 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video today. It's time to continue the exploring color series We're gonna talk about the color white or I guess sort of a non-color. You'll see what I mean. Let's get into it The strict techno man sir that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci Vs All right, so we're gonna talk all about painting the color white now This is a very challenging color to paint for a lot of reasons But let's start of course with some history and kind of understand what the heck this even is So first off, this is one of the oldest colors in art dating back some 18 to 20,000 years it shows up in prehistoric cave paintings and beyond This thing is used all over the place. It's sort of associated emotionally most Humans tend to associate it with sort of purity cleanliness honesty Neutrality you have sayings like, you know, raising the white flag and stuff like that So all of those things are part of what the color white kind of emotionally represents But in general it has this sort of take of cleanliness or purity about it It's often part of religious practices. So it shows up in a lot of religious outfits Sometimes even things like wedding dresses So that's a big part of it and it just generally gets used a lot for a lot of formal purposes Part of the challenge of white in the real world is of course keeping it clean So when you have something that actually looks quite crisp and white it feels just naturally pretty You know pretty clean and above Everything around it in some way That's why it's become favored in a lot of modern Architecture and interior design because it just has this very naturally clean look although if you have one of those really You know nice kitchens. It's just really hard to keep it clean. So there's a downside Now interestingly with white and related to what we're going to talk about later on in this video Many languages, especially like Inuit but also Sanskrit and other languages have lots of words for the color white So English is fairly limited, but you know what there are sort of proxy words But lots of language is going to great detail not only breaking down the different sort of Purities of white is it warm is it cold? Is it dull is it shiny all those different things can have slightly different words and nuanced language to refer to them Because it turns out as we'll see when we get to the paint White is a pretty big spectrum of colors and to really use it in our miniature art We need to expand our horizons over What we consider white paint it'll make our lives easier and our painting better Now in paints white tends to be one of the more difficult colors to paint It is often made from titanium dioxide But the pigments for white are larger. They are chunkier They are harder to grind and as a result of those bigger heavier chunkier pigments the paint will often be more chalky You know harder to actually Blend with to paint on to get a consistent smooth layer all of those things so it's a very problematic paint to utilize and So that's going to also lead to some tips we talk about as we get into the actual painting process The important thing to understand about white is and there are some differences here If we're talking about something digital versus our paints and so on, you know versus like snow or a cloud or a a White sand beach, but effectively white is a chromatic What that means is just it has no hue and so it's scattering all components all wavelengths of light Equally and sort of in a rough direction And so what that means is that you don't get any real color out of it However, imperfections in the surfaces when they are slightly less What I want to say when they're slightly not as perfect That's when you start to get tones where they appear a little more green a little more red whatever it happens to be Warm cold so on it's also important to understand that and you know this if you ever tried to wear a white outfit Or as I said have the aforementioned white kitchen White stains and colors really easily it's easily polluted by environmental colors, right? So in many ways True pure white is going to be something fairly rare in the environment. All right enough theory Let's talk about actually painting this color. Here's my first piece of advice to make painting white easier. Don't Just don't don't paint pure dead white. Just don't there's almost no reason to use Basically the only time you should be using pure dead white is When you're talking about like the glint of light off of non-metallic metal the glint of light in an eye The glint of light on a gem. Are you seeing a pattern here? It's whenever you're trying to represent the glint the reflection the specular reflection of some pure white light dot like something that is hitting the full spectrum back at the Eye of the viewer through some tiny glint That can be pure white because it is in fact in reality a pretty close to pure white light So in that regard that's when you should be using pure white in Basically any other case you should not you shouldn't you don't need it You can use other near whites and be much more successful now Most things aren't actually white that what I mean by that is like you perceive maybe a lot of things around you as being white But they're they're really not so I'm gonna prove that to you right now This is a picture of my wall now my walls are just white walls But what color is this wall? You're looking at right now What colors that would you say that's pure white? Well, you know and then as