 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today we're going to talk about something that often confounds new painters. We're going to talk about highlighting. Let's get into it. Let's strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique in learned Vinci V style. Highlighting or where to place the brighter value colors, tints, whatever you want to say on your miniature is something that I think a lot of people find challenging. Now of course all you're really doing when we're painting highlights is painting the light. So there is no single place that highlights go. That's the most important thing to say to start with. Is that highlights themselves can be anywhere. It depends on where the light is. If I am in the dark and I put a flashlight beneath my chin where those highlights are going to be are going to be very different but if I'm standing outside at noon on a sunny day. So there is no single right answer. The key to understanding highlights is to remember that all you're doing is painting the light. That's all it is. You're just painting where the light is. If the light is coming from the right or the left or the top or below or has a color or anything like that. It's warm. It's cold. It's just the light. And the real world can always be your guide. So when you think about where to place your highlights it's really just a question of what lighting situation are you trying to create. But as I said this video is more for newer painters and some of this may sound rather artsy fartsy. So let's get to the simple heuristics and shortcuts we can use. In our world of miniature painting we generally want to place the highlights from above and being somewhat diffuse. That is to say if you're painting figures for a game you want them to look good on the table and you want to imagine the lights coming from above on the open battlefield that they happen to be occupying at that moment because that would be the pretty standard outdoor lighting situation. Display painting lighting is a whole separate thing. I've got a whole video on that. You can find that linked up above. But that still leaves the question of where do we place the highlights. Today I'm going to take you through two simple methods to place your highlights. Let's head over to the painting table. So what are the two tips? That's the first question. Before we get to those I want to talk about how I'm approaching this figure. Right now this is our new death master and he's just base coated. No highlights whatsoever, just flat colors. And I'm going to approach this using a universal highlight. I want him to appear as though he's in cold, pale light like a cave or moonlight or something like that. So my only highlight color I'm going to use is vertigris. Everything you see me apply here is whatever this base tone is plus increasing amounts of vertigris. That's it, which is effectively a pastel green blue. Now here are the two tips and you saw me apply them already. We're going to use simple layering methodology and tip number one is we push the highlight to the top of the volume. Okay, what do I mean? Let's not talk with me. Let's not make this any more complicated than it needs to be. To the top of the surface. So one is hood, the top is that little ridge. If it's a rounded thing, as you'll see on the face mask when we get to that later, then it's going to be toward the side ridge. If it's the top of the cloak, then it's up to the point where it meets the hood. If it's the lower red part of the cloak, then it's up to the part where it meets the purple part of the cloak. If it's the pants, it's the top part where it meets the purple and the red part, okay? Wherever you have one material or surface changing into another because of a change in the volume, which could be folds in an individual item, or it could be that item switching to another material, like cloth going up under armor, something like that. All of our highlights just get pushed to the top of that surface. Now you will not want to do this. Your brain will fight you on this. You've got to fight back. By the way, this purple is quite glossy, so I apologize for that. I ended up rotating him here so that you can actually see better what's going on as I realized my painting light was reflecting it. But we push toward the top and we shrink it every time. Just like my layering video linked up above, we're always covering a little more than we think and we're shrinking the amount we're covering every time and we're pushing those highlights to the absolute tippy, tippy top of each individual volume. That's trick number one. What's trick number two? Well, you already saw me doing it. See those little purple areas hanging out down at the bottom? Those are what we call sticky outty bits. Effectively things that stick out from the vertical plane of the miniature. If you imagine the miniature in sort of two dimensions we lay them, we have a flat plane going up and down. What's sticky outty from that vertical plane? Now I way over highlight this intentionally so that I can just glaze it back and smooth it together. Same as you saw me do in the layering video. And you'll see how I use the glazes differently on each of these surfaces to draw things together. Here I'm just using the thinned purple which makes a wonderful glaze. I actually thinned it completely with ultra matte varnish so that way it mattes out and isn't a total glossy nightmare and smooth out all those purple layers. I know this method might seem strange to begin with and it is a shortcut. It's not always going to be right but for the most part when you're painting your troops be they space marines, sci-fi figures, fantasy stuff, it doesn't matter. Using this kind of a trick where you push the highlights to the top and you and then highlight the sticky outty bits can really be a great simple shortcut when you don't know what else to do. And it makes it look really compelling and convincing. The reason it makes it compelling and credible and convincing is because it creates a singular lighting scheme. One of the most important rules in lighting is consistency and using a shortcut like this even if not totally realistic and look, we're painting tiny plastic people some part of this is about art and fun this isn't about rivet counting and realism all the time so even if this isn't realistic it can still look credible because it's consistent and when the brain sees a consistent lighting scheme it goes yep, got it, that works for me. So remember we're pushing to the top and to the pushy outty bits, the sticky outty bits top and sticky outty bits. Again, here on this red undercloak I guess is what you would call it. Sometimes that can be challenging. When you have these large flat planes with your initial layers you might cover the whole surface that's sticking up and that's fine because when we build the layers we always cover more than we need. On something like the hat where it's around or his mask, I'm sorry his face mask where it's a rounded top instead we're gonna push it to each side of the head which is effectively the top of that side. And as I go down you'll notice I start leaving some of the shadow in the middle so where the thing turns away from facing directly upward or just in the middle of the area where we're going we're not at the top anymore but we're also not at the sticky outty bit we just don't highlight that all the way up. So we just keep integrating more and more vertically and pushing towards the top and the sticky outty bits. Now the top can mean two different things. It's not just the nearest point to that purple layer it also means the side nearest