 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today we're going to be tackling a subject I've been asked to do multiple times. Today, are you afraid of the dark? I hope not because it's time to talk about how to paint figures in Moonlight. Let's get into it. The strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get into the technique and learn it Vinci V style. A little setup before we head over to the painting desk. The key with Moonlight is that everything is de-saturated. Just think of the moody blue song. Red is gray and yellow white. In darkness, under the pale blue Moonlight, all of the color and the life is sapped out of everything. So our mission today is going to be to learn how to use the universal highlight of the Moon and then along with killing all of the saturation, the intensity, and the life out of our colors while controlling the singular light source. So let's head over to the painting desk and see what we can do. Alright let's talk about Moonlight. So the first thing we're going to do is start with the skin. A lot of these early parts, they're going to seem a little boring. I'm warning you right now because that's how I'm good at making videos. But the reason that I'm starting with the skin is because we want it to be the focal point of attention. And so as we're looking at it, it's vampire skin. It's already very naturally de-saturated. That's why vampires I think look so cool in Moonlight. The sort of pale white skin fits in very well. But I start by placing the highest highlights and the reason I do that is because even though I've put the zenithal over him from the direction of the Moon, it's really important that I start sketching out those directional lights really early. Setting where are those high highlights going to be hitting. And effectively his face is going to become a reference for the rest of the miniature. As I look, I'll constantly be referring back to the face to make sure all these lights align. Now as I start adding shadows to the sort of shadow side of his face and under his extremely sharp cheekbones, I start integrating violet and purple. Now why do I bring in these warm colors into the shadow? Well, when we normally highlight, we often use warm highlights because our figures are meant to be out in the sun. And so we use cold shadows like deep blues and deep blue blacks. But here in this very cold light, this pastel blue we're using as our highest highlight, our shadows need to be warm. And so throughout this, you'll often see me just include intense black, but of course you can also, and I do in some places mix in things like just a little bit of red or stuff like that. There's some reasons, but you'll see in the future of how I integrate warmth in on the opposite side of this. Once I have the face in a position I'm relatively happy with, I then just simply start working up the hair. Now this is important because I need to frame that face and set the next sort of point of light, which is going to be the halo of the hair. And boy oh boy, this guy has like the widow's peak of widow's peaks. Let me tell you what. And so I very carefully start just building up little thin lines in a halo around the top center of his head and the top part of his ponytail and then a few of the edge parts where his hair is flipping up in that long pony tail he has. You can't really notice much of a difference piece to piece because it's almost impossible to shoot something so utterly small. But you can notice when I screw up, which I'm about to do right now, there we go, by putting a big thick line on because I didn't bother to get my paint flowing as well as I should have. We all mess up. In the end, it's fine. It ends up being too fat of a line for his hair. But I can go back in with a darker color and fix it and it still helps me set the highlight in the right place. And in fact, here you can see how I'm fixing it with the darker lines, retracing, reinstantiating some of those shadows and getting them ready to go. The last thing I want to do here with these initial steps is just black out all of the sort of undersuit he has on to just get that nice and dark and then I'll add some very subtle highlights to it. I know at this point I haven't painted a lot of actual colors, but I'm laying down the key elements of this guy and really at this point it's more about setting the light direction. Remember, there are three key elements in play here. One, the direction of the light. Where is the moon? When you're in darkness, there is one primary light source, that moonlight. Everything needs to orient towards that. Two, the light is cold and blue. So that means that all of our lights are going to be the same universal highlight of this cold blue color. Three, the loss of saturation and the general grayness and dimness of colors. That's what we're going to tackle now. So let's get into some actual colors and how we drain the life out of those. All right, now comes the hard part, the actual colors. When we're dealing with all these whites and blacks and things that were already naturally very desaturated, this is easy. But now comes the hard part. And you'll notice I have very complicated mixes on all these colors. I don't just use straight red or straight purple or any or straight brown. I'm always mixing in black or gray or something like that and then further desaturating with my highlights. For example, here with the cloak, I didn't just start with the base red. I mixed in a little violet and a little black to get it off of the true red and desaturated. As I add more of the pastel blue, and I'm really going to show you kind of this whole progression here as I sort of wet blend it out and get it in place of where I want the lights. I want this color to feel, you know, still red. If as a point of fact, this guy was really in like complete darkness with no other light except the moonlight, even this red wouldn't show this true. But it is a miniature and has to have some visual interest. So we need a little bit of artistic license. And then when I mix in the shadows, I just once again take and start integrating more and more of that black. But the whole time I'm working, you'll notice how much weaker that red is than the red that's be over the sword on his back. Right. That's what that starts as. Here's where we end up because the pale, very cold moonlight is going to draw out and soaks to sap away all of those warm tones. And you're not going to get a true read on any color, even here with this dark purple. Now this is a pretty dark purple base, but I didn't just leave it as is. I still integrated in some black because I wanted to kill it. When we desaturate our palette throughout this, we're going to add one of three things. Either we're going to add neutral gray. We're going to add black or we're going to add a highlight. And in fact, by over by instantiating very strong shadows through the intense black and by having very bright highlights, for example, on this satin cloak that also further desaturates the color. The more highlights and shadows that you take up the general volume with, the less saturated the actual area is because the mid tone is where the saturation lives. That's the thing that's actually the color. And this cloak I end up messing around with for a long time. If I was smart, I probably would have just come in here with an airbrush, but I'm not. And