 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video, and today we're going to talk about pale flesh. We're going to talk about doing very pale, but still perfectly human skin tone, just as many of us are, and certainly myself, who spend too much time indoors, and don't get out in the sun enough, or perhaps you want to do some kind of fantasy race of an elf like I have here, where they just have a very sort of fair skin tone. So here I have an elf, it was actually the sorceress, which I converted over to be slightly different, and we're going to talk about how to do a pale skin tone with her. So what did I do so far? Well I started out by just laying down a little base of 09443 Warrior Flesh from Reapers, because I like this, it's quite a pinky tone, but it's still fairly neutral. I just applied a couple thin coats of that by brush to get a nice base coat down, then I took some whole red, some model air whole red, and I shot it up from below with the airbrush. Just easy quick prep, and that was all over a standard zenithal highlight, as you can still see on her hair and her clothes. So let's talk about the paints I'm going to use today. So let's bring the palette over here. So right here we have the Warrior Flesh as previously mentioned, we'll start down here in the dark part. Right here we have some Gothic Crimson, we've got some Flesh Five from Warcolors, right here we've got some Pale Pink from Proacrill, right here we've got Moon Ray Flesh from Scale 75 Fantasy and Games, and then finally we have some Glacier Blue from Vallejo Game Color. And we're going blue because as per usual with things like this you want to think about how you're opposing your highlights and shadows. So if you have very bright, cold highlights, then we want warm shadows. It's a nice easy sort of rule of thumb. Again it doesn't have to be, you can have variance there, but for this case we're going to adhere to that rule. So I'm going to turn her like this so we can see her and work on her, and we're going to focus here on this area and we'll do a lot of jumps in between. But the way that I like to start with a figure like this where I've laid down this base is to, I like to start by establishing my deep shadows. We have to know we're eventually going to go somewhere pale. So I've got a little master medium from Green Stuff World as well as a little flow improver, but any acrylic thinner or flow improver will work because I want to make this stuff very thin. The Gothic Crimson is a really nice, just a really nice kind of purple color. You can see it here. I'll show you on the back of my hand. There you go and you can see how thin I've got it down to almost a filter glaze color, and we're just going to work real carefully. As per usual, you can see, if you want to see the palette very quickly, how I thinned that down. So there's what it looks like now, back to her. And we're just going to go ahead and bring some of that crimson tone into where we're going to place shadows on her. So where, this is a fun thing to paint on camera. So for instance, where her dress is sort of falling over it, we're just basically trying to help establish some volumes here. This is a very minimal touch. So that's step one. We just lightly glaze in some of this crimson. You'll notice I do it over a couple of glazes. I especially make sure it's flush up against anywhere where there's a change of material. So for example, here where we are changing over to the breastplate, or here with her waistband belt, or with her boots, those kinds of things, letting it dry each time. So I'm going to continue on with that. Make my way all the way around the fig, and we'll be back in a moment. So everything has been turned crimson. We have our shadows all nice and crimson now. And one of the reasons I'm using this kind of a more softer pinkish color, as opposed to a deeper red, like I'm sure in past videos, you've seen me use something like an African or Indian shadow from scale color, or even black leather or something like that, is because if we do want this to be more pale, then we need the deep shadows to work well. And this kind of thin crimson color will work very nice. It's softer. It's not as dark. It's not as harsh when we get later into the brighter colors. Speaking of brighter colors, let's start doing that. So we're going to take some of that warrior flesh, and we're going to start mixing it in with little bits of the Moon Ray and the pink flesh to get a brighter color. Now I'm not going to worry about how significant my jumps are at the moment, because they're going to be fairly big, and I'm okay with that. With our initial run here, you're going to see me just slowly integrate more and more of these and then start bringing in the glacier blue as well. And with our initial run here, when we're building up a nice pale flesh, the way we want to work is we want to just have our layers be nice and established, and then with glazes, we can bring everything back in line. So I don't worry too much about having these exact little steps. We can bring it all together. What I more want to do is just slowly build up these highlights, figure out where I'm setting my tones. Like you can see, that's a pretty significant jump, and that's okay. Nothing wrong with that. And what's interesting here is we'll be able to really nice and slow ramp this up. So we start with that first one. Now I'm just going to go through all these rather than cut and do the whole thing. So I'm going to take that color I have, I'm going to add a little bit more pink flesh to it, and start bringing in just a tiny bit of that glacier blue, but not much. And then we're going to bring in just a little bit more of that glacier blue into that at just those highest peaks of color. Okay. All right. So right