 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another hobby-cheating video. Today, we're getting back into some of my favorite stuff to paint skin tones. Today, we're going to talk all about darker flesh tones. So, let's get into it. Uh, the strict techno-mancer that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style. Sometimes people ask me to work from premixed colors, and sometimes people want to see how you make the colors themselves from a more simple color palette. So to solve that problem today, we're going to do both. And in doing so, we're going to explore darker skin tones and the sorts of colors and hues we can mix in to better capture the wide panoply of colors that are available amongst the human race. Darker skin tones, just like lighter skin tones, there's no one bottle you can open that magically covers all of skin. Skin is incredibly varied. There's lots of different shades and values and hues to capture in it. So, I'm going to show you a couple different options today, but you should of course recognize that there's a lot more you can do beyond this. So, you should absolutely feel free to experiment with all sorts of different tones and integrating different colors. That all being said, let's get over to the paint desk and let's start painting. Alright, we're going to start actually with mixing out brown skin tone. And you can see the four colors I have on here, and it might seem strange that we would start with these four colors to get to brown, but I assure you just as you can see, just like that, you get a really rich brown tone. Now, I'm going to play around with this for a little bit, showing you how you can add in the different tones to tilt it different ways, add a little more green, a little more blue, a little more orange. Now, we're going to talk about just using colors out of the bottle as well, and that's perfectly fine. But when we're talking about darker skin tones, skin tones in deeper brown colors, there is of course a really wide spectrum here, and you can use more tones than this. I think it's simple to these sort of base four, which you can of course mix in as well, yellows and reds into the mix to tilt into more, you know, flesh that's out in the sun, you know, skin tone of somebody who's maybe has like a burnt skin tone or something like that. All of it's just fine, but I want to empower people to play with different colors and mixes, because as you can see, just out of these four colors, I can really get the entire range of what I would want to use. But for many of you, something like starting from a simple brown tone would probably be easier for most people to stomach than mixing their own from scratch. And I've picked Vallejo burnt umber. You could pick any starting brown you want. Now, two potential highlight colors for me are beige red, and then AK interactive sunny skin tone. The highlight for darker skin tones tends to be what we traditionally think of as Caucasian flesh tones. The shadow for darker skin tones, if you're just mixing one color straight in purple tends to be a pretty easy mix in there. And the reason for that being because purple contains both a little bit of blue and a little bit of red, creating a nice universal shadow. Of course, any of the previous universal shadow colors we've talked about on this channel could also apply. Now, of course, our model for this is the one, the only the infamous Larry the ogre. Back again, reprimed and ready for another cone of paint. Has he ever been stripped in the history of this channel? No, 350 videos. He's showed up in a lot of them. Never stripped a layer of paint off. Once we lay down a base coat and let it dry, I'm really just trying to set some initial tones. So my goal here with these paints is not really to have a true base coat. That's not that a lot of it's really even to show where this color is ever going to be true on the miniature. I'm more setting the tones underneath. So these reds and these Browns, you know, I want to capture the blood beneath the skin and that tonality to it before I put all the additional glazes and colors that I'm going to put on top. Now, my process for this one is going to be a lot of over highlighting and then glazing back down. The reason for that is because skin tones have a wide variance of color, especially darker skin tones, both value and hue. And so by pushing the highlights way up, way over where they should be, like obviously I'm getting into tones that will look to your eyelid like we're dealing more with Caucasian flesh tone here. But there's a method to my madness. I'm doing this because when I lay the later glazes over top of these brighter colors, it's going to look different than if I had just tried to layer a similar color mix on. The multiple layers of paint over top of each other will mimic the actual translucence of skin. Skin is in fact multiple layers and there's capillaries and veins and blood underneath there and all those kinds of things. And light shows through skin. So the ultra thin layers of paint that we're going to build up here glazed over the top of this as I set all my highlights using these overly bright colors effectively helped me to mimic the real experience of skin once I glazed back down because there will be these multiple, multiple thin, thin, thin layers of color laying on top of each other creating the illusion of realistic skin. And the fun part is it's really fast. I'm going to do this with an airbrush. But you could do everything I do here with a brush as well. I'm doing it with an airbrush because it's easier and faster. If you want to see a video on how to use your airbrush like a surgeon and learn all about this infinity airbrush I'm using, you can find that linked up above. But the