 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video, and today we're going to talk about taking your terrain up to the next level, making it pop, pop, pop, so let's get into it. The strict technomancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it. Terrain for me is always a fun in-between project. It's something I work on when maybe I'm in the middle between armies or between display pieces, it's a pallet cleanser, it's something fun and de-stressing, and I think that's why terrain is so awesome, because you can just go nuts with it. It can become part of whatever world you want, you can use rough techniques, a little sloppier techniques and it just looks cool, especially when we're making terrain for our battlefields where obviously if there's a war going on the buildings might not be the most clean thing. So today we're going to talk about those techniques, about how to take that terrain and pop it up, weather it, mess it up, do cool things and make it stand out on your table. You know the best part about terrain is that as I said it really is just something relaxing, it's great to cleanse the pallet, you don't have to worry about being messy and that's all fun. So I started over black and because of the nature and the shape of this thing and this is true for a lot of terrain, a sort of standard zenithal doesn't really work. So instead I'm just building this up and I'm going to start from a sort of cold gray base because of what I'm going to be doing later to warm it up and so that'll help kind of neutralize it and balance it out. If I went to a warm white or more of a warm yellow white, it would end up looking far too brown. So you see how I'm just building it up and notice that I'm not trying to be perfect with it. So this is my first piece of advice with your terrain. When you're building it up with the airbrush, don't feel like you have to get everything down to be absolutely perfect, especially on structures like this. There would be, you know, small areas where the light isn't perfect, where things don't look exactly right, where there's differences in finish because of, you know, sort of weathering or time or where or whatever. And so you can see how I've got it up here. Again, it's close. I've got a nice base coat down, but I'm not looking to have one smooth exact perfect layer of a color. I want there to be some natural variation in transitions in there. It makes it more interesting in the end. So once I get that all set, I figured, okay, just the white's a little uninteresting. Let's do something fun. Red stripe. Not only is it beer, but in fact it's just a fun, easy way to break up a lot of space. And this is one of my first tips. Some simple masking tape and just a couple things like a little shape, like a stripe can suddenly change the whole look of your terrain. Now we go into hyperspeed mode. I thought you'd want to see how I paint kind of everything else that isn't metal or sorry, that isn't white on here. But just those little tricks, like the tiny little red stripes took me, you know, five minutes maybe to, to, to lay those stripes down and the mask and stuff off, but it just does so much to make the terrain look more vibrant, to add some color interest and will help keep things popping later on. Same with, frankly, the copper tubes, like that all could have been steel, but just making a few bright poppy color choices is really the first tip to keep you to make your terrain more interesting. But as we go through this and get everything all kind of base coated here, because that's all this step is, notice I'm picking out some of the individual elements, but not everyone. Like I don't do every rivet and steel. Most of those things would just be covered over by whatever paint was on the building itself. So we're not going to worry about that kind of detail. We want enough to keep it interesting. That's the goal. Now, about 40 minutes of work and we've got a perfectly acceptable building. Nothing wrong here at all. But we can go farther. Often when you're painting figures, making things grimdark makes them look more boring, but with terrain, making them grimdark makes them look awesome and like they belong in nature. So we're going to begin our journey with some streaking grime that I just paint all over. A quick note on streaking grime, if you wanted to absorb more in and stain the surface, you don't need to varnish the acrylic paint first. If you want it to be very light and easy to wipe off, go ahead and give the surface a good varnish of satin or gloss varnish. I begin by taking a paper towel after it's dried and just kind of dabbing around and wiping and cleaning up the still wet excess. Then I dip my paper towel in a little bit of white spirits and move it around and you'll see that basically we're going to get that nice and wet. And as I spread the white spirits around, it then sort of starts breaking up the streaking grime. And then what I'll do is I'll flip to a clean area of the paper towel to then wipe that whole area down and you'll see how it just pulls all that streaking grime right up and off and gives us a nice, awesome looking stained weathered surface. Now paper towels are fine, but if you don't, but if you can, I would recommend a cloth. Here, I grabbed an old sock that was literally one of my dog's toys. That was one of my socks that I got a hole in it. And cloth just makes it so much easier because it doesn't catch. It doesn't tear. It doesn't leave residue and fibers on the surface. And frankly, it just does a better job. Same rules apply. I'm just dipping a sock in some white spirits and then switching it all over the thing to get it wet and then moving my finger in the sock to a clean area to then wipe and remove the now