 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're gonna do something fun we're gonna paint most of a figure and We're gonna do that with the new lady of vines which games workshop was nice enough to send me early So thank you very much. I really really love this figure I think it's really gorgeous and I wanted to use this as a chance to talk about resolving things like wood and Flowers and surfaces like this That might be a little samey like most of her is sort of the same material, but we're gonna make them interesting Not probably what the video title is gonna be Let's get into it. Let's strict techno man sir that is fancy V Let us get to the technique and learn it in CV style as I mentioned The lady of vines is a really compelling figure, but the challenge with figures like this She's mostly made of wood now They gave her some shoulder pads and maybe a couple other little elements that are meant to I guess be different be meant to be metal Which is kind of strange that this tree person has bunch of metal built into them But I'm not asking questions ever and you probably shouldn't either and so today We're gonna walk through and I'm gonna basically share with you my tips and tricks for how we make figures like this a little more Visually interesting while still painting them fast and efficiently. This should be really fun Let's turn our lady of vines into a lady of cherry blossoms Let's do this The paints are gonna roll up at the top and we're gonna cover basically all of this model So I'm really gonna be talking about more what I'm thinking and why I'm doing what I'm doing My initial instinct here is just to get some base brown color down. She has made of wood seems reasonable enough Wildwoods quite dark. So it gives me a nice dark base to work from I'm not using straight wildwood Nor am I pre thinning it instead I go into the bottle apply it and then I go into a bunch of contrast medium and Smooth it out. I find this works a lot better and gives you more even sort of coverage across the model Walls still collecting it in the recesses The journey here over the rest of the highlighting on the wood is gonna be all about bringing out and creating texture So wood is naturally quite rough When we often paint, I think smoothness becomes sort of this Thing we're trying to achieve as though it's some magical property that will make the paint job exceptional One of the reasons I love painting Sylvaneth is because they free you from the shackles of such non-sensory And instead most of the time when I'm painting you're gonna see I'm painting in thin staccato lines and dots and things like that intentionally not trying to properly blend it or something like that But my goal here is to create texture namely wood texture Now I am focusing in this texture on the areas where the highlights would normally be on the model. So her Right knee here is extremely far forward. It's a natural place where a highlight would fall So we're going to as we build up through these browns and whites and such We're going to really focus the texture in those areas And I actually have two purposes here one to reflect the light but two also to show sort of the I don't know new growth of wood. It seemed more visually interesting if the edges of her armor were sort of constantly regenerating and growing Kind of like a mouse's teeth, I guess and so as I build this up I'm not worried too much if I create too much contrast or too much texture You can knock it back quite easily later And so the advantage to this is you can really just go nuts and have fun I think Sylvaneth is truly one of the most fun armies to paint because of the freedom to use lots of different colors lots of different textures and In the end be able to integrate all sorts of things like contrast and washes and just have a good time So as I push higher and higher here, you'll notice I don't always cover the exact same space But I'm always trying to bring out that texture again continuing these little staccato lines and dots Now I take this quite bright in the highlight areas But you'll notice that it's only those most highlighted spaces that get these final touches So the center of the face that I want to draw attention to maybe the base the neck the very top of her chest The very stuck-out knee the top knuckles The edges of the branches above her shoulders that are sprouting these grappy grappy vines I want to make sure that those areas have a lot of differentiation But I still want to also be able to bring them back in and this contrast paint that I'm using here It's really all about creating more additional color and tonal variation By taking this thinly using it more like a filter Over some of the lines. I already have you get a different effect than if I just tried to build up through the brown The brown skeleton horde Contrast is going to act like a great filter that sort of integrates all these different Lines and color variations that I layered together into a more harmonious single Figure while also creating more visual interest It also lets me hide some of the maybe shoddier lines or things like that where my brush wasn't quite in as much control as I would like While also then creating new and great tones. So it's good all around Notice that a lot of what I'm doing here is trying to resolve and create lots of changes between light and dark Now that's a sort of understated thing I could probably do a whole video on it And maybe I will in the future But one of the great tricks to painting miniatures is to just alternate between very light and very dark repeatedly and close together Look at paint jobs. You really enjoy and really look at