a paint with a good coverage. This rubber black from AK Interactive is a very good black, especially when mixed with the whole red. You don't want to be doing this all twice and you want it to be solid. You don't want to get any of it down into your hot areas, because they're leaving the cracks and the crevices and the inner areas completely lit, so completely in orange and yellow, which can be a fun time around some of these bone tails. Boy, did these bone tails take a nice long time. Weren't they fun? You want to make sure you get any sides of areas, like on these bones, they have a... They're three-dimensionally popped out, so they have a side. You want to make sure those are all black. You want to have the high contrast. You can't have anything looking like it's hot that shouldn't be hot, that isn't the glowing ember. One of the other things you can do if you've got nice small areas like this is you can just dry brush the black over the top. I'm using just a normal brush, but you see how I'm just kind of roughly dry brushing it? You just paint the whole area yellow or orange and then dry brush over the top. So if you have something like a dragon, you can do the whole thing in yellow, just dry brush in black, with orange ink, like you see me doing here, to kind of stain the deeper yellow areas more orange, as well as to then bring some of that heat up onto the bone. And in fact, that's what I'm doing around the rest of this miniature. I'm taking a very, very thin orange. So this is a glaze consistency, lots of water in here, and still flow improver. And I'm just making sure everything is touched up. I'm covering a lot of the orange, especially in the orange to yellow transition, and bringing it up over the black to just add a little bit of that orange into the black itself and tint it like it's heat. And you can see I'm just doing this all over the model, not really washing, but more just carefully making sure that we don't have like bright yellow immediately going to bright orange with nothing smoothing it out. The glaze smooths it down. Now this model has actual fire on it as well. When you have actual exposed flame, it's very important to make that hotter than any of the other embers or the inner heat because that's actual fire. So here I've taken yellow and mixed it with the white ink, and in the deepest, deepest, hottest parts, so right near the eye, at the very base of the flame, I'm taking that yellow, white, and just putting a little in there. I'm also wear applicable just touching some dots into the skulls. You might not have skulls in your particular item, your painting. But whatever those deepest areas are, you want them to look super hot until you need this very, very, very, very, very small volume of white yellow, very small. You need the littlest amount. Now I'm taking the orange glaze again, running it over the flame, bringing that all together. Your final big step is you want to give the black some character. It's next to fire, so it makes sense that it would have sort of an ash-like element to it. So a nice neutral mid-tone gray, especially along the edges or things like that, can really help pick it out and make it feel more like burnt-ashed bone or something like that. So I'm just here tracing the edges of the little horse, his dead horsey. It also really helps to make the model more readable. One of the challenges when you paint a model completely in black is that it all fades together, and it becomes very, very unreadable. You'll notice I painted the rest of the colors here quite dark. That was so the only thing that stood out was the fire. So everything else is muted, but the fire kicks. That's what you want. When you're doing this inner flame, everything else should be desaturated, muted, turned down. The fire should be your color. The gray helps make the black readable again, and then the neutral colors of your other elements don't get in the way, and keep the model focused where it should be on the fire and the flame and the heat. So there you go. I hope you liked this. If you did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. I do really hope you enjoyed this one. As I said, this is a very challenging project. This is a hard effect to pull off, but I hope this helps you at least try. If you try and fail, don't worry about it. It's tough to sell. Try again. Failing is still learning, and that's never a bad thing. As always, I thank you for watching, and we'll see you next time.