 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we return to our Exploring Colors series, and today we talk about turquoise, or is it teal, or maybe aqua, or blue-green? Look, I don't know. It's this color. We're going to talk about turquoise and teal. One of my favorite colors. Let's get into it. Alright, let's talk about teal and turquoise. So first things first. Turquoise and teal, often as they're labeled on paint bottles, are reversed. For example, this says turquoise right here, but it's not. This is actually closer to teal. Both of these are probably closer to what actually teal is. Turquoise is actually properly more in this range up here, although there is a wide range of turquoise colors. Warcolors actually matches them pretty accurately as to what they are. They are a blue-green color, but they are distinct on their own. They are not aqua or cyan. Cyan and aqua are both more blue, more bright. They have their own color and color families. Turquoise's color is traditionally drawn from the gem, and if you've seen turquoise in real life, it more closely resembles something like these two colors. The gem is prized in various cultures. It often has value. It's been worn as jewelry by royalty and things like that in various cultures for many centuries. Teal, that word being much more recent, only really having come into use in the 20th century when meaning a color, teal, which is actually more in this spectrum down here, teal is drawn from the duck, which is a Eurasian teal, and teal is the color on the back of the duck's head, and so that then became the color name. So, other than the fact that our paints are mostly named wrong, the important part to understand is that turquoise tends to be a brighter blue-green, teal tends to be a slightly darker blue-green. These colors occur in nature in lots of different places. As I mentioned already, both the gem or the animal, lots of animals have this kind of colored plumage, but also you can see things like teal reflected in very large glaciers. Those often tend to fall into the teal or turquoise spectrum. The colors themselves, they're complementary colors, so the opposite side of the color wheel is orange-red. So, when you have teal or turquoise put together with orange-red, you get this poppy combination of colors. They are both very strong, and these two colors together should be ringing alarm bells in your head. For a couple different reasons, first, copper and those kinds of metals are orange-red in their color tone. The true color of copper and those kinds of metals is orange-red. Of course, what happens when those colors oxidize? Well, why they turn turquoise and teal? Vertigree is effectively turquoise teal. You can have vertigree all along here. Most vertigree tends to be at the higher end of the spectrum of turquoise, looking more like this, but when we interpret it artistically, we can use anything in the spectrum. And so, vertigree naturally really pops because it's set against its complementary color, often appearing in the recesses and shadows and things like that, which makes the whole composition really pop. That's why vertigree looks so cool because it's naturally being put with its complementary color, albeit a desaturated version of it in the metals. We'll do a show here soon on color composition and how to combine saturated colors with desaturated colors. Now, the other reason that orange and turquoise, or teal, should be making your brain pop is because every movie of the past twenty years, basically, has discovered that one turquoise and teal and orange-red is an awesome color grading for the movie itself. It makes everything look warmer, more poppy, more alive, more vibrant, more saturated, more interesting, so movies themselves often get color graded into turquoise teal, but also movie posters to grab the eye have started to use this trope. I mean religiously. I mean religiously. I mean religiously. They have started using turquoise and teal on movie posters. Boy oh boy, has this become a thing. So though all of these are basically in the blue-green family derivative of cyan, they are their own color grouping. Turquoise tends to, in the truest sense, is sort of the brighter end of the spectrum. Teal is actually the lower end of the spectrum. That is to say where our colors, bottles, are most often labeled turquoise, they work best against orange and red, but that isn't the only color they work with. These colors are extremely versatile and work with a lot of different color schemes. They are bright, they are eye-catching, but the reason we love them in both movies and on art pieces is because they are eye-catching, but not overwhelming. Like some other saturated tones, because they are a natural soft combination of blue and green, two colors our eyes are very comfortable with, the sky and the earth, we find them very very pleasing to look at. They don't overwhelm our eye, but they do add a lot of life, vibrancy, energy, and saturation to our pieces. So that's why we love this combination in art, in movies, and most importantly