 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today we're going to talk about atmospheric lighting, how to use light and color to place your miniatures into a realistic lighting situation. Now this is a very complicated subject but in fact you already know more about it than you think. From the time you started painting you were told about things like shading, like sitting in the shade in the absence of light and high lighting which just kind has the word in it so it's pretty direct. And really everything we're going to talk about today is building on that. So whether you're interested in understanding highlighting better or maybe a little OSL this is for you. Let's get into the detail, let's get into it. The strict technomancer that is VinCV. Let us get to the technique and learn it VinCV style. Alright starting with our paint list as always. This isn't every single paint I used to paint the whole figure but it's everything for the lighting. Let's start with a little theory. This is a silhouette, a silhouette of a miniature. Not who we're painting today but it'll carry us through what we need. And this is usually the best place to start thinking about your lighting. So let's start with the concept of a direct motivated light. Motivated lights, lights in general work in cones. There is a source and then it shines down on your miniature in a pattern like you see here. So when you think about what is the light touching you can hold your miniature at that angle and sort of imagine the cone over it. Maybe even take a picture with your phone. Now we can also have two cones. So here's the concept of atmospheric lighting coming from above. It's going to cast an area over the top part. You can see how they meet in the middle in a shadow. So when we look at this what we get is a dominant environmental light on the bottom that's setting the color palette. This could be object source lighting might not. Contrasted by an atmospheric light source that sets the highlight tone but not the regular hue, could be object source, could be weak and distant. That shadow area that separates the two is really, really important. That occlusion shadow that happens between those two motivated light sources is what's going to make this actually sell and feel real. Now I mentioned light is in the shape of a cone when it's directly motivated from a light source. Well guess what we have that just happens to spray paint in a cone-like shape. Why it's our old friend the airbrush. Where paint comes out of the front in a cone-like shape. So I always start over black whenever I'm doing motivated lighting with my, that is to say just straight black primer. The reason for that is because a zenithal is not correct here. A zenithal says it's a lighting scheme. It says there is even light from above but that's not what we're doing. So instead I'm going to start with the relative color tones I want to use, a cold blue and a warm red. And I'm going to oppose them. And I'm spraying generally from the angle in both cases. Now note I do move the brush around. I'm not holding it at one angle and just out a singular cone. You've kind of got to sweep it in a little bit of a circular pattern because your miniature has all sorts of odd hidden spaces and things like that. But by doing this and keeping it directional and setting the two contrasting tones like this, I'm creating a sphere, a zone, a circle of color. And there you can see how the two interact with the shadow in the middle. They do not cross over the top of one another. And what I'm doing here with the airbrush with this sort of cone that I'm laying down the sphere of influence for, that's setting the outer bounds of my color. From this point forward, we will only work inside of the colors we already have. So when I want to continue to show the red and build the red up into my warm highlights, which is coming from his top right shoulder, that area, we're not going to paint anything in reds or red highlight tones that wasn't already touched by the airbrush for the most part, because miniatures have some weird shapes and sometimes there's things that will get in the way. Light isn't a direct exact cone like your airbrush. Light hits other surfaces, bounces around, cast small amounts of light. You know, shadows aren't deep black. So if because of your airbrush, you didn't get exactly the coverage within that sphere, but there is an object or a surface in the sphere of influence that didn't get touched by paint, that's OK. You're still going to paint that the color. You'll just need to brush apply the base, you know, sort of initial tone and then build up from there. And what you see me doing here is effectively working the highlights just like I would for any miniature, layering up into brighter and brighter tones, because I'm going to map the highlights. But the trick is the red highlights are only going to occur in the area where the red spray happened. Where it didn't, where there's blue or black or areas that didn't get touched. I am not highlighting anything. I'm leaving those in shadow and leaving that space in between dark. And the more you highlight the darker that shadow in between your two initial soft deep tones will appear. Because they will look darker next to a highlight. But other than that, I'm just