you can see the picture sort of expanding how about now, right? The point being is that almost none of this wall looks pure dead white whatever that color is in your paint bottle Because it's polluted by the strong shadows that make it look more gray or blue by the yellow light from my lamp that Really reflects in his very warm low K light shooting up at the at the at the wall All of these things create this environmental light pollution and so most things in the world just won't look pure white it reflects absorbs and and Shows a lot of the hues and environmental colors around it which make it feel not pure dead white now Let's take a look at some paints that we could use as white So all of the paints you see here on my desk in our composition could be our white So that's everything from this very sort of gray dark bone color all the way up to this pure dead white And we can separate these two Into temperature colors what I mean by that is the white could be seen as warm So that's when it's more yellow or brown influenced or it can be seen as cold So that's when it's more blue or gray influenced generally Dead white if you're if you ever use that color does fall into the cold side of the spectrum But in fact these are all just sort of in the gray area, but we don't have to stop there these other paints all of these things are also whites for the purposes of our composition and That's going to be hard for you to sort of look at because you look at this bottle I think this is something people don't really get They look at the bottles here of these pastels and all these colors and you think no that's a color Vince That's blue or purple or pink or green or something like that But I promise you when we put these on the model to our eye against the other colors in the composition They're going to basically appear as white We don't need to use actual white dead white bad pigment hard to paint white to get something that just Looks white to our eyes. Okay Well, all of these things are great because they have a little bit of tone in them So even though they'll still appear white, they're more visually interesting more compelling and just generally better to use In your painting speaking of painting. Let's actually do some of it. Huh? How about that? So here we go. Here's a figure. I'm working on this is the new tomb king from the old world and here I'm going to use some white blue. So as you saw earlier you saw it on the desk It's it's a blue looking color But when I put it on this composition On you know as part of the the sort of turquoise that the clothing he's wearing it looks white It looks like a white highlight. That's true on any part of him And in fact as I move around on the model and start placing this color You're gonna see that it looks like this basically white edge highlight now In fact if we got up super close and put on you know little sort of Glasses that were 10x magnification or something we could see it has some hue to it a little bit of color And it is more visually aligned and interesting, but for the most part it's occupying the same space It's that highest value highest tint part of our paint and our scheme and so it's doing the job of white while being a much easier and more compelling credible and interesting color to work with Now let's actually that's kind of interesting. I did a few dots. Let's do something a little more So here I'm gonna paint the cloak now I actually start this cloak in that bone color and If you look at it once the thing it's painted on again in the bottle It looked pretty gray, but as I'm painting this and this is this wonderful bone from Matt sex Which is signature line as part of Proacryl Proacryl makes some really excellent near whites that I really do love You know if you're interested in checking them out There is a link down below where you can find and get some some money off of your Proacryl paints So you know I guess check that out if you're interested, but their whites and near whites are really like the best around I use them all the time Now as I start with this bone color It like yes, it is kind of gray, but at the same time depending on the rest of our composition This could have been our highest highlight in this case It's going to be my deepest shadow right and that's because I want this cloak to feel like a white cloak, but That doesn't mean I paint it white and in fact as a point of fact The only reason I'm gonna end up putting any true white on here at all is just to show you a good way to do it The end Now this is a little bit of red infused. It's warm. It's a very warm gray So next up I go to this more cold green gray again green gray That's our white for our white cloak, but watch what happens when I put this on there It feels in the composition very much like the bright white highlight and in fact because the green is the Complementary color to red the little bit of green actually acts as a really nice compliment to the red It's way more visually compelling I get this cold complimentary highlight to my warm red Infused shadow and so all of a sudden I've got a way cooler looking cloak Then if I had just gone through gray up to white So not only did my initial color base coat easier But because it had a hue and fall infused into it the red and then I used green as my next layer a green Infused white gray basically I got a way more compelling overall Composition so anytime you can lean into these hues It's just gonna look cooler Especially when you can have those slight complimentary interplays