 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to talk about large-scale figures. This is going to be me narrating over my self-painting the Duchess from Miniac. It's a great mini. I ran all the paints at the beginning, I'll reference them occasionally, but most of them will be pretty obvious. So I used a rather different zenithal scheme here, going with some purple to white, just add some more interesting tone to the undershade, and what I'm doing first is just I laid on a nice thin coat of Bugman's Glow to the skin, and now I'm integrating a little bit of the black leather, and I'm just sort of sketching out my shadows. One of the important things you have to remember when you're working in large-scale is that you simply have a lot more space, I mean I know that sounds obvious, but being that this is a 75mm figure, it means that we're going to have a lot more area to bring out detail. So when we get the opportunity to do things like texture or add other elements like that, we want to make sure we're doing so. And when it comes to things like the skin, we want to make sure that we're really capturing all those nice transitions. So now I've gone back to Bugman's Plus a little bit of a highlight color. What I'm doing is just moving up the flesh down in this case, integrating a little bit of Harvester Flesh from Scale 75, and I'm trying to follow that T-zone of the face. Just slowly building the highlights, using our standard layering technique. So this is just, you know, putting shingles on a roof, right? Covering mostly less and less as I go, just trying to find those areas where light would hit, and I want the light to be hitting a soft, basically coldish light from a sort of two o'clock direction, so over her left shoulder. And that's where we're going to put all the highlights on this. That's where I primed with the light coming from that direction. So, you know, right away I kind of liked how that looked and said, okay, let's go that direction. So I just keep climbing up, integrating more and more Harvester Flesh, and eventually now I'm integrating in some Ice Yellow. And you can see that that creates a fairly stark transition, right, when we integrate in that higher highlight color. I'm not going to be putting that everywhere. I'm just going to be really careful about the T-zone and where exactly that light would be catching using more of like a Rembrandt style of lighting, which just means you've lit heavily to one side, almost at a 90 degree angle. Not quite there, but I'm pretty close. Now one of the keys is that when you're doing things like this on large scale, you can't just do them once. So one of the great secrets to working in large scale is you have to repeat everything multiple times. So as I continue to work through the flesh, as you see me doing now, like right now she looks pretty stark. But once I start integrating the highlights, like this is just the first pass that I'm going to record here. What I'm doing then when I go off camera is turning the miniature around, looking at it very closely and repeating with a lot of the colors, but this time with more soft glazes. So just going in and readjusting the highlights in places, you know, do I like exactly where that highlight is? Is the transition there as smooth as it could be, right? And just making sure that everything is nice and smooth. And so you can see as I get to this step, I've moved the highlights just slightly. It's all the same colors still, but I've just kind of fiddled with the colors, right? So with that flesh done, the face, the most important part, especially on a large scale mini, and I wanted her to look alive, but sort of, you know, painted. So like when I say painted, I mean like makeup painted. So now we're just going to go ahead and start working on the dress. And this is a big smooth flat surface. So wet blending is going to be the order of the day. This kind of shape is the perfect thing for wet blending. I've got out a huge brush. In this case, I'm working with three Camara colors. So red, burnt red, and black. And I'm just going to wet blend this all out. And you can see I'm just really sketching fast. I'll put the paint on, I'll wipe my brush, and then I will go back and smooth it out. Okay. And so I just continually do this over and over again, integrating more and more paint each time, okay? And when I'm happy with an area, I'll kind of move on and start setting some color next to it. And I just make my way around the dress doing this, integrating more color, and then there we go. Nice and smooth, okay? And all that was is just consistently working at it and making sure that we had it, you know, very smoothed out through the blends. Now the next important step is I need to make sure that I can actually understand how bright a lot of these colors are going to be. So the things that are going to end up black, I need to black out. So this is like the hair, her corset, and so on. That was just literally applying one shade of black to them. And I just needed to make sure when I put all these bright colors next to it, I need to understand what it's actually going to look like, especially the face. Okay. Now comes a little step that's probably surprising to most folks. So what I did is I took some little putty from AK Interactive, but you can also choose silly putty, and I covered up the stuff like her flesh that I had already invested a lot of time in painting. Then I loaded up some ivory paint into the airbrush, and I'm going to go ahead and just do some very thin layers over the red, which I know probably seems crazy. Why after I put that much effort into the red, would I go over an airbrush over it? Well, the answer is because that's what's going to help me get the super brightest red, and we're not done yet. So now I come back in with a nice ink glaze. So this is a mix of Vallejo Game Ink Red and Scale 75 Ink Tensity Red. And the reason I use a 50-50 mix is because the ink density is really intense and really bright, but the game ink is very matte. And so together they actually form a really nice, you know, rich red color. And I'm just working my way around the miniature. This