I didn't. And this whole time, what I'm really doing is just building up pastel blue. When you incorporate a very cold, white influenced color like the pastel blue into a very transparent color like purple, you will get these very strong layer lines in between each individual element. And that's fine. You don't have to worry about it at this stage. Because the original color is so transparent, we'll be able to fix it very easily later. So what I'm worried about setting at this stage isn't a smooth blend or anything like that. I'm worried about getting the values right and making sure that these things are placed in the right positions. Then I can do like I'm doing here, come back in with that original mixture of elendil violet plus black, thinned way down into a glaze and start smoothing out the edges, knocking back some of the highlights, making sure everything's where I want it. And you can repeat this multiple times as you'll see me do here. This cloak is a very important piece of the overall miniature because it's dominating the back view of the mini and it's such a large space and it's not going to have any other light working except the moonlight. So it really needs to feel like it's capturing that cold moonlight. If I mess this up, the whole image kind of falls apart. And you'll notice here I just start glazing back and forth. Glazes with the pastel blue integrated, glazes with the dark colors integrated. Just slowly pushing it back and forth to smooth out those blends. And then somewhere in here coming up very soon, I realize that I'm not following my own rules for highlighting and fix that. In fact, right here, because we always highlight towards the top and the sticky outty bits as my recent video mentioned. And I had this big spot of darkness and it just didn't read right. By adding this extra highlight in there, now it feels correct as though the sword has pressed into an area where the light is falling and created a depression. There's a dark line clearly on both sides of, but the light is still there. The light would still be in that entire area. And so now it's just time once that's fixed to glaze it back into place again. Same thing bringing out those stronger shadows. Not being happy with the blends yet we're then going into the best way that you can blend with, I would say moderate to low effort, but lots of time. And that is stippling to reinforce some of my highlights to smooth out some of my blends. I just start taking parts of the individual mixture here. I'm starting with the pure pastel blue, but I'm going to work all my way up and down the entire spectrum of all the blends I've done. And I'm just going to stipple. This has two effects, two reasons I'm doing it. One, it's a lot easier to sort of hide the sins of your layer blends even on something like this purple with this kind of a stipple because you're just making tons and tons of tiny dots. And two, I love the look of like satin velvet, shiny cloaks. I just think it looks awesome. And this dude is a completely awesome looking Dracula. So I was like, yeah, let's let's get it going. Of course you would have this crushed velvet cloak, right? Like why wouldn't he use the coolest dude? So having that little bit of texture in there can help bring the cloaked life and separate it as a material from everything else on him. In working with the browns, this is another important color to sap the life out of. Brown is obviously a naturally very warm tone. And we don't want that here. I have a little bit of a brown black mixture on my thumb. That's where I'm going to when you see me going off camera along with a little water. I'm literally just working from like a thumb palette. And I'm just doing that to quickly wet blend out. And you'll notice compared to the original brown black we started with, which still felt, you know, somewhat warm. Now with the added highlight and then this strong shadow we're going to put on the bottom, we really took all the life and color out of that brown and made it so it's a lot, lot, lot more dead. The last major piece we're going to cover here with him is his non-metallic metal. And this is where we really sell the cold blue of the environment. Now, the way I like to do non-metallic metal is to first tint all of the things I'm going non-metallic metal steel is to first tint all the areas I'm going to do non-metallic in, in just sort of a dark blue gray in this case, because that's the undertone I want for everything. So I was just a simple base coat. And then I go in and just do a value sketch. So here I'm taking pure pastel blue and just tracing around where I want light to be. This is not where I want the pastel blue to be. It's where I want the light to be. And there's an important distinction there because I'm putting more pastel blue on the miniature than areas I actually want to be pastel blue. I'm over applying the pastel blue. And in fact, if you sort of squint your eyes at him right now, you can see it already feels like metal because we've got the full dark to light transition. Once those values are in place, once I know I've got all my highlights in the right place, I hold it back, squint my eyes at it, make sure it feels like I'm catching something that is roughly metal and then it's just a matter of smoothing out the transitions. Here I use both that anthracite gray, which is a very blue influenced gray and actually ocean blue, which is a very deep, desaturated, more blue side of the gray spectrum to just repeatedly smooth this out and create the transitions between everything. In doing so, I get two sort of things happening here. The first thing that happens is I get the whole value travel of the non-metallic metal smoothly transitioning. But the second thing I get is that armor feels like it's in a very blue influenced light. And that's really important because that sells that overall ambiance, that coldness. The last thing I do is just grab a little bit of pure white and in places where I want real, real high highlights. Since the metal is shiny and reflective, it needs to go brighter than anything else. And just in those corners and dots and places where light would catch, we just place a few of those around and we're good to go. There you go. That's painting and moonlight. Now you may have noticed I didn't finish the figure. Here he is in his current form, and you might be looking at him thinking, wait a minute, Vince, I thought we were going to paint a model. How come you left sort of the bottom left half of this guy completely undone? That doesn't make any sense. Well, that's because we're going to paint this guy with two light sources. So come back next week when we add some fire because what's best to counteract the cold pale light of the moon but the warm light of the fire that he's looking down on as he stalks his prey? So that'll be next week's video. Can't wait. With this one, though, if you liked it, give it a like. Subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. Don't forget, if you want to take your next step on your hobby journey, we have a Patreon that's down below. You can click on that. It's focused on review and feedback, and you can join an awesome community full of enthusiastic hobbyists on Discord. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one. If you've got any questions, drop them down in the comments below and we'll see you next time.