 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about colored non-metallic metal or in other words non-metallic metal that's reflecting light. So this is when you want especially bright and shiny non-metallic metals that are picking up the light pollution of the environment around them. So here we've got the backside of Larissa Shadow Stalker or whatever her name is, the storm cast that was in last week's video and she's got some fire down here on her base or she will. So that last week you saw me talk about placing the reflected lights and she's more or less in a good place but now it's time to do the actual blade and the way her blade is facing the top half here, this side, will be sort of away from the fire and so we're going to use a colder scheme for it whereas the bottom side is very much directly facing down toward the fire and so we're going to infuse some warmer tones in that. So let's talk about what's on our pallet here. I have both a warm and cold pallet set up so let's talk through it. Over here I have some Daler Rowney white FW white ink and some golden heavy body acrylic titanium white. Next up we've got some Warcolors Turquoise 4. We have some Dark Sea Blue right here from Vallejo and then we have some Pains Grey Blue Black ink. On the warm side of it we have some Proacryl Black Brown, we have some Proacryl Orange, we have some Scale 75 Kokum Copper, it's a really nice sort of orange yellow color, it's very ochery and then we've got some Ice Yellow, our favorite traditional fun from Vallejo which is our favorite bright highlight for warm colors. Okay, so I'm going to bring my paper towel in here, get my water all positioned and let's get to it. So here I'm working with a size one brush from Monument, it's from their Bomb Wick line so this is a Sable brush and what I want to do first is just understand sort of the way the blade is going to look. What I mean by that is it's important for me to figure out where exactly am I going to place my light reflections and given that it's kind of at a downward angle like I don't know how well you can see that vis-a-vis like the normal angle but she's holding it at a downward slant. So I want to gather light here at the tip on the cold side and I know I want to gather some light here on the warm side so given that it feels to me like we've got a 3-2. When I say a 3-2 what I mean is three spots of highlight opposed by two spots of highlight. There's no hard rule on this, I just like sort of thinking in those terms. You can have the same, there's lots of different ways you can do this. There's a million billion billion ways you can reflect non-metallic metal but in this case we'll do a nice 3-2. It presents a sort of even pattern and I quite like how it looks. So what we're going to do is we're going to start with our critical element which is some Flow Improver, I've used it so much I've wiped the name off but this is some Warcolors Flow Improver which I really like. I just like their mixture, I think it works really well. So there you go, sometimes people ask me what Flow Improver I like, well that's the one. Although you can go buy Liquitex from the art store, I have some of that as well and it's a perfectly great product, no issue at all. And what I want to do is actually see if I can move my palette on frame here just a little without getting too in the way. We're going to take just a little bit of that turquoise. We're going to grab some of that white ink and a good amount of that heavy body white. We're going to make a couple different mixes of it here. And Flow Improver is great when you're working with heavy bodies because you want them to actually be going and mood doing something. Now there's other ways you can work with heavy body acrylics where it doesn't require you to do this. So you can place and paint on the miniature but for our purposes here we want to keep it moving. Let's actually try to get that part out of there so we get our clean white. We'll just bring this down and that'll be our very white area. OK, so I'm going to avoid any true white at this moment. You can see even my color here has some blue infusion and that's what I want. OK, I've got kind of three shades of it there that all are before we get to the the darker color. And so now what I'm going to do is go ahead and just kind of place that where I want it. Now, I should note that as I just kind of move quickly, smooth the paint out. Then I'm going to want probably a small highlight here. So let's go ahead and drop that in. The nice part about just kind of placing these things first as I can see how they balance. And then let's go ahead and let's get a nice one right back here at the back. OK, sorry. Tough angle to work on camera. OK, so we just kind of drop those in there. Just kind of taking a look, see how I feel about that. Then we'll go into the next color, this next blue. And I'm just going to go ahead and cover over some of my previous work. This is going to be real thin and that's all right. Probably a little too thin, honestly. So we just kind of place that blue in there. I'm just having to be very careful of that gold I painted because I don't feel like repainting it, OK? So we kind of just smooth out those edges. Then we're going to get more into the regular straight turquoise. You notice how each time I'm not placing them right next to each other. I'm covering a lot of my previous work and that's intentional. I'm also tending now at this point to make these hashes to paint in this hashed style. So oftentimes I'll say paint with the side of the brush. You get something smoother. But in this particular case, I want this to have a little bit of a feel of these hashes. So I'm purposely using the tip of my brush like this just to create those those lines because those are going to be beneficial to me in the long run for actually forming my shape. OK, all right. So now let's take a little bit of that dark sea blue. Let's get a dog hair mixed in. Always a fun part of working in my office. We'll mix a little bit of that turquoise. Again, get that flow improver in there so we've got it moving. I like to move it to move it. Move it. So there we go. Right, just kind of cover over this right here. Again, kind of taking this hashing mentality right where we're doing these in sharp, thin, repeated lines. You notice I keep then going back to the previous color, pulling a little bit of that in when