them. Don't just look at them Maybe see them you'll notice that they tend to alternate light and dark quite often in very bright sharp changes That's often what makes a model look clean compelling and keeps your eye moving around it So that's why we're doing it here, especially with things like the wood to integrate these elements in So being relatively happy with the wood now It's time to move on to the other colors and we're gonna begin here with the vines Now I wanted something that was a bit unusual So I chose this oxide green light in the end. I'm not sure if it was the right choice. You could use any green I think maybe I should have gone with a more deep foresty green But it seemed an interesting choice and I wanted to play with it Some part of painting models has to be fun and experimentation and trying things even if it doesn't work out perfect We still always learn and that's valuable in and of itself But I like to the tone of this. There's a little bit of yellow in it and it seemed interesting I also took a little bit of this as a glaze and worked it around what I saw as those fresh growing wood tree especially like new Bark or something or new fresh heartwood when it's growing will often have a slight tinge of green to it I think of it in my head like a banana though. I know that's not great and not correct But I wanted to work a little bit of that in Maybe show a little bit of moss a little bit of life a little bit of growth and again always pushing more color into areas That are otherwise completely in neutral tones Now I had to bring together the green with the wildwood so a simple mix and a glaze over the top Smoothes those two out. One of the nice parts is that those two paints just work really well together Brown and green just go really well and so that you can hide the sins of that layer line really easily Deciding to re-instantiate some of the deeper tones and recesses. I'm effectively made a wash out of the Green-black ink and I'm just running that over all of these vines It also you'll see I take it all the way up to the sort of root where the vine is sprouting to once again hide that transition line But by working this ink in here. That's very dark, you know, green black is a pretty dark ink I just mixed this ink by the way with a little bit of water and a little bit of flow improver bang bang Bob Jerome Well now we've got a wash And I was able to sort of get those deeper shadows back in place But the other way I could build contrast was by taking the edges of the vines up So with increasing amounts of buff into the oxide green I start picking out the individual vines Focusing especially on the edge, but not only the edges. I do crawl back up to the areas of the vines that would also be Sort of at the top or extremely lit by light wanting to make sure that's really captured As a side note, this was an almost impossible miniature to film painting So I apologize if some things happen to be on the edge of the screen or slightly out of focus This girl is truly wild with how much she's spreading every you know out all over the place and Proved an interesting and constant challenge to actually film what I was doing so great pick to film painting a whole model I knew I wanted to do something with the chest to break it up. She has this sort of ornate Pattern around there that's clearly some kind of different material So I decided to take it into the same green vines. It makes sense if she's the lady of vines She probably has this sort of vine iconography on her chest quote-unquote armor Just like anybody else would have you know a key aquilas or whatever else they have on their chest And then I just needed to put in that nice black line to get that separated and really make sure that the green Stood out from the lighter woody colors that were around it and in the end I like how that worked It actually felt sort of like a naturalized Take on what would be a standard warrior's metal armor. So I thought that came out pretty well Hugh Hugh variation I talk a lot on this channel about tonal variation and here it's important as well When we're dealing with neutrals like wood Right, so a lot of this figure ends up being some color of brown or maybe even you want to go dark wood Maybe it's like black or something like that, but it's wood. So it's going to be a neutral tone Browns are by their default As an acrylic paint somewhat uninteresting to the eye as I've said in the exploring colors brown video Only 3% of people list brown as their favorite color However, Hugh Those things on the color wheel so not white not black not browns not tans anything like that The colors that exist around the color wheel tend to be much more compelling to human eyes So we're really going to look for opportunities to work those colors in in a compelling way and in this case We're going to use the soft soft Complementary colors of this off green and pink to create something that's visually compelling or at least I hope so You'll be the judge of that in the end. I suppose. Let's get back to painting Our tones thus far have been fairly desaturated or or neutral all the woods even the green is a fairly desaturated green It's not really a wake up and slap your mama green But now it's time to put some real pop into this and so of course since I've got green Well, obviously it's time to get out the pink And I knew I wanted to kind of cherry blossom feel to this teal and pink or turquoise and and You know sort of magenta and these kinds of green and pink colors just work really well together and they're all variations on the same sort of complimentary type of scheme and Boy oh boy does she have a lot of little