is very thin paint, very thin, like eight to one. And I just gave it a couple of glazes until I liked where it was. That snapped everything back together. Now came a part of the miniature that I struggled with mightily, and that is this pop color. I knew I wanted to use teal in some minor way or more of a cyan, really, to be honest. But I was trying to figure out exactly how to balance it, because it's a really intense color. And when you move up to a large scale like this, it's another one of those things you got to be very aware of. You need to be very aware of how your miniature is balanced. Oftentimes, when you have 32 millimeter miniatures and they're more made for gaming or something, you can have wacky schemes. You know, space marines often look like football teams, but here I needed it. It has to be in balance. If you have some bright thing that's stopping people's eyes from moving around the model, you're in a lot of trouble. So I started with the cyan, noticed how bright it was, and now I'm going to knock it back, right? And I'm going to do that through the addition of contrast. So there I took some of that. This is, by the way, the Vallejo blue-green that I'm using here, and that's all the color is. And I'm going to start integrating in darker colors. I started integrating in some blue, black, panes, gray, ink. I started integrating in some of the ice yellow to get my highlight. And I just ended up, you know, when you desaturate something heavily. So by making it that shiny, it's going to feel more satin-like, which is a nice benefit for what's underneath her dress anyways. I want to assume she has very soft, luxurious clothing. And you'll notice in between these two steps that I switched things. I ended up making her, whatever, neck ruffle, this kind of blue-green color, and made the little flap that's supposed to be her corset pulled back red. Because I realized, as I was sitting there looking at it, that I didn't have enough red in the middle of the model. I had an outer ring of red, but no inner red. And so I switched that to red and turned the corset to this blue-green. And now we've got something working. Things go in balance. Don't be afraid to adjust your schemes. Okay, now for the free hand on the dress. Again, when we've got this big space, got this beautiful, luxurious big dress, we can't just have like a super smooth blend. That flies maybe on a 28 or 32mm miniature, even then I'd still argue you should do free hand on something like this. But on a big model like this, we can't just have a flat color. That's not going to sell, okay? So the question becomes what to do. I thought about a regular pattern. I actually had tried a few instances of a more repeating pattern and really hated how it looked. So I looked at some classic dresses of, you know, capturing Renaissance paintings. And I noticed a lot of them have this sort of brocady pattern to them. And I thought, well, I like doing brocades. And people think this is really complicated. It's not. Here's what you do. You get some paint, you get some flow improver. That's what I'm working with here. I'm working with a little paint, a little ink, a little flow improver. You can check out my How to Paint Sharp Thin Lines video if you want to see exactly. And I just start drawing circles, half moons, squiggles, right? And I just kept working them, kept working them. And that amount of visual confusion makes it really easy to just keep building up. So I draw one thin one. Maybe I'd thicken it up a little, draw another one, keep going. Draw a little one underneath it. Just let my mind go wherever it wants. Just make a fun pattern. But now I've got to bring it, by doing it in that light color, I get it nice and even and smooth. I'm not trying to match the dress. Now I go back to that same red ink mixture and I'm going to glaze over everything. I ended up doing a little more glazes off camera. Now you can see everything's red. The problem is I also need to shadow this freehand because there's areas where the freehand would be less seen and it's too bright down in the shadows. So I mix in a little bit more blue-black ink into the red ink and now I get a nice transparent shadow that I can shoot over the shadow parts of the dress that are supposed to be limited. Again, all of this super thin. I'm doing like four layers of this glaze with the airbrush because I can do it in seconds. So I'm working eight to one, seven to one, thinner to paint or ink. It just makes it so much easier because then I can just build this soft, subtle, natural shadow. Okay, so with that done, with all that finally in place, now lastly I'm going to turn to the major like non-metallic metal sections and for this time I decided to go with a pretty straightforward non-metallic metal recipe. This is a more common sort of steel-ish recipe I'll use. So this is, we start with some Vallejo Dark Sea Blue and all I'm going to do is integrate deck tan. So Vallejo deck tan. And then eventually at the tippy-toppy highest highlight for like very edges and stuff or maybe a little bit of a light catch, I'll integrate a little bit of ice yellow. So what you're going to see me do here is pretty straightforward. There's a lot of texture on these gauntlets and this is another place where scale matters as to the final product. But as to the initial blending, I'm not really paying any attention to that filigree that's on the gauntlet. I'm treating it as one cylindrical volume. Don't worry about the little details on things, the little tiny sketches and little nuanced stuff first. Get the highlights set on your volumes. The total bracer. Same thing goes for hair. Same thing goes for all kinds of stuff like that. Chainmail. Set the complete volume first. Where should the light be? And that's what I'm doing here. Again, just standard layering techniques, slowly integrating more and more deck tan into my pains gray. You notice I'm constantly working the edges using the side of the brush mainly and just working my way up, making sure that I'm in a nice place and I'm constantly, you'll see me turn the model and check it. Look at the top, look at the bottom because I