doing the normal thing. This is probably also a good example of how to get a poppy red highlight, because as you can see, I jump immediately up to basically a a sunny skin tone here. And as a point of fact, on everything on the warm side, sunny skin tone will be my highlight, whether it's the metal or the cloth or the skin. I'm showing that it's the same atmospheric diffuse light, a warm tone, hence the sunny skin tone. Now, with the red skin, we've got to bring it back into tone so he doesn't look like a total clown fiesta. And so to do that, we bring back in orange and red glazes to bring it back in line. But yet again, with these glazes, I will cover over my highlights that I laid down with the white and I will cover over more than that. I'll pull them down into the reds themselves, resaturate some of those reds, build up up that tone, that rich red and orange warm tone on the warm side of the miniature. But I'm not ever glazing outside of the initial sphere that my airbrush layer set up. That created the outer edges of my map. Once you figure that out, you get that element that it's just about first laying down that outer edges. What's the outer edge of the light? It's just normal painting from there. You're just painting less. Instead of trying to work your way around the whole miniature and highlighting everything, you're only highlighting in the space where the airbrush touched. It's way easier. So here's, you can see the progress, the skin after a few glazes of the orange and then a glaze of the red to bring it all back in together. I love fiery demons. They're just a really cool, interesting sort of look. I just make my way around there. But the key is, is that this is just normal painting like you would highlight anything. This uses all the tricks I've talked about before for creating highlights. The trick is same universal highlight color. You'll see throughout this whole thing and only applying it in the areas where the airbrush touched for the warm side. So with the warm looking pretty decent, let's get into the cold side in the exact same way. No blue as I work my way up toward a higher, higher blue highlight here. And I do all this with three paints. This is just turquoise, the cobalt teal and white as you'll see. But all of this is on the underside of everything. So I'm following the same rules for highlighting but doing it in reverse as though the light source was coming from the bottom. So instead of highlighting the top of the muscle structure, I highlight the bottom of the muscle structure. And that gives us the feeling that the light is shining from that lower direction. When you go bright, dark, bright on the miniature itself, it's also going to create just a really cool look. I will say this is a very visually compelling sort of scheme. I do love the motivated blue glow, which is kind of fun. But I continue to work up and again, each time covering less and less in the same way with my normal highlights on the rest of the miniature, as you highlight, you cover less and less space. See the layering video linked up top. If you've got any questions about that. I'm doing the same thing here. These are just layers of paint that I am slowly covering less and less and less space. But the highlights are drawn toward the apex of the imaginary cone. Effectively where my airbrush was when it was spraying. So just imagine that airbrush is still out there. And that's what your highlights need to point at. Now, you'll notice I didn't do the metal on the other side of his legs in red. That's because that metal will still be in its normal tone. But since this side is a direct motivated light, it's recoloring everything. So the metal is going to be blue. Everything is going to be blue. Because this is an object source, although even though the object is not here, it's direct motivated lighting, environmental lighting. It's turning the metal blue. It's turning his skin blue. It's turning the bone blue. Everything is blue. Whereas the other side, we have a warm diffuse light so it doesn't color everything. It just reveals warm highlights. I'm going to jump in the middle here to just refresh a lesson I talked about right up front. There are two types of lighting. Generally, we're going to capture on our miniatures. The first is a direct motivated light. This is a colored light source, something blue glowing, green glowing, pink glowing, basically like those lights every YouTuber who isn't me has behind them. That is going to retone whatever you shine it on. You put it on something white, it turns blue, so on and so forth. That lighting, you're not showing the underlying colors as much. In fact, you're just basically playing in that tone. That's often how we capture things like glowing green crystals or plasma glow or stuff like that. But the other lighting that we're familiar with, it's around all the time, can still have tones to it. You can have light from the sun, from the light in your room. It's atmospheric. It's diffuse. It's revealing the normal colors. Like my shirt is under atmospheric diffuse lighting right now, namely my room lights, but it's fairly neutrally balanced. You're getting a pretty neutral tone on the shirt. If I had super yellow lights above me, it would look quite different. As you've experienced, if you've