leaves. I didn't even realize this until I started painting them all in But I want to really make sure that these stand out. This is going to be my Really intense color on the model and I want to make sure it's balanced all around It's a good chance to use an intense color because the leaves are so spread out all over the model I can go really poppy while still staying in balance And I can move up to something like the old rose here and really trace and create a lot of interest in these leaves Make them feel a little bit more like cherry blossoms while still maintaining the impact of the bright pink all over and you might think to yourself isn't tracing these three lines all Over every single leaf on this girl top and bottom a bit insane Yes Yes, it is it took um took some time But I think in the end it's worth it because it just looks really cool So you know sometimes you go the the extra smile Then I just took a bit of the pink and just kind of touched the edges of every leaf The goal here was to make sure again We're always creating that nice value contrast and little bright spots to keep the eye moving around the miniature Especially since the vines are nice enough to be in a wonderful compositional circle Because they're in that sort of a shape they do us a favor and so by having these bright spots all around We can make sure to keep the eye moving Let's talk about pop colors pop colors are the extra color you add into your Model that really only exists in a minimal way that needs to exist in a small balanced way around the model Now when you've got this sort of green and pink what else can you do but get into some turquoise And blue green So this was my choice here And I wanted to make the little bugs the little her Weapon which by the way could not be at a more odd angle for filming It's like directly under the vine turned at an odd angle vis-a-vis her and her face It doesn't show up in photos at all. So super fun placement on that spear really great a plus My only part of the model I really didn't like was the positioning of the spear and if I had my druthers I would I should have cut it And then repositioned it but hey didn't think of it at the time By building this up I'm working into Extremely bright poppy blues If if I did a lot of this if for example, I took her her armor that's now blacked out and did it with this color It would be completely overwhelming to the miniature You really have to be careful when you get into these bright poppy colors Not only do you need to watch and you know appropriately desaturate them Which I'm doing through these editions of white and gray where I'm you know increasing their tint To weaken them and weaken the saturation of the color But also notice that it doesn't really exist a lot. It's gems. It's her weapon. It's these little bugs It's her eyes. So it's very small touches But having a really bright intense color But used in very small amounts again can help to complement The overall motion of the eye on the miniature keep it moving and keep it visually interesting providing additional tonal variation And most of what I'm doing here is just the same things you've seen me do in other videos working up sort of my standard non-metallic blue kind of crystalline crystalline weapon for her spear so on and so forth But the goal was to create something that was interesting Now this is my magic gold mix if you want to see this that video is linked up above It's too complicated to explain the recipe but you can watch that video and learn how to make it One of the most common requests I got is what do you do with that gold mix? Once you do can you highlight it and shade it and the answer is oh, yes And we will do so here and in attempting to show that I actually screw up This is a big mistake part I use rinox hide to shadow down this gold generally which works fine in most cases However, what I didn't contemplate here was that by using rinox hide, which is itself quite close to Wildwood and how I resolved the other wood patterns is I was actually making the gold look more like wood oops So by integrating a lot of the same colors I kind of make this whole model look like the armor is the same as the wood but slightly shinier Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a bad thing. I'm not sure in the end how I felt about it I would love your opinion. Tell me what you think look at the final photos and tell me if you think I screwed up Um, but then I highlight it with just a little bit of pale burnt metal mixed in there To really pop the shine up catch all the edges things like that and with that She's all done There's the figure all done. We're going to roll it over the top here while I'm talking If you want to see how to make the base that was in a previous video you can find linked up above so go check that out Uh, I really hope you enjoyed this. This was a very fun very very fun miniature to paint and I really liked her She adds to my Sylvaneth army, which I'm excited about because I haven't had an occasion to paint anything for that army in several years If you liked this give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future We have new videos here every saturday If you've got questions, I didn't answer drop those down in the comments below. I always answer every question If you want to take your hobby to the next level, we do have a patreon You can join down below focused on review and feedback and helping you along on your hobby journey You also get to be part of a great discord community full of enthusiastic incredible hobbyists So thank you so much for watching this one. I really appreciate it as always We'll see you next time You