have to put the highlight on both the top for the direct light and the bottom for the reflected light on a cylinder shape. Right? Lastly, we'll kind of clean up those edges and then what I go do off camera is I go trace the individual little filigree, lay some little shadows against the filigree and pop those out so that they fit. But I'm not going to worry about that when I'm initially sketching it in. The key is to always then keep repeating, keep going deeper and deeper. I think of it like an inverted pyramid when I'm painting in large scale. I start with the big stuff, right? The total shape. That's what I'm doing with the hair here. I'm just put using some, this is again some of that deck tan and I'm just putting in a nice broad highlight, right? Around the crown of the head and around the little hair strands in her curls, right? Again, using the side of the brush, letting the texture of the miniature do the work for me, okay? And as I'm doing that, what I'm doing is just setting that highlight in place. Now it's way too broad at this point and that's where we're going to go back and just start knocking it back. So now I've taken some of that dark sea blue. Same thing I did for the non-metallic metal. Hair and non-metallic metal, hair and metal, I should just say, have a lot of properties in common honestly, depending on the shine of the metal. And now I'm just glazing that white down by placing that broad highlight. I can go in and slowly glaze it back. I can take some black and trace some thin lines in between. Just slowly work it down. Once I was happy with that, then I decided it was time to work on the gold. Now I didn't want to use brown in this and brown is usually the first step for non-metallic gold. But I actually didn't want to use any brown in this piece at all and want any earthy tones. So instead I took the brown, sorry, the base gold color, which is English uniform, a very common deep ochre color. People use this sort of a base for non-metallic. And I mixed it with some dark sea blue. That means that my shadows on the gold get more cold, more antique, more influenced by green. The point here is, is when you're display painting at a large level, there's no more recipes. But there doesn't have to be. You don't have to just use this particular thing. This is the recipe for non-metallic gold, so I will execute robotic recipe plan 7a non-metallic gold. No. Not at all. Instead, by integrating the blue, what I get is this real, antique, old looking green gold in the shadows. And I'll go back and glaze some of that in later when I'm trying to smooth everything out. And then from that point with the English uniform, I just slowly integrate a little more yellow ochre from Proacryl and a little more ice yellow as my highlight. Perfect highlight for this. And you can see me just slowly again, layering it up. Most of what I do off camera from this point, it's just glazing. It's just final glazes, little touches, fixing the volumes. Like laying down those initial layers, your goal isn't to be perfect. You cannot make it perfect in one pass. You have to set the tones and then come back to it. So finally it's time to turn to the sword, and I had to actually do two of these off camera because I wasn't even sure what I was doing, so I did two of the top reflections, which means that that left me with the bottom to film, not the best, but it's good enough for our purposes. So again here I'm going to use some layering. I'm using the same non-metallic steel recipe, but I'm going to infuse a lot more blue and environmental colors, as I did with red on the top of the sword. But again, to begin with, I'm just going to sketch more or less in that dark sea blue to deck tan pattern. And one of the things I often see people do wrong with non-metallic metal is they'll try to make these little volumes completely even. Every highlight is exactly the same space as the other highlights. Make them varied. So you can see how I have one kind of up in the middle of the blade that's of a significant length, a small one, and then it goes all the way to the edge, right? So I got this weird off pattern. By making things irregular patterns, they feel more realistic. Light does not automatically line up in a perfect 3-2 pattern. There's nothing wrong with following those things. But it will feel more naturalistic if it's irregular. So I started by sketching the whole thing in this dark sea blue to deck tan. And now what I'm doing is I'm just integrating in some of that more dark sea blue. You can see I'm reinforcing some of the shadows. Unfortunately, the light's hitting it. It looks like I'm just painting it more white. I'm not. That's a dark color. You'll see once it turns away from the reflection. Then what I'm going to do is go and get some of that blue color. And using an interference color like the blue is a great way to smooth out your blends, to add more realism, and to really punch that up. That's more or less the mini-painted, okay? All I was doing off-camera was just subtle glazes to refine, refine, refine. That brings me to the last and most important step when doing large scale. You have to keep turning the miniature around in your hand and looking at everything. Take pictures of it with your phone at all angles and look at it on your phone. You'll notice errors you didn't notice before. And I'm just going through and correcting all the little tiny mistakes, errors. There's a lot of space here, and I need to make sure that everything is in line. So just little, little itty-bitty baby corrections. So there you go. That's painting large-scale display figures, how I tackled it with her. I hope you saw some cool, fun techniques in here. I hope this gives you some ideas. The key is don't waste a chance at detail. Work once and then refine two, three more times. It's all refinement with large scale. So thank you very much for watching. I certainly hope you enjoyed this video. We've just got some glamour shots over here at the end. Subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future. Give it a like if you liked it. But as always, I appreciate you watching, and we'll see you next time.