now it looks insane, and that's okay. Don't worry about that. That's just perfectly fine. Let it be kind of insane. All right. I'm going to carry on and do those same steps you just saw me do all over the figure. We'll get her looking like a total loony tune, and then trust me, we'll snap it all back together back in a minute. Okay. So now she looks all crazy and clownish, and that's okay. It's all right. Sometimes we've got to make things look ugly before they look good. No problem. We're just going to adjust. Now we're going to bring it all together. The reason I jump way out like that into extreme shadows and extreme highlights is because I want to really set my sort of extreme values and then just start slowly pulling back into something in the middle that feels more organic. So what we're going to do here is I mixed up a couple different thin glazes. So here I've got my mix of Gothic Crimson and some of the Warrior Flush, and here I've got a mix of the Warrior Flush, the Moon Ray, and Glacier. So a very light, sorry, a pinky glaze and a brighter glaze. Okay. And then what we're going to do is we're just going to start bringing those colors together. Now I'm not really washing because I've made sure that the excess is all wicked off of my brush. I'm just carefully applying a nice, thin, smooth glaze of this mix of sort of this pink type of flesh color. You can see as I make my way around the model how it starts to just snap all these colors together. I know she's standing at a kind of odd angle, so I apologize with the big sword in her face. I wanted this sort of warrior pose of her like with the sword pointed out directly challenging somebody because I'm going to have, we're going to do a little OSL effect on her hand. I thought, because she's a classic elf, I wanted to go for like the classic elf of, like elf, like those of you who played D&D back in the day, I've been a little obsessed with the Dungeons and Dragons Tower of Doom Arcade game recently and so the elf has been on my mind and I thought, well here's a fun chance to paint an elf. Sometimes if you get an idea, you just got to go with it, you know? Okay. So you can see now how all of a sudden when we go over it with that glaze, how much more it's brought all the colors together. Her face is still a little extreme here and there, but we'll fix that. The face is actually a whole separate shooting match. In the end, I'll spend a lot more time on the face. In general, when you're doing figures, the best thing I can think of is if you're going to spend, you know, like assuming they have a face, like a face face and it's not like a space marine helmet or something like that. If you're going to spend two hours on the figure, spend an hour on the face. That's my best advice. Faces always draw more attention. Okay. So now you can see how that glaze went on and it really did just all of a sudden snap these wonderful colors together. Look at how much smoother that all of a sudden looks. We went from crazy clown time into something that honestly I think has a nice look to it. Like right there, we're pretty pale, we're pretty good. So if you wanted to stop there, you certainly could. We're going to go a little farther because of course we are. It wouldn't be this channel if we didn't. So the real simple cheat here I want to really impress upon you is undershading isn't just a matter of something you do with your zenithal priming. You can do it there later on as well. And just as I did by setting those very cold tones and the highlights, those very warm tones and the shadows, and then you can use your mid-tones to re-glaze over it and draw it all together just like you would. And what you get is this nice, smooth, heavy contrast. All right. So now I'm working from my lighter glaze. So this is my mix of a little bit of warrior flesh, mostly moon ray and blazer blue. But again, thinned nicely down. Flesh tones glaze so much easier than a lot of other colors just because of the nature of the pigments that make them up. So they're just a lot of fun to sit there and play with glazes with. And now you can see what I'm doing is just pushing out those highlights even more, just making sure that every little thing that you have a highlight will have it. So now we get into the part what we call the refinement stage where we're going to spend a long time making little itty-bitty baby changes. I can always go back to my previous glaze that I've got here and we can bring some of that back in so we can keep balancing these colors back and forth. We can keep adding more richness to the tone. One of the things that's fascinating about skin, I say this in a lot of videos, but I really can't say it enough, is skin is translucent. We don't think of it that way very much, but it is. If you've ever held a flashlight up to your hand, you know that light goes through it. It's not an opaque surface. Your hand isn't a steel wall, right? So because of that, when light interacts very interestingly with skin, it makes it so you're seeing little bits of the color underneath. That's why all that pink and stuff you can see in my hand over on the frame right now is visible because all the blood and capillaries that are underneath there that are showing through. So you can bring that same thing into a miniature. You can create that richness through repeated applications of these glazes that will keep the flesh looking nice and like it has a lot of depth. So I'm going to keep working these back and forth for a little while, doing just what you see me doing here. And I'm going to make sure all my color tones are set correctly. I just need to work my way around the figure, really look at it. And one of the things that I often recommend, by the way, here I'm working under a very bright light. So I have