 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today we are going to tackle another type of hair color today It's time for beautiful radiant blonde hair Let's get into it. The strict technomancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style A little while back. I talked about how black hair can be very challenging Well blonde hair is no different right now. I'm painting up northern wind This bust from big child creatives. It's a really amazing bust one of my favorites of all time I've wanted to paint it for years finally got my hands on it at adepticon But a lot of the pictures I see of people painting this manager and including the box art itself, which is exquisite They often give her red hair and the reason for that is obvious that kind of bright color really sets off against Against sort of a Caucasian skin tone red draws the eye and so it's you know, makes it very flashy blonde hair is a lot more challenging and I often see people really really go wrong on blonde hair Making it look like it got squeezed out of a mustard bottle as opposed to being on someone's head So today we're going to talk about the pitfalls the challenges of blonde hair and of course how to paint it We're gonna do it on this incredible bust. So let's head over to the painting desk and we'll get going All right Let's get into some blonde hair and we're gonna start with paints and they're going to be a bit unusual Pastel green pastel yellow bringing in a green might sound strange golden brown and cork and then dark brown ochre The idea here is pretty straightforward We're not using any kind of Sun or lemon yellow. This is the number one mistake I see people make don't do it. We need to start with sepia tones rusty tones ochre tones those kinds of things we're gonna start by just laying down a nice base coat of The cork which is effectively our low mid tone This kind of tone is sort of off-brown is really great for it And it's very important to establish a very solid base coat of this You do not want the black showing through at all if you have a zenith will highlight that can actually help But you still want to put on a really strong. You want multiple thin layers Next up we need to instantiate the actual shadows and when you're placing this in this is actually I'm doing this more or less as a wash You can see that it's quite thin. I'm not really wicking off too much of the excess paint And that's because here. I actually do want it to run into the recess is one of the few times that will be desirable in this entire process and This is only in the sort of deepest shadows and we are going to apply it both on sort of in the front and the back at Anywhere where the hair would be off of the halo We're effectively needing to pick the places where the hair is turned away from upwards Hair has a specular highlight meaning it will reflect light toward the eye of the viewer because it is sadden So we're looking for places where the hair is vertical or tucked under in other words places Where it's not exposed to direct light and where it would not be reflecting directly to the viewer Now let's talk about highlights As I mentioned for most of this we don't want to do washes You notice I'm still using a big thick brush most of this has been done with like a very large brush. This is a size 8 brush effectively and When I'm coating these areas that are going to be the base for the highlights I'm using my upper mid-tone, which is the golden brown and I'm Covering the entire area including the recesses. This is the next big mistake. I often see people make When they do this they they only hit the highest highest parts You want to make sure you get that all the way down in there get into those recesses, etc hair moves as a sort of wave pattern so our shadow color in the upper areas in the highlight areas the higher value areas is The mid-tone that's the shadow it doesn't ever go darker than that Whereas in the shadow areas our highlight will be the mid-tone and you'll see how we get to that later Now is finally when I'm going to start instantiating some of the thin marks and this is really where the process either becomes. I don't know fun or Maddening depending on your point of view But I'm taking a thinner brush some decently flowing paint and I'm going to start making thin lines lots and lots and lots of thin lines So many thin lines no more thin lines than that no more still more Now these first ones. I'm not being too careful. They're still a little thicker And that's because again these aren't all not all of the thickness of all of your highlights should be the same When you're starting out with like sort of the first incremental highlight You can have sort of thicker lines because they will be more broad as we move up the spectrum and to higher values That's when we need to start thinning it so our control of our highlights is not just about placement and Not just about sort of the the overall value change How big those volumes are in other words how large or small the highlights are but also the width of the brush stroke So now that I'm into a brighter color as we start to really integrate the pastel yellow and call out the big highlights Here is where we're gonna start getting thinner and thinner now at this point. I'm working almost completely in a layer Consistency I want this to go on I wanted to flow off the tip of the brush and just create these nice thin lines and again The key here is these specular sort of point highlights. Where would the light reflect? Where would the light be caught? What is upward-facing and it needs to align Over the waves of the hair What I mean by that is here on the front you can see like I have highlights toward the end of that flowing part out On the second sort of tier so not the one I'm currently highlighting But the one below this you can see how as the hair travels It's moving up and down. There's all sorts of different areas and flow to it But there is a line of light and that's the best way I can describe it when I'm saying this halo of light It's these concentric circles of light and shadow passing around the miniature Okay We really want to make sure that We're focusing in and working always in these initial layers within each space So as I move up in value I'm working always within the previous space that I highlighted so each Volume getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller unless I need to make a correction Like there you saw me go a little bit outside of the previous one because I needed to push the highlight All the way up to the top of that little poking out bit Now is where we start drawing down into the shadows because we can't just