 Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today it's time to talk all about everybody's favorite painting technique, the thing that drives us all insane, but we know we have to do. It's time to talk about glazing. Let's get into it. Glazing is one of those techniques that figures into everyone's painting journey, and often causes a lot of frustration. Exactly how to do it, how to make your paint behave in that way, and what its purpose is, is what we're going to talk about today in detail. We're going to get into when exactly do you glaze, why do you glaze, what is a glaze, how do you make it, how do you apply it, and so on. So throughout this video, I'm going to be showing you on a figure I'm working on for Golden Demon, where exactly I'm using glazing, why, and how. Because ultimately, acrylic paints weren't really made for blending, they kind of suck at it. They were made for durability and quick drying, but what they don't do is blend. If we all painted with oil paints, I wouldn't really need to make this video, or at least it'd be a very different video. Since we are using acrylic paints, today we're going to talk all about that finishing technique to get those smooth blends. The first thing I want to say is that glazing in the end shouldn't really be that mystical to you, but depending on where you are on your hobby journey, it might be very difficult for you to achieve, and I understand that. The important thing I want you to lock in your head at first is that glazing is not anything different than what you already do. If you already thin your paints in any way, that is to say if you've ever added a drop of water, or anything like that, or a moist brush full of water to paint, you've thinned paint. Glazing is exactly the same, we're just thinning it down more. Effectively, when we thin a paint to a layer consistency, that's just thinning it usually something in like the one to one, it varies depending on the paint brand with some kind of water, or medium, or something like that. Glazing we're often going two, or three, or four to one, depending on exactly how rich, how pigmented, and how thick the paint we're starting from is. As I mentioned, we do this because these extremely thin, translucent layers of paint allow us to hide those transitions that happen when we paint in other layers and using other techniques with acrylic paints. Acrylic paints are made to dry quickly, generally drying in seconds, as opposed to, say, days like oil paints. But because of that, and because of the very hard, rigid crystal lattice of how oil paints dry, that is to say that's what acrylic medium is, it means that they show layer lines and these kinds of distinctions between the individual colors we use very clearly. And of course, what we ultimately want to do is hide those and establish the smooth colors and gradations of light that exist in reality, as opposed to often the hard edges that our paintbrush and paint strokes will leave behind. It is the end of most display painting. So whether you're painting for something special, a character in your army, whether you're going out for a competition, or ultimately, like I'm going to be working on in this figure today, Golden Demon, when you really got to nail those smooth blends, glazing is often the end of the road. It sits at the end of other techniques. It's a way to finish off layers and make them look smooth or wet blends and make them look smooth and loaded brush and make it look smooth, whatever. Glazing can often be those final steps that really brings the whole thing together and gives the illusion of flowing smooth transitions. I want to start and talk about some basics. If you're just starting out with your glazing or even if you've been doing it for a little while, you may have noticed that there are some differences in how certain paints glaze. What I mean by this is not all paints glaze equally. So first off, some paints just have a lower pigment density. And so when you thin them down a lot, they really fail to distribute that pigment evenly over the surface and can look broken up and give you coffee staining. That's often the case with some cheaper or lower quality miniature paints, though most things that are available in the market today won't really run into that problem. You also may have noticed that some single pigment paints, so here I have some Chimera paints, are much better at glazing because one, they're very pigment rich, but two, because they're single pigment and don't tend to have a lot of white or something else like that in there, they will thin down very naturally and they're incredibly translucent, easily going into these transparent layers we want. The important part about these paints, and if you don't know if you're painting a single pigment, most miniature paints are not. Things like Chimera, especially paints are. Some of the new contrast paints actually are single pigment, but they exist. Here's the easiest way to tell whether or not it's single pigment, but whether or not it's going to make a good glaze. The closer the color that you're looking at in your hand and that paint bottle looks to the dead center middle color of the color wheel, like the more blue it's blue, the more red that red is, the more orange that orange is, and so on. The more true hue it is, often that is a good indication that it's going to be easier to glaze with. Why? Well, when you're dealing with colors that are either much lighter, that usually means because they have some kind of white mixed into them. Oftentimes to make them simply lighten in tone, to tint them up. So think the difference between blue and sky blue here. You just simply add in the white. The problem is white glazes like crap. Lighter colors are much, much, much harder to make effective glazes out of. And you might often notice that they become chalky when you glaze with them and thin them down. This happens for a couple reasons. First, the pigment being so bright will easily show its spread out diffuse nature over the darker color mid tones you're putting it over. It's exactly the same as if you put on a layer of the brighter color, the layer line would be very, very, very obvious. That's because of the higher opacity of the individual pigment compared to the color that's underneath it. That's problem