occurring the same thing can happen if you use like Blues for your shadows and then yellows for your highlights or something like that okay Now I keep building this up and from here. I am gonna go to like another cold, but near white But we're still not there yet. This is still absolutely not white Like if you look at this in the bottle this brain eater or whatever it still looks fairly gray But in this composition it looks darn white like we're getting up to almost a pure white to our eyes as we perceive it in this Composition and that's what's important white is really perceived net by the colors that are next to it so something that can be pretty far away from pure white if it's next to a bunch of other saturated dark colors will feel like just pure dead white and That's part of the advantage of working in these near tones. They paint easier. They don't have the annoying pigments They don't go on chalky, but when used as part of your otherwise normal composition, they will still serve the same function now the last thing I want to show you here or not the last thing sorry the next thing I want to show you here is When we put a bunch these colors together, let's grab Larry out and we're just gonna paint his butt now I'm gonna start with purple. This is pastel violet to be clear That is the color when you look at this when you looked at it originally it will look purple to you But notice when I put it on the little threads. It looks white Like those look like white threads again They're gonna be more visually compelling and interesting But they look like white threads and in fact I'm just gonna scatter a bunch of paint all over Larry's but just taking you through a bunch of these near whites And you can see each of them once they're next to each other You'll start to see small differences in the hue where you can kind of read when all these bright near white tones Are next to each other that some of them appear more yellow some of them appear more Blue or more gray or more dark or more light like there is travel and distance here There is something that's happening you can tell the difference But if any of these were sort of in isolation None of these things I have put on his butt at all are actual dead white none of them not a one, okay? but It it all feels that way because it's next to such a dark surface Namely that gray black of the rest of his pants and so in comparison to that it feels white now if you're going to Try to paint something pure white I do recommend picking up a tube of an artist color something like a titanium white here that I've got from golden These are generally much easier to work with they're much creamier These artist grade paints are generally I find a much more pleasant experience Again, I rarely use these except to do like the dots and eyes the glints and gems and so on But here I'll go ahead and do the edge highlights in this cloak with it And you can see that you know a little bit of water mixed in we get a nice pure strong effective white these do work a lot better as far as getting a Non-chalky effective white in there for those occasions where you do want to include pure dead white in your composition Finally one last little trick. I do want to share with you and that is with the Pure white the other thing you can do here I have a little goblin friend and I'm just going to put some some pure white on his shoulder Like let's say I was building the shoulder up to to a sort of pure white One of the things you can do with your just pure white part to make it easier to paint with is mix it Sort of 50-50 with a little bit of gloss varnish because gloss is reflecting and scattering the light in a very controlled Way so it doesn't scatter it all around it sort of reflects it straight back like a shiny surface will That means that it's reflecting more or less all of the light, especially a pure white light back at you So the gloss is going to make your white seem smoother more consistent and more white So it just makes a little bit of if you're trying to do something if you're trying to cover a decent size area With actual white paint going 50-50 for that final highlight with the pure white with gloss will not only make it apply More smoothly and evenly, but it will also make it reflect and look more clean and more pure white And it won't actually look glossy because the white is supposed to be reflecting everything and the gloss is reflecting everything And so they're both doing the exact same thing and it will end up just looking like a really bright intense matte white So there you go. That's painting the color white and basically everything about it. I do hope this was helpful to you I know this can be a challenging color if you like this give it a like Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday If you've got any questions, I didn't answer drop those down in the comments I always answer every question asked As always if you want to support the channel hit like hit subscribe share this video But there's a lot of links down below as I mentioned There's the monument link where you can get some money off of a really excellent set of White and near white paints. There's also links down there for Amazon That have all of your hobby goodies and stuff like that if you pick those up there Does it cost you anything extra if it gives the channel a nice little kickback and of course There is our patreon focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey as always though I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time