ever sat in a room lit only by candles. So understand the differences between these two lightings and are they revealing the color, but tinting it? Or are they completely replacing the hues we know with their own tones? That's kind of the two forms we're balancing here. And putting those two together on a miniature can often make it pop in really cool ways. All right, let's finish this guy up. All right, let's deal with the other elements on the warm side of this miniature. When we're dealing with diffuse atmospheric lighting, which is basically the light we're under all of the time, the sun, the lights in our room, whatever. We're dealing with normal colors, so his skirt or whatever he's wearing here. Why do all demons wear skirts? I don't know, it's an odd fashion choice. Maybe they're all maybe it's a really a kilt. I don't know. I can't say. But either way, it's still the normal color. It's just the highlight tone is going to be influenced by that diffuse atmospheric lighting. So as the skin is warm, so too will the purple skirt be. So I'm slowly integrating that sunny skin tone, which is the same thing I used on the skin, which is the same thing you'll see me use on the metal in a moment to bring that warmth in there. Now, as a side note, if you've watched my previous video on exploring colors purple linked up above, you'll know that sunny skin tone makes an awesome highlight for purple all the time. It gives it a very regal feel, a very silky feel. So it's just something I like anyways, but it works out well here. Notice how, again, I'm just pushing these layers, nothing too, nothing too scary. And I'm just covering less and less each time and creating a light pattern across the middle of the skirt. One thing I often see people do with these kinds of like raised surfaces is push all the highlights toward the bottom edge. Not only is that fairly unrealistic, given the curve that these things normally have, it's also less interesting. Your miniature is always more interesting when it goes light, dark, light. So the more alternating versions of that you can get, the better. So just put your highlights in the middle and your painting will jump up a whole shockingly high level. I'm glazing over the the bright sunny skin tone, the pure sunny skin tone to bring everything back into the purple tone. But because my glaze is so thin and transparent, it's still going to feel very warm. And because the purple itself is a warm red violet, it's going to naturally let that shine through and make it feel like an area where light's hitting from there. It's just some slight adjustments and other glazes to smooth everything out. And with the purple skirt in place and showing the same light as the skin, the next step is the is the metal. So I'm going to show you that on his belt here because it's sort of the best place I could find to show it off. But here again, I'm working in the same exact way, integrating sunny skin tone into my black and then eventually a little bit of ivory. Now, I will go slightly brighter on the steel than I do with everything else, but sunny skin tone is still my primary highlight. The reason that I go slightly higher on the non-metallic steel is because we expect these shiny non-metallic metals to have a real reflection point, a light catch. And almost any color light, if you look at its exact point of reflection, the small dot where the light itself, the original source, is being strongly reflected back, it's going to reflect pretty close to actual white because it's all of the light just gathered. So I build this up nice and slowly and again, just through standard layers. And my white application, the ivory that I say, I never go to pure white. I'm still using an ivory color, which is a warm white. It's just the edges and a few teeny, tiny little dots just to make sure that it catches the light. Now, I do take a little bit of a black, mixed with a deep turquoise to mix into the shadows and glaze over it and smooth things down. The reason I integrate just a little bit of blue onto the opposite side is for two is two thoughts. One, the light would bounce around and so there'd be a little bit of blue there. And two, warm lights make cold shadows. And with that, there you go. It's just repeating the same process over and over again for the rest of all the metals on the sky, and he'll be done. So there you go. He's all done. I'm going to go ahead and run some pictures over the top of me talking here at the end. This is a really fun project. I really like playing with this kind of lighting. I hope the tips and tricks I gave you here today helps you to understand how you can use this type of lighting. It's not really that hard. Just remember to set your initial zone, your circle, your sphere of color. And then you paint within that. Once you've kind of mastered that concept and understood that the light is motivating from that conical shape, everything else is really just putting paint on miniatures and highlighting in the way we're talking from the very beginning. So if you liked this, give it a like. Subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, hey, drop those down below. I always answer every question down the comments. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one. And we'll see you next time.