 Hello everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to talk about rocks. So yes, as Brack told us there, we're going to pay for everything with rocks. And stone is one of those things that I think is actually really fun to paint. It's very relaxing, it's very freeing, and I think most people paint it wrong. So here I've got this big mountain terrain piece thing, and I started out by just doing a zenithal, dry brushing it over white, washing it all with nuln oil, doing another little dry brush, and then dropping in some agrax. And I think this is about where most of us stop, right here. This is what most of the rocks we end up with on tables look like. Gray, maybe a tiny hint of a brown here or there if we decided to get agrax near it as opposed to just nuln. The problem is this isn't what rocks look like. This just isn't how rocks look. So let's make it better. So up in the, you'll see some pictures on screen right now of what rocks look like out in the wild. And the first thing you'll notice is that they have this wonderful natural variation of color. There's reds, there's greens, there's browns, there's everything. If you get really close up to rocks, depending on where you are, there's every color in it because it's out there. There's yellows and all sorts of fun stuff. So we're going to start with pigments. I took some red, I took some green pigment, and I shoved it down into the lower areas, the lower parts of the rock, right? The red to make it look like oxidation or iron oxide, the green to make it look like the first place where light would be sticking. Then I again dry brushed over everything, and you'll notice the real key to something like rocks is very simple techniques applied repeatedly. So then I went ahead and washed over all that pigment area with some agrax to lock it into place, and then you guessed it, another quick dry brush. Now I'm taking a little bit of a very, very thin brown ink, shot it through the airbrush just to add some more color variation. There was a sepia tone, so a little bit of green in there. Then I'm taking a little bit of pale sand, and you'll notice I'm just stippling. See how I'm just kind of stippling edges and around and creating interesting textures. Texture, texture, texture. That is the key with rocks, with natural variation. You want to create all these textures, and one of the ways you do that is again just simple techniques applied repeatedly. By washing and then dry brushing and applying pigment and then dry brushing and washing and then dry brushing again, we get all these little different scratches and scratches and exciting things that create visual confusion and make it look like it's actually in nature. Because nature is random. So the other thing that's in nature is life. We've already added a little bit of the green to kind of give the impression of some life. We've got to go farther. So now I've got some super thin, super glue, and I've got a little bit of like railroad model train flock. You used to make the big boards. This is great for making moss. So you see how I just sprinkle it over the glue into all the places. Just sprinkle it down in those deepest areas. Sprinkle it around, and it creates this wonderful, nice, deep variation in the moss. The problem is it's a little bright and flat. We don't add things to our miniature that aren't painted. So now I took a little bit of that same sepia ink, thinned it down, and I'm just dropping some of that sepia ink down in the moss. What it does is it creates a little more naturalistic color because things out in the wild like this, like greens out in the wild don't tend to be this green unless we're talking about like, you know, grasses on a beautiful hill. But amongst rocks, it's gonna be lots of dirt and detritus, stuff that gets caught down in there. There's like mossy junk growing up out of dirt. So we put a little bit of that brown ink everywhere. Get it down in there. Get it looking like we're desaturating that green. Color is nature, reds, greens, browns, purples, yellows, blues. But the trick is they're all very weak, all very desaturated. It's only in those some places in the world like, you know, you see like an Irish hillside that you get those really bright green grasses, okay? So now that my moss is all sprinkled over my glue and it's been desaturated, now we need to pick a little bit of it back out. Again, this will further desaturating it, highlighting it, desaturates it and makes it feel like, again, there's little bits of it catching the light or that has, you know, various little elements or little flower buds or things like that in it. And so I took a little cement gray and I'm just stippling it over all of the moss. Just kind of dip, dip, dip, dab, dip, dip, dip, dab, dip, dip, dip, dab. Little tiny touches onto the moss to again create more variation in the tone and the very lighter green gray with the darker green brown sepia. Over that middle green, we get a full range of our highlights and shadows with extremely simple techniques. Again, I haven't done anything that was complicated in painting this, right? This was done when my arm was very badly injured so there's like, I'm painting and paying the whole time but I couldn't do anything that required too much like precise control. So hence, this was the perfect project, right? Just remember, it's all about creating that natural tonal variation that exists, the randomness that's in nature. So now we've got some good looking stuff. We got some life creeping up out of the rocks. Again, there's another picture of what I'm talking about where you can see the life in the rocks right there but we're going to take it farther. So we're going to grab our old friends some tufts. We're going to take some tufts and we're going to shove them down into the areas in between the rocks. That's the goal here. Make sure that there's little bits of life growing up out from between the rocks where there would be naturally water and dirt and soil collecting is where we would then see that life spring up out of those natural grasses, mosses, shrubs, all that scrub and life even amongst this rocky terrain grows really strongly. And so you don't need to put it everywhere. I use multiple different kinds of tufts over this, different colors, different types you can see. We can use some tiny tufts. We can use some big wild sprigs. All of this by the way is from Gamer's Grass. The key here is you want to go ahead and keep it varied. So here's me just getting it all over the place, getting it all in there and yet again, once we apply it, I'm going to go ahead and wash it down. So every one of these little tufts that I apply, I take some Agrax Earthshade, drop it on there and then I highlight it with the same pale sand. Everything gets painted. So there you go. That's how to make better looking rocks. I hope you enjoyed this. It's a lot of fun. As I said, it's just simple techniques applied over and over. Give it a like, subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. But as always, I thank you for watching this one and we'll see you next time.