my brush is still wet. OK, and then I'm going to go ahead and pull the edge of that. It just helps make my job later a little bit easier. Then we're going to go ahead and go straight into the straight dark sea blue. Nice, little thin version of that here. We'll get a little broader at the bottom. Create some directionality. So in other words, I'm starting thin at the top. And you see how my lines just expand as I come toward that middle line. And finally, we're going to take just a little bit of that ink. Bring that in there. That's real dark in here, just in the center of this top shadow. I'm going to deepen that up because I don't want the I don't want the bottom shadow to have that much depth. OK, so now we've got a nice range of colors there. OK, so I understand exactly what I'm dealing with. It lets me squint my eyes. So if you kind of let me see if like I suppose I could try to fuzz the camera, but then I'll never get it focused again. But the idea is you just kind of squint your eyes and look at it and say, All right, does that look like about correct? I think the answer is yes. Obviously, we're going to do a lot of work to smooth it out later. Now we're going to do the other side of the blade. Won't this be a fun challenge on on camera? So here again, I'm going to start with a little bit of the regular heavy body white touching that ink just to get it moving. We're going to bring some of that ice yellow in there. So here I know I want my highest highlight to oppose the shadow on the top. So OK, we just kind of lay that in there. But then I'm going to bring in just some regular ice yellow. Sorry, I'm just trying to figure out the best way to actually paint this on camera. I would not normally hold the brush five miles off the tip, but I don't have a choice here. And we're going to grab some of that ice yellow. We're going to pull in some of this copper color and get a nice mixture there. Always still working in these hashes. Go for a bit of that straight copper. Here we want to be real light touch. OK, we're going to grab a little bit of that brown, a little bit of that orange, which kind of pull them together. Get all that mixed in toward the tip of ourselves. Nice shadow there. So we can see now we have the cold opposed by the warm. So now that we have that sort of base laid down, it's ugly or definitely ugly, but that's all right. I'm going to move this off now that you can sort of see how I'm working with this and the colors I'm working with so I can actually work on the sword more easily. So at this stage, you want to let everything dry. But then the goal is to just start bringing these colors and smoothing them out. Now, the other thing I want to do here at this stage, when it's still very rough, is I'm going to make just some pure white and we'll grab some flow improver and get a nice reason. We like the heavy body in there is it's so absolutely pigment rich that it just makes it really easy. Any light application of the brush is going to get paint on there and it's going to be rather strong and bright. And the other thing I want to do at this stage is we're going to go ahead and give the blade a nice edge highlight. Now, the reason we do this here and not later on is because I'm going to do it multiple times over the course of working with this sword. But by repeatedly doing it, it allows me to sort of like check how it actually is going to look and determine whether or not I think it's actually like in line with how I want it to come out. So again, just side of the brush, nice light touches. And there we go. We'll take a little bit of that white and really smooth it out that tip there. Make sure it's nice and bright. OK, so now we have our line sort of separating everything. And now it's just a lot of refinement and pushing the colors around. So like right now we we want to run this contrast, but we don't want it to be obviously this sketchy. All right. And we don't want to have it completely opposed with something that has no steel in it at all. So this was more of like the temperature matching and the highlight matching. What I'm actually going to do is slowly start to work a little bit of this on both sides, because it's not like this blade is so perfectly light bounces off of things. There would be a little bit of pollution on both sides. So what we do is we start making some glazes out of our water. And we're just going to start pulling that over that area that's dark. A lot of people, I think, when they look at, you know, sort of finished work, they think, wow, that must have had a lot of a plan and people must have really known what they were doing. When, in fact, often it's just pushing paint around. I think this is sort of the secret that the people ultimately have to learn when you're trying to advance your painting is you're never going to get a thing right the first time. It just doesn't happen. You kind of have to just keep playing with it and pushing the paint around and seeing how it looks. And does that fit yet? We're going to grab a little bit of that orange and work some of that in. I'm also going to grab a little bit of that dark STC blue up here. So we get kind of a nice blue-orange color. Pull my palette back in, get that real thin and we're just going to kind of work that into the blade here around this middle part. And the reason I'm using that and bringing that into the shadow is because I wanted to feel like there's still steel there, right? We don't want to lose that completely. OK, so now let's go for that 50-50 of our ice yellow in that mix and again, we're going to actually pull that over everything, OK? Now we can start to see how that's forming there. But. Still too a little bit too much of a hard transition. So we're just going to take some of that mid copper. We're just going to go right over it like that, right? Just kind of smooth all that out. Let that dry while that's kind of sitting. Then we're going to take the top part of the blade. We're going to thin some of that turquoise way down. We're going to do the same thing up here. That's one of the keys when you see and you hear that like non-metallic needs that contrast, it does. But you can't establish that all in one straight shot. It's a lot of very careful work. Back and forth. And you don't actually need to go all the way to the dark or all the way to the black. You can rely on the transparency of the paint to do some of that work for you. OK. It's a strange thing to say, but it needs to feel dark more than it needs to be dark. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense. What I mean by that is. You don't actually need to have a hard, like, you know, black to white in the blade. If you've got some, you know, like a transition that feels like it's infused with that darkness, you're going to be in the right place. OK. All right. So what I'm going to do now is just keep working with these and I'm going to bring the two colors together some because right now they're very, very different to the point where it looks like two separate weapons and we don't want that. So I'm going to bring a little bit of the orange up here and a little bit of the blue down here and we're going to keep pushing it around until we see exactly how we balance it out. And then I'll come back and I'll show you how we then refine it out. OK. So I'm going to work on that. We back in just a moment. All right, we're back. So here's what our blade looks like now. Now, I don't want to pull a now paint the cat or now paint the owl or whatever on you, but whatever that meme is. But that's kind of the idea of the thing. You can see like this was just a bunch of glazing back and forth, guys. That's all it really was. You can see this is what my palette looks like now. Right. All these different mixtures and things where I'm just pulling different colors together and subtly glazing them out. And but I want to talk about how I constructed this. So you can see how I've got some of the blue still infusing the blade on the bottom, but it's pulled in a similar direction every time. What I mean here is I wanted to create directionality to the reflections. So it's not it might feel random on first glance, but it's not. Let me see if I can explain. So here's a shadow and here is a shadow. The blue on the bottom of the blade. Pushes up from the shadow into the blade. So it's here. It's dark and then it goes into blue and into the rest of the spectrum. Whereas the orange on the bottom of the blade pushes from the shadow down, shadow down, right here on the top of the blade, the orange pushes from the shadow down, shadow down, and it's more minimal in the blue pushes from the shadow up, right? The reason I chose this is because technically the it's just I picked a direction. So the light coming from above would be creating the blue into the shadow as the reflections and then it would be going orange when it hits its reflective light, right? Or at least that's the argument. Sometimes I mix these together a little bit in some glazes. I did little, little bits of blues and greens and I still need to glaze this out more. So I'll show you how I'm working this. I'll show you a couple of like live examples. So here's how thin my paints are, right? Now I've added some just straight medium onto the palette. To help me glaze while I maintain color consistency so the paint doesn't break up on me. So like here on the bottom of the blade, right? What I do is I'm coming in, it's a glaze. So I've wicked off all the excess liquid. I'm just going to come in and very lightly hit that edge and hit that edge, right? And just real light smooth it down. Now while I'm still working with that blue, you can come in there and we can come in on that side. OK. So just nice light touches when we let that dry. Same thing. You know how I keep covering over the darker color? This is what I meant by it needs to feel dark, but not necessarily be dark. Like no part of this is that original black color that I put on here. We've covered it with so many interference layers that there's a lot of different color being reflected into your eye. But it still feels very dark, right? That's the trick. You don't just stop with the darker color, you keep glazing over it because those top colors when they're on there will feel like they're they're adding more depth, more visual complexity. All right. So now we're going to do a little bit with the orange in the exact opposite direction. So we take a little bit of that orange, push it up there. Push it up there, right? Real light. You'll notice the orange is more intense on the bottom of the blade, just as the blue is more intense on the top of the blade. So we're relying on these real subtle differences, these real subtle visual cues. OK. So you can see how bright the orange is there. Compared on top there, it's very faded out. Whereas the blue on top is very bright compared down here, where it's quite weak. So now it's just a glazing game, folks. Now it's just me sitting here for the next hour and slowly pushing these colors back and forth and back and forth and back and to the left and back and to the left. But there you go. That's kind of how how we do polluted light in the blades or reflected light non-metallic metal. We really went for it here, I guess, because we've got both both tones. You can do this with just one color, obviously. I wanted to show you kind of a whole rainbow spectrum. You can do this with a lot of different. You can do this with just one color. You could have the blade reflecting just fire if she was in a hot environment and you could step through all warm colors. You could have it just be blue. That's very common. You see a lot of blue blades because the bright steel will tend to reflect the ambient blue in the sky and in the environment around it. But there you go. That's kind of how that works. Now it's just glazing from here. There'll be a picture at the end so you can see what I'm doing. But it's just more of what I just did lots of times. That's it's just that every so often I'll come in with my white and I might re area my near warm white or cold white. I might re establish a little bit of the highlight here or there. I continually am refining my edge. Like I've done this edge highlight probably eight times while I was working here in the interim because I want to make sure that it's always nice and crisp. And I know what I'm working in between. It helps me then understand the contrast by having that placed. So there you go. That's reflected light non-metallic metal. I do hope you enjoyed it. If you did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you've got a suggestion for a future video, go ahead and drop that down in the comments as well as any questions you might have on this technique. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time.