advantage to working this way is now I'm introducing the richness, the saturation of the tones. That initial burnt umber is a fairly dead color. It doesn't have a lot of life to it. But once we get this very thin glaze of this rich, orange, brown tone going over top of the sunnier, warmer, brighter, higher value tones all of a sudden we get a really nice transition. And you could certainly stop after what I'm doing here with this step like you could build it up through the layers, glaze it back down, call it a day. But of course you've probably seen this channel before. You know me. We always go too far. That's the fun of it. And so now I'm going to come back in and with the airbrush but still in a glaze formula. The paint here when I say glaze, this stuff is thin, thin, thin. This is 8, 9, 10 drops of thinner to one drop of paint. This is like water in my cup. And I'm building it up very slowly, very carefully, very precisely just create some very soft, brighter highlights. And I build all the way back up again to pure sunny skin tone. But coming through the airbrush or as a super light glaze there's much less impact than when I had previously layered it before. It ends up still showing through a lot of the color underneath and turning into a more brown infused tone. But again we're stacking layer on top of layer on top of layer here. And that's the basic idea. Now I also do want to add a bit of a hint of red in here. Of course there is always blood under skin. So we want that slight presence of a sort of reddish brown tone, a ruddy tone. And so hence going to the Reiklin Fleshade. This is still thinned one to one by the way. So it is still very, very thin. And it's just going to add this slight subtle tonal shift to the miniature. Now I'm doing a lot of work on this model. Different glazes, filters just to show you the option of what's possible. Darker skin tones like any human skin tone has a huge amount of variance to it. One of the interesting things though about darker skin tones is that they often have more value jumps captured on the skin. Especially if you've got somebody with a darker skin tone standing in bright light under the sun or if they're sweaty or something like that so their skin has become very satin. And so we're going to capture that. Really try to show that full range of value here. But of course you can simplify this recipe down. If you don't want to do all of the additional steps I did there's no problem with that. You shouldn't feel like you have to. As always, find your appropriate level of engagement for the project you're working on and decide when and where you want to stop. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Paint to the level where you think it looks good and you're happy. Let's talk about building in some shadows. So here now I'm glazing in some Vallejo Royal Purple. This is again thinned about seven or eight to one. I actually should have went thinner. I kept this a little too thick. This should have been more like ten or eleven to one. And once that's done then I'm with the brush now in the detail areas. Your airbrush as precise as you'll ever be with it will never be a perfect tool for doing small detail. So now it's time to get in there and glaze with the brush where I can be very specific. I can hit individual little areas and I'm kind of going lightly over that purple. This is a very thin glaze of contrast paint. So this contrast paint is thinned down about three to one with contrast medium and water. So it's not having a huge effect. That purple stone tone still stays in the shadows. At the same time I am introducing a filter now. This is a very very thin glaze. So this is about six parts water to one part paint of this cadmium orange. I find this last step really adds the punch. It's so small but it's so important. This orange when thinned to this level doesn't really feel like orange to your eye. Instead it just feels like warmth on the skin. As though this individual is out in the sun soaking it up it's a warm day with a warm environmental light. And it'll match very well to some of the sort of colder purple tones I've put in the shadows to match here with my warm highlights. And you can see how I just kind of spread it around and I'm really focusing on the areas of transition between the highlight and the low light. So I'm really taking that glaze only over the mid tones, that filter, but it's so very very thin. It just provides again the slightest intonation of color. Now with some finishing I'm taking a little bit more punch of a red tone doing things like the lips, the elbows, adding a little bit of ruddiness to the cheeks. Basically those areas where blood would be very near the surface and or you would have a sort of red tone in it. Picking out the teeth, the eyes, all those little finishing details. I paint the rest of the miniature that isn't the flesh tone off camera very simply and quickly just to give you what a full picture of the miniature looks like. But there you go. Larry's all done. This was very very fun and the key with it is you can do so much just by simple repeated processes stacking those layers on top of each other. And there we go. Larry's all set, skin tone all finished. This was a really fun project to do just because working with these darker and different skin tones is such an interesting change from often how I find myself painting by default. And so I hope you enjoyed this as well. If you did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every Saturday. If you want to take your hobby to the next level, why there's a link down below for Patreon, and that's focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey. As always though, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.