number one. Problem number two is white pigment is also larger. And so it often tends to be less finely ground and less evenly distributed across the overall surface of the medium you're spreading there. And so can look more splotchy and chalky more easily. One of the ways you can solve this is just always paint your light colors with layers and then always glaze down with the more true single colors. Let's talk about execution. We're gonna start here on the palette where we begin our glazing journey. Now the paint here is right out of the bottle and I'm gonna take some out of that and we're gonna make it into a basic layer. This is just some paint with a moist brush. Like that brush has a little bit of moisture in it. We swirl around and you notice it sort of spreads out, doesn't really shrink up because it's not mostly water. There's still medium forcing it apart. Now as I then move on, I'm gonna add another full brush load of water into it and thin it down, mixing it around and now you see how much more it pulls back together. That's of course because of the high cohesion of the water molecules, right? So they want to be close to each other so the water sucks back together. I can go thinner. We can put in a second brush load of water into the same amount of paint. And now we get something even more thin. Whenever you're working in these kinds of paints, it's important not to go directly from the palette to the miniature. There's actually two important steps we need to do first. The first important step is we need to test on our finger and or our glove or the back of our thumb or something where we can then see exactly how much coverage it's providing. Because the pigmentation on the individual paint can vary so highly, you may thin one paint down with two brush loads of water and get a perfect glaze, whereas a different paint in a different bottle might require four or be better with only one. So always execute on a surface that isn't your miniature first if you're not completely comfortable with the ratios at hand. Now a common question I get is should I use medium or some kind of glaze medium or thinner or whatever to do my glazes? And the answer is you don't really have to. Water is just fine. Paint consists of three basic elements. Pigment, binder, which is acrylic medium in this case, and solvent, which for acrylic paints is water. And water itself is just adding more solvent. As I mentioned, if you're working with a cheaper paint, you can, the too much solvent will break the paint down and it will be very hard for it to evenly distribute its pigment across the lattice because there's just not enough binder, not enough of the acrylic medium left to cover the whole surface. If that's ever a concern, you can simply use any thinner medium. Now here I have some more colors, but of course you can use anything. Most of them that say different funky wacky names just have additives mixed in, different flow improves and retarded mediums and stuff like that. Thinner is all you need, just raw acrylic medium. That's the binder, that's the thinner. You can get bulk of it so cheaply at your local art or craft store and that is ultimately what I recommend. It can be a real game changer for those lighter colors. One of the ways, the other ways to make your lighter glazes apply more evenly and smoothly is to apply them to thin them down with acrylic medium. So that way you're applying it with just all medium to thin it out as opposed to water breaking it down. That will help distribute that pigment a little more evenly and make your light colored glazes a little smoother. Now the most important part, we've made our glazes on our palette, but of course, we have to then actually put it on the miniature. Ah-da-da-da. See, you got ahead of yourself there. No, that's not the next step. Not the next step. The next step is the single most important thing when it comes to glazing. After our paintbrush goes into the glaze, which after we mix the glaze, we always rinse our paintbrush first, dry it, then we go back to the glaze. Now once we've got a brush full of that very thin, very, very thin paint, we're going to touch it to a paper towel. And we touch it to that paper towel until we stop seeing the bloom of paint come off. So we might touch it once, we might touch it twice, depending on how much liquid we soaked up as far as the glaze goes. By doing that, we extract all of that excess liquid. All that excess liquid will make it a wash. When we want a glaze, we're applying it in a controlled fashion. So wicking out that extra liquid into a paper towel is absolutely critical to getting an even distribution and a smooth glaze onto the miniature. Now let's move over to the actual miniature. Enough of this talking, let's see this in action. So when we're painting on the actual miniature, the next thing I'll say is glazes because they're so thin and translucent and meant to show a lot of the color underneath them work much better over lighter colors than over dark. Here I've taken the areas I want to paint on the shoulder pad and I pre-primed them with an ivory color, which will give a very rich tone to the magenta I'm gonna lay over top. And as you can see, when I paint that magenta over top, I get this bright, intense, very true color magenta. If I try to lay that over the black color, I basically get nothing. When this dries, it will look like a slightly purple black and barely have been changed at all. And this is sort of the thickest possible glaze I could put on here with a really, really hyper intense, albeit translucent pigment. Glazes do not work over black or darker colors. Glazes work over your mid-tone areas and over brighter colors. And that's important to understand because the brighter the area you're trying to glaze, the more of an effect it will have when you touch your brush to that area of the miniature. Dark areas, it does nothing. But if you touch something white with even a very thin glaze, it will immediately stain that color quite strongly. So be aware how thin your glazes need to be will also vary based on the color that you're glazing onto. All right, now let's go ahead and see some of this glazing fully in action. And you'll notice the first glaze I put on here, it doesn't really do much. There's barely a change. This isn't that