in our painting. Speaking of painting, I say it's time we get into it. Let's get into some painting. We're going to start by laying down a simple base coat of the teal color. It's labeled turquoise in the bottle, but it's actually more of a teal or dark turquoise. We're going to lay down the darker color. Now the nice part is you can use blue, green, or the brighter color, normal turquoise, to highlight the darker one. They work naturally well together because that blue-green is really just the same color, but with more white added in, so it will act as quite a natural highlight, and it's a lot easier to smooth between these two. Now let's talk shadows. I've got my turquoise and teal on the palette, and there for shadows I have royal purple, calahari orange, and dark sea blue. If we mix in purple, we get a very different colored shadow, and it really shifts it hard into the purple spectrum, but it can be nice if you're trying to do a more colorful artistic take on it. Calahari orange, as its complementary color, will create natural shadows. This is the best way to make a naturalistic looking shadow on your two colors, and you'll see that in action. Dark sea blue is in the same color family, and so if you're just looking for the simplest option, saying in the same color family and darkening it down will give you very natural shadows. And with purple, I like it. It's a simple dark color, but it does color shift it. It's more artistic, more painterly, but it gives your miniature more visual interest. If you're looking for naturalistic shadows, the complementary color, which is what I'm using here, calahari orange, really does an amazing job of feeling like a very natural shadow of what would occur. And that's because it is simply the primary color desaturated with its complement. Now if I do the same thing over here on the bright turquoise side, look at how wonderful that shows. Look at how much that looks like an actual natural cast shadow by the area above it. I really like this effect with the brighter turquoise, and in fact, I like the brighter turquoise better in general. Now lastly, we can use the simple dark sea blue. What that does is just darken the mix. It's not that much different when put into the dark turquoise, but when you see it mixed into the teal color as you do here, it is quite a bit darker. We can use that to our advantage. In tandem with the complementary color, it acts as a great balancing shadow for the deepest darkest parts. Now let's talk highlights. Here I have Glacier Blue, Ice Yellow, and Pastel Peach. Glacier Blue is in the same color family. It will highlight it quite naturally. Ice Yellow brings out more of the green tones. The yellow basically working into the blues and shifting it slightly toward green. Pastel Peach, being both a yellow and an orange, will both brighten it, but also shift it towards green. Again, an interesting take depending on how you want your miniature to look. If you're going for something maybe a little more sickly, that can be a great way to go, or even aquatic or maritime. Starting with a straight forward highlight, you can see both this and the Ice Yellow that I'm using right now, honestly look pretty similar. You're going to get a somewhat similar effect though the Ice Yellow shifted slightly towards the green spectrum. When I move toward the Pastel Peach, you can see I get something that looks a lot more like, I don't know, Caribbean water or something like that. But this can be a great mid-tone to soften those brighter highlights of an Ice Yellow or a Glacier Blue. Now on the teal color, starting with the Glacier Blue, you get a really bright, sharp eye-catching highlight. Same frankly with the Ice Yellow. Again, a little bit as it pushed into the green, but it's not overwhelming. What it really feels like is that the character is just in a more natural environment. The green one, however, you can see how when I mix in the Pastel Peach, it does brighten it still, but what I get is something that again looks more aquatic, more maritime, or ocean-like. So if you're going for some kind of sea-themed miniature, it can be a great way to go. Now you can of course mix and match these. Here I'm highlighting the previous regular bright turquoise with the Glacier Blue Mix, and that can be your sort of three-step highlight. They'll work together to soften and can be a nice combination. So there you go. I do hope you enjoyed that. Turquoise and teal really are some of my favorite colors. Between the way they pop and give a miniature energy, excitement, life, without being too overwhelming, it's great as a small addition through something like vertigris or weathering. It's great as a main color. Obviously, I'm a fan and I've worked it into so many of my paint jobs. If you liked this, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. Remember, if you've got any questions, I answer every question down in the comments, so don't be afraid to drop a comment down there. But I thank you so much for watching this one, and as always, we'll see you next time.