the light nearest the top. So you'll see as I go here especially on the back cloak that I start forcing it more to sort of the right side from your view right now then I do to the left side. So like right here I'm tracing that line down the top right of it, the top part and then the sticky outty bit which is specifically the littlest part of it that flares over his tail. Now what else are sticky outty bits? Why edges are sticky outty bits? Because edges both act as sort of the top of the surface at the general edge and they tend to stick out as they do on his mask here. That means that we need to make sure to give them a highlight, hence an edge highlight. Now we don't circle around every edge we don't necessarily need to highlight the upward facing edges but we wanna make sure especially those edges or sorry I like the downward facing edges but the upward facing edges we certainly highlight. Here I'm using the burgundy glaze again just to draw everything together just like you saw me do with the purple I apply it and then feather it out and get sort of the smoothness that I'm looking for. All right, let's talk about highlighting black. So in this case I'm just going for pure black his pants are meant to be black and rather uninteresting he has a ninja assassin after all and so I'm just pushing very vaguely into the gray tones and this is where we talk about different materials. You don't need to push every highlight to the same level of contrast. So with his pants I don't go as many steps up as I did with the purple. The purple and the burgundy are dominant features they're very exposed, they're very up high they're very in the light they're the top of the total volume, the complete miniature so I really wanna push those way up high whereas here you'll notice the pants stay much more subtle that's because both they're lower on the miniature but they're also a different material being more matte and something that doesn't reflect as well. Non-metallic metal poses a few extra challenges but we can use the same rule of the top and the sticky outty bits and this armor plate on his shoulder will illustrate this perfectly. So we start by pushing the highlights to the top but I carry them through the center. Notice that my brush stroke has changed slightly here whereas before I was doing these long smooth brush strokes on the metal I'm doing these hashy short brush strokes that's another way to show the difference in the material. But I'm still pushing the highlight towards the top of each change of material and the sticky outty bits in this case each of these armor plates has a little ridge on it that I'm making sure to highlight that's the sticky outty bit here. The edges of it are also sticky outty bits as aforementioned. Notice that each time I shrink it and I'm putting a lot more highlights up toward the top of the shoulder right what's resting against the purple then I do against everything and then I do anywhere else. Notice also that I leave that black line in there in between the two and that black line is really important. That's an occlusion shadow in between these two areas and that occlusion shadow is something your brain very much expects and having a light, dark, light transition helps sell the overall effect. With the non-metallic metal I go all the way up so whereas with the pants we were very subtle with the highlights we didn't push the contrast with the non-metallic metal we're going up to pure vertigree. We're also making sure to put in bounce lights hitting those hidden edges on the other side. Non-metallic you have to go a little bit farther and you have to hit whatever's opposing your light with a mid-tone highlight as well. That left side of what you saw there really brings it all together. Here again I'm glazing with a little bit of my original dark sea blue just to then feathering it out just to help smooth those different blends and bring it all together because I was being rather hashy and dashy but I do go back to the vertigree again and make sure I get a nice bright shine point right at the tip tip top because the metal has to be highlighted in a much more extreme way and have a much higher contrast to sell as that material whereas the cloth doesn't need such a run. You thought we weren't going to talk about the skin oh of course we're going to talk about the skin. Now again I do all of this skin using basically three colors you'll see. Cork and vertigree are where we're starting out the same as everything else. By using the same universal highlight color I create a credible lighting scheme as though the light is all the same. He's in cold light so everything has a cold highlight. Once again I'm pushing to the top of the muscle structure in the leg and then the sticky outty bits which in this case is his heel which is jutting out. The bottom of his feet and toes his little toesies because those are sticky outty and his ankle bone. Right so the top of the volume. Now the hand poses a very different challenge but the rules are the same. Right at the top of the hand where it matches where it meets those little leather straps is where I push the highlight and then my sticky outty bits are just the knuckles. The knuckles are sticky outty from the plane. Boy you're going to all be sick of me saying that by the end of this video. I hope I've drilled it into your heads enough. But you can see how again we just run that highlight right up to the top and then on each knuckle. And what we're doing there is alternating light, dark, light, dark, light, dark. And the more times you tend to alternate those value jumps the more visually appealing the model becomes because it becomes more easily readable. And now a slight difference. I still apply a glaze to smooth it all out. But this time instead of doing my original cork which would be boring we need to also add a little hue, a little color into the skin. So I take the burgundy that I used for the cloak thin that to a glaze and that's my glaze for the skin to smooth it adding in some additional hue but not affecting my highlights. Even things like poison or this drippy venom whatever it is we're going to do the exact same way. We mix in a little vertigris and we want that to really pop right at the top right where the light would catch that liquid and then on the bottom drops which are effectively sticky out events. Now here I cheat a little because at the end I take some golden fluorescent green and go over everything which is very transparent and will very much respect the highlights. My glaze here is just thin fluorescent green. There's the death master all finished. He's ready to go. I think he came out pretty cool. So you can see how what we did is push those highlights up to the top and then all the sticky outty bits. That's what it is. Top and sticky outty bits. Those are the two rules you need to remember when you're not sure what else to do. I hope you found this helpful especially if you're a newer painter. Obviously we're going to roll some images over the top here of the death master. I do want to thank you very much for watching this. Hit like if you haven't already it helps other people find the channel and I really appreciate it. Subscribe, we have new videos here every Saturday. We do have a Patreon focused on review and feedback so if you're looking for additional coaching to take your next step on your hobby journey check out that link below. It also gets you access to a really cool discord community full of ultra supportive hobbyists. But thank you again for watching this. I really hope you enjoyed it. I liked painting this guy and as always we'll see you next time.