wet, easily removable streaking grime. You can remove as much or as little of this as you like. It's really about your tastes. I will say try to be directional when you remove it. You want to pull in certain directions. You notice I'm often pulling towards the outside of the thing to make it look like waters run out and is streaking in that direction. So long strokes like that will amplify the effect of the streaking grime. Here we've got it all cleaned up. And now comes a very important but simple step, our old friend sponge weathering. We dip a sponge. This is a clamshell sponge thing that I'm just dipping in some rinox hide and dabbing around. Turn off your brain. You want this to be random. When you shove it down flat on a flat surface, it won't leave much behind. That's fine. That allows you to build it up. You can also drag it along the edge or dab it along the edge. And that will give you different effects from scratches to more built up, awesome looking sort of scratches and weathering along the edges where the paint would naturally chip. The reason I say turn off your brain is you don't want this to be symmetrical. You want it to be quite random and scattered around and build it up naturally. Don't try to do it all at once. Dab the thing a lot. It's an easy, relaxing thing. You're just stabbing and slamming your terrain. But I'm doing it on the metal as well. And I do it all over the figure because what this is going to become is a roadmap for our later weathering. Because I dab this so randomly and because the paint comes off the sponge randomly, it gives me an awesome random pattern for later weathering. Remember the techniques I'm showing you here? I'm applying everything to this building. You don't have to do all of this. Don't feel like this is the step by step you need to follow. Instead, I want you to think of this like a selection of techniques. You can choose to deploy whenever you feel appropriate. If you only want your building maybe a little grungy, stop with just maybe that kind of rough wash and then clean it up a little. If you want it to go even farther, throw all this and more onto the pile. In the end, buildings can look a lot of different ways from brand new and just stood up to old and battered from centuries of war and wear. And whatever your vision is, is perfectly fine. Bring that to life. That's the fun. It's your world created. Contrast paints are not just for painting miniaturs with contrast. Okay, in other words, they have a lot of other purposes. All of the browns and oranges are really great for weathering and the next simple tip for making your terrain super grim, dark and making it pop on your table is some quick, simple streaks. I just take a brush, dip it into the contrast paint and start driving it down, like literally just making little streaks. Then I get a little bit of water on my brush and I then just kind of smooth around so it pushes out a little bit. The contrast paint itself will naturally shrink and so it's perfect for this kind of weathering because it will create those natural streaks. It's also good for around your rivets. So all these big rivets or anything that's kind of sticking up where water would run and collect, you just put a few drops of this around it. I don't do every single rivet because they're gonna weather in an inequitous fashion. And once I've done all the rivets that I wanna do, I come back and do a second bite at the apple on the streaks because streaks build up over time. And so by literally applying a layer, letting it dry and then doing another layer, new streaks, new lines, you create that natural layering that feels very organic, that's just like nature. We can also use this same thing to reinforce some of the natural random patterns we made with the sponge weathering. These work in hand in hand really well. So I'm just taking some of it and then you'll notice that I then again, just wipe the brush with some water, feather out the edge. But I'm gonna do that over all these big spaces as well as some new areas, like hit the metal, put some of this in the corners where again on the metal water would naturally build up. And so leave the deposits. When you're using these kinds of browns, and by the way, if you don't have the contrast paints you can use Serif from CPO or Agrax Earthshade or anything like that for this. And that's perfectly fine. But I can also do things like cover these sponge spots on the edge where when I was dabbing against the edge because it's a very random pattern, I happened to get a larger amount, no problem. Let's put a little stain there because if the building's covering is exposed and now there's rust and dirt as water pooled around that on a rainy day and dried it would then evaporate and leave a lighter stain. So again, it's about building this stuff up in these natural layers. If we're gonna make this building grim dark, if we're gonna make it pop, then we've gotta do some weathering. Now I got a bunch of fun tools here like this actual rust texture from Green Stuff World and the liquid rust. You can use that stuff. You can just use regular old paints. You can use inks. You can use any company's rust products. It does not matter, okay? You can just use normal old red, brown and orange paint and that's fine too. But notice that as always I'm using the random map I created with my sponge dabbing to sort of guide a lot of my work. Not all of it. Sometimes I introduce some new colors in some spaces where they weren't before because you want this to be overlapping. Think like a Venn diagram. You're not laying this just over the previous areas. I think this is where a lot of people sort of have trouble because they tend to think of this like layer paint where you start from a