uncommon. I'm starting very thin just to create a smooth transition to start priming for the colors I wanna lay down. The name of the game with glazes is multiple layers. This is not a fast process. Glazes are slow, they are time consuming and can often drive you a little insane. I'd love to tell you there's some other magic secret to it, but there's really not. A careful light application will just begin to tint the color. But as you build it up slowly over time, you can have a stronger effect. Now, if you don't have all day to put on a thousand thin glazes, you can work with a more normal consistency glaze like I'm doing here. And in this case, you will see the changes. In this case, I'm putting on a little bit of a mix of this magenta and a strong violet, both single pigment, both very strong and heavily pigmented paints. And in doing so, I get a pretty noticeable effect. Now, there is still a transition line visible and we'll come back to that later, don't worry. But you can see how I can very softly and through multiple attempts, build up that color. And when I apply a sort of layer philosophy to my glazes, that is to say, applying multiple glazes, covering less each time, within the area of that purple, I'm gonna get these really smooth, very natural, subtle transitions down into the darker color. No need to go back and blend later. It's gonna all look great and smooth without issue. When it comes to hiding that edge line, we've got a couple of different options. We can put another glaze over the top. So we can glaze back in the other direction. That's probably the simplest. So I can glaze with the magenta back over the violet and hide and smooth and fuzz the edge. If I'm working in a very, very small area, I can also feather out the edge of the glaze. So I can apply the glaze, clean off the brush, which means either eating the paint, which I don't recommend, or keeping a wet paper towel or sponge next to you and just wiping off the brush on that very quickly and then feathering the edge right along. By doing that, you can sort of continue to smooth out that edge into this incredibly soft transition. Ultimately, which then you might need to go back over with another glaze, just to smooth it out even further. When you're trying to get that perfectly smooth blend with acrylic paint, it often means a lot of just back and forth and back and forth work. As we work with lighter colors, even with this, you'll see that this glaze doesn't go on very smoothly. And part of that is because it's such a strong transition from the magenta. The edge is very visible, and when I try to feather it, it really doesn't feather out very well. Worry not, that's perfectly okay. Glazes come to save the day again. As I mentioned earlier, we can apply a couple of the lighter color glazes to build that tone up. And then as we do so, once it's dry, and this is another very important point when you're applying multiple glazes on top of each other, each glaze needs to dry completely before you apply the next layer. Because these are so heavily liquid, intense layers, it's really, really key that you let them dry. Otherwise you'll pull these extremely thin layers of paint right off the miniature. Generally takes about 30 seconds to a minute to let a particular glaze layer dry. Depends on how humid your individual area or basement or painting room or bunker is, I suppose. Once that light color is completely dry, I can then come back in with my magenta tone and glaze over that either partially or completely to then again, bring that into the right color family. And because the glaze is going over both the lighter color and the mid-tone, it will have a much stronger effect on the mid-tone. And when I want to create those smooth blends, the key is that's when I'm using the two or three brush loads of water thin glazes as opposed to the one. So as you continue to refine your glazes and stack glazes on top of glazes to get those smooth blends, you're also working in progressively thinner glazes. Each one being a more of a mixture of water paint, each one having slightly less of an effect as you're working in a progressively smaller area to really hide all of those transitions in between the individual layers. Remember the key here is a lot of back and forth work, but glazes can be an absolutely fundamental part of your workflow in making your paint jobs look really clean, really smooth and really well blended. The key with them again, just to cover all of our key items. Number one, every paint is gonna respond slightly differently, so experiment to determine how much water you need to establish the appropriate layer of glaze and what's gonna work right for that individual paint. In addition, the amount of water you add is gonna vary over time as you work with the glazes and depending on the color, you're putting it on top of. You need a thinner, lighter glaze. The lighter the color is that you're sitting the glaze down on top of. Don't forget, after you mix your glaze, your brush needs to be cleaned off and then when you go into the glaze, you have to wick that excess water out. I cannot stress that emphatically enough. You wait until you don't get the bloom off the tip of the brush into the paper towel anymore and then you're ready to glaze and to get that nice, smooth, even application. Finally, remember it's all a game of going back and forth, back and forth. And when you're working with those lighter colors, don't ever be afraid to be a little thicker with the glazes there so they don't go on as chalky and then simply glaze down over top of them with the easier to work with translucent, more stronger single pigment or middle hue colors. There you go. That's my ultimate guide to glazing, everything I do when I'm working on my competition pieces and trying to produce work of the highest level. I hope this was helpful for you and really gave you the insights you need to be successful in glazing. 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 wanna help support the channel, you can do so down below. We've got a patron link and that's focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey. As always, I thank you so much for watching this. Don't forget to comment below if you've got any questions. I always answer every question asked and we'll see you next time.