have this flat Rectangular area of sort of washed shadow Again, the highlight for the shadow area is the mid tone and So here I'm going to repeat the same process I start with something that's relatively close to the actual color and I Push it up now. I'm working outside of the previous volumes To bring these lines From the the mid tone down into the shadow color and create the highlights Still the same principle. I start a little thicker and then work into thinner But also notice that I am working back up on to the previous layers So I'm not just covering the shadow area I'm stretching that new line out over where some of where it was a little bit up into the highlights and down into the shadows So now as we refine our initial layers are all setting there were sort of Rectangular like volume lines and then we work within it We shrink and shrink and shrink up to the highlights and so on The refinement phase is nothing but crossing over those lines So it's taking the selectively brighter colors and Working our way up with the line covering the colors next to it Think of it just like how you try to blend layers All right, you've got a bright blue on one side a dark blue on the other you make a 50-50 mix And you try to blend out the middle in between the two There's nothing different here in principle except we're doing it with thin lines instead of with a Shwoop smooth application of the layer Okay All right, so and then as I work up. I'm following effectively the same progression I'm just going to use different mixes and slightly thinner paints Whereas before I was working almost completely in a layer consistency now. I'm working in a very thin layer I want to use the transparency the translucency of the paint to my advantage to show some of the colors underneath Remember the keys here is we're not using a bright yellow stay away from these sun yellows lemon yellows anything like that Now blonde hair can exist in a wide variety of colors Of course as I've mentioned but in general the tones we want to use are more subtle They're in the sepia's the rusts And of course up into ochres and then from there we transition directly from the ochre Into more of an ivory or a brighter tone, whatever we happen to be using That's going to give us a more realistic effect the more platinum blonde You want to go the more you push it into that higher value spectrum So the more you start including those ivories or other sort of bright pastel colors and increase the tint accordingly All right, so now we continue on with the journey of bringing these down now I'm up into the you know very bright highlights still working thin and I want to sort of reinforce a point even though the General highlight and the general light lines and volumes are moving in these like as I said this halo pattern this sort of Flat area. There is a line that is the brightest highlight. There is a line that is the mid-tone There is a line that is the deepest shadow One of the keys with hair is it can't actually be a solid thin line that will look fake and almost immediately You have to have individual strands go farther So it needs to be varied think of it like an EKG or something that's like, you know going up and down You have lots of different Variances on exactly how big the total volume is and you're doing that Through instantiating these slightly different lengths of each individual line When it comes to sort of smaller volumes like this something you'll very often encounter It's still the same techniques. I'm just doing it with a much sharper brush and in a much smaller space but each braid is getting the same treatment where I'm pushing the high highlights toward the top going into mid-tones at the bottom hiding the deep shadows underneath and And then working down those thin lines And you can see here how that halo line there is a solid area where it's completely sort of one line And the deepest shadow in that area is the mid-tone same at the other points but That line is not just one solid rectangle of light There's different lengths of these individual lights. They move they spread And that's because we wanted to have that natural wave feeling to it Our last step is to just make sure there's no too sudden transitions That's really what you do at the end as you're making all these lines You will as you make your way around the figure, especially a bust of this size But it can happen all the same on 32 millimeter miniatures You will notice that there are areas where basically your transitions are just happening too quickly So you just go in and make sure that all of those are smoothed out by running again more thin layer lines over the top Here is where we bring in that little bit of pastel green Which will turn into a nice bright white color give us a bit of an environmental light And there i'm just touching those in the very centers of all of these things we working in these thin layers Making sure that at the highest central point we have the actual specular highlight The tiniest little area where light will reflect the most strongly into the eye of the viewer Showing that true satin quality of the hair Lastly then we're working in a glaze to just sort of of our mid-tone to re-instantiate our saturation Saturation is really important when you're working especially in something that has a lot of different tint in it Like this where i've used a lot of these brighter colors And so i'm just going over this will both help smooth some of the sins and transition lines But also bring back that rich tone of saturation You can see how intense how wonderful that is when we get that color in there This is too thin applications of the glaze all over the transitions in between the mid-tone and the shadows We don't ever touch the highlights. There you go. Her hair is all done As you can see there's still a little bit of cleanup on this model to be done We might do a few more things with her Uh, but Her hair is looking radiant and shiny exactly how we want. I hope this video helped you with your own Blonde hair painting whatever miniature you happen to be working on if it did or if you liked this Hey, give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. Don't forget. We have new videos here every saturday If you want to support the channel Then hitting those buttons and doing those things is a great way to do it That's free But if you want to go farther, there's a patreon down below that helps us keep the lights on around here And that patreon is focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey We'd love to have you as part of the community As always, I thank you so much for watching this one And we'll see you next time