darker color and then you just layer your way up. That's not what we're doing. Instead we're covering randomly with the initial sponging or weathering and then some of the later elements we put cover a smaller portion of that certainly because the rust would only have these smaller spots of these very bright things but also some things would just be in the red rust or just be in the orange rust or whatever. Here with the Typhus corrosion I'm laying down all sorts of new spots even going off of the metal itself onto just the regular seemingly like white enameled painted surface of this metal building to really create even more stuff. Now one of the things with rusty oranges is that they go on a lot brighter than they dry but the orange is so essential. If you really want your building to pop rust can be an amazing way to do it. Orange is extremely eye catching to human eyes just like the red stripe is and so by laying down just a little bit of orange it adds a lot of interest to your piece. Of course since we've also got some copper here we're gonna go ahead and vertigree that out again just using a couple different shades of this to just really create different sort of experiences with the vertigree both a darker blue green and a lighter more bright color. Just like with the walls I'm gonna do streaks here. Now when note on doing streaks whether on the walls or on the copper with niloxide or anything else streaks happen from logical areas. You want them to be random but where the streak begins isn't random. Look for rivets, divots in the wall existing other heavy spots of your sponge weathering. Those areas where water would naturally collect build up and then fall will be where you want your streaks to fall from. But of course weathering isn't just making things darker we can also make things brighter. Here I've gone back to the sponge and I've gotten an ivory color and I'm just dabbing it around really randomly but in areas where I haven't heavily weathered to create brighter spots. Almost like salt stains or weather stains or snow stains or something like that right? There would be these little areas where the surface would be brighter because of surface dust or maybe they just still clean or whatever right? And so again it's just this little tiny touches that can really break things up and create a lot of visual interest while also still making it look dirty. Who'd have thought you can make things look dirtier by applying sort of a bright white paint but in fact you can because it makes it look dusty. The next trick is of course pigment. We cannot get out of this if we're not doing some pigment. So your next step on the grim dark poppy terrain journey is pigment, just tons of raw pigments and you'll notice how I use them here is I'm just literally dabbing them on and then spreading them around. Dab and spread, dab and spread. And you don't need to really worry about the color you can use reds and browns and oxides and yellows it's about whatever kind of world you imagine this thing to be on. If it was a dusty desert I would expect yellow dust if it's just normal sort of temperate climate it might just have rusty brown mud, whatever you like. You can also use black pigment which is one of my favorites to just reinforce things on buildings to make it look like scorch marks where like a weapon impacted it and left a burn. It's a really awesome trick. You just kind of dab in the pigment and then you spread it around. Now as a note, you can seal these pigments with a little varnish if you want but you honestly don't have to. You can just really, really, really dab it in, blow it off and then dab for a long time and you'll kind of force it down in the paint where it really won't wipe off if the surface is plenty matte. But those pigments can be a great step to just bring a lot more visual interest into the overall thing. Look at how much more worn that looks. And again you can mix the colors. Here I mixed a little red in to show where maybe not only had a bomb gone off but there was a little bit of rust, a little bit of different burn. My last trick for this is to make it feel like it's part of the earth. Your terrain sits somewhere. It's on something. And that mud that I suspect would be around this heavy and reinforced building is going to get wet and splash up on the side of the building and leave a staining where either could also be organic life. So here I've used a sepia tone, which is a brown-green and I'm just gonna go around from below on the lower sort of third of all of the terrain and give it a nice light glaze. The sepia ink is thinned six to one. So six thinner to one drop of ink. So I can build it up nice and slow and you see how it just gives that wonderful patina that really makes this thing feel like, oh, there's some moss that grew up the side or some dirt that splashed up there. Anything like that. All those tricks and more can be used. So there you go. That's the finished building. I'll run some pictures over the top here. I hope you enjoyed this. It was a lot of fun to work on this terrain. This is a really cool terrain kit from GW. I really like these. It's kind of had a lot of fun angles and neat stuff to work on. So all in all, definitely enjoyed that. Give it a like if you liked it. Don't forget we've got a Patreon you can sign up for which includes a Discord full of an awesome community to share your hobby progress with and get your questions answered, as well as a way for me to provide you more personalized feedback on your miniatures. Link for the Patreon is down below. Subscribe if you haven't already. If I didn't answer anything or you've got more questions, hey, drop that down in the comments. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.