an architect's light on my desk that I'm shooting this under right now, set to standard 5500 or whatever, like your daylight setting. So it's nice, even light. But I'll often take the fig. My office has different color lights in it, yellow lights, all sorts of different things. I'll go around and I'll look at it under all those lights. So it has a look there, it has a look there, and so on. Just to make sure I like how it's looking. Because it gives you a more varied way to see everything. You want to often check your work under multiple different kinds of light sources. It really will make a difference. And each light will kind of, even though you want a nice bright daylight thing so your eyes don't get strained to work under normally. It can really help to use different lights to evaluate what you're doing. So with that being said, I'm going to go to work. It's time to do some glazes and fixes. And we'll come back and I'll talk about how we kind of pop it all out and what are the areas we really focus on to get our looking done. Back in a moment. Alright so we're back, you can see now we've done a lot of smoothing of the skin tone. I also darkened some of the lines around the other elements just to make sure that everything was nice and even. And you can see that what we end up with is this wonderful pale skin tone that still has the other shades in it. That's why I like a sort of crimson color, that gothic crimson, anything like that. That's what I happen to be using here, but obviously you can have, there's lots of different tones you can use. The key with doing a pale skin tone is that you don't need everything to be pale. You can still have lots of other colors in there. You just need a good sized volume of the paleness. So you can see that here on like her stomach, here on the top of her hip here and you know down on her leg. But there's a little bit more we can still add. So on my palette, I went ahead and got myself a little bit of a Rykland Fleshade and Carenburg Crimson, two shades from GW and oftentimes we think of these as only for washes or something. But the reality is they make quite excellent filters as well. So we're going to mix them in a very thin mix on the palette. And when I say very thin, I mean like here's the back of my hand. You can see how transparent that is. And then what we're going to do is we're just going to come in and very carefully lay a little bit of that down in some of these areas. So if you watched the Golden Demon video where I came back in with like a sepia glaze with that brown glaze portion there, that adds so much richness and tone to the skin. And that's much of what we're doing here as well. And you can see how the application of just a little bit of that, it just warms the skin up. That pink color just seems more rich now in that area. And that's what we want. We want that nice subtle tone just mixed in there, giving us that very gentle effect in those places where we want it. So now from here, of course, I'm going to spend a lot of time with this is ultimately an entry for competition. So I'm going to spend a lot of time going over it with, you know, magnifiers on and making sure that I've really got everything down where I want it. I would say from here, I get into work that's honestly too small to film, but I will tell you about what it is. So you can sort of think about it if you're doing your own piece. It's stuff like the hand here, which is still quite boring, right? So we want to make sure we get some color in there around the knuckles, stuff like that. Very little touches, but it makes a big difference. People tend to look at hands. They look at faces. These are the kind of things you want to be spending extra time on. So and even these subtle final glazes can make a big deal. Not only do they smooth out your overall work, so these kind of final glazes can be a great trick if you're trying to, if you're trying to get your blending down and you're having problems, one of the things you can do is just kind of turn to these kinds of these kinds of final glazes where it gives you a real chance to sort of cover everything over and, you know, or cover some of the, I shouldn't say everything, but cover some of those lines in between. And sometimes even those very subtle color shifts can really make a big difference. And of course, we still have our previous glazes out there. So if we ever need to come back in and maybe push back the other direction a little bit, we can do that too. All right. So there you go. That's your pale skin. Your key is you want to start with something relatively neutral-ish, but already into the pink tone. Pale skin tends to have a lot more pink in it. Hence why we started with this kind of pinky warrior flesh. And then you'll notice I didn't use much of the flesh five. I keep that for shadows. I was using that some in the glazing stage, especially in the shadows. Didn't really do it on camera, but it's a very minor color. It's used mainly in things like the lower back and stuff like that, where I want to knock the saturation out of the flesh. And then what we do is our highlights, we go into cold colors. So things like the Glacier Blue that I brought in there as my ultimate highlight color makes it feel very cold and counters out well against something like the Gothic Crimson, which we use as the shadow. And all over what that gives us is this wonderful pale pink tone that feels very much like somebody who has a very fair complexion. So there you go. Hope you enjoyed that. If you did, go ahead and give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got suggestions for future videos or things you would like to see, feel free to drop those down below. As always, I very much appreciate you watching this one. And we'll see you next time.