 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video and today we're gonna talk about making your miniatures pop, the final step of when you're painting something. So I'm just finishing up this unit of Chaos Warriors. These are the new Chaos Warriors and I really love these minis and I just want to talk about sort of the final things you can do. Now I've spent a long time on these guys, you know, I'm painting up 20 of them. I've put a lot of work into them to try to make them, you know, really nice and a really high quality and deserving, a paint job deserving of the sculpt hopefully. But I want to talk about when you get to the end of a project, there's a really important step that I think a lot of us don't do because we start to get close somewhere like this. We say, yeah that's good enough and we just stop and I want to encourage you to spend, you know, just another few minutes. I know it's tough. One of the hardest things you can do is keep painting, especially when it's at the end of a long project and you just want to be done, oh when will this ever end? You know, I've spent probably 60 hours on these guys so far, maybe more just because they're so complicated and I wanted to take them to a high level but we're not gonna stop there. So I've got a little selection of a couple of the guys from the units and I want to just talk about various things. So in general, when you have a fig like this, there are certain things that people always pay attention to. So rather than if you want to get the most impact, if you want your miniatures to stand out, I'm gonna talk about those final pop elements that can really, really add and make your fig stand out. So the old adage is bases, faces, banners, and shields, okay? This is sort of the thing because that's what, when people look at your stuff ranked up, that's what they see. Now obviously not everybody has a banner but a couple of people in your unit do so spend extra time on your banners. I'm not gonna, you can go to all my freehand videos and you'll see kind of ways you can punch up banners. What I want to talk about this time is more focusing on, and I have a lot of basing videos, you can go watch those. What I want to talk about more is the fig itself, so the face, the shield, stuff like that. These warriors are great because they have these big, expressive, really nice, angular shields that just, you can do really fun stuff with, right? It's like this guy's got a little angry face on him, stuff like that. That's just super cool. So the elements that you want to look at are, these are the sort of questions you want to ask yourself. One, have I popped enough contrast on the face? What if the rest of your figure that you haven't taken the contrast up as much, if the face and the shield, if one's present, are really high contrast? People won't notice the rest. Because the shield and the face are where people look, like as human beings we're just trained to look at faces. And so we do it on miniatures as well. So for example, on this guy right here, one of the things I could do is I could, his horns don't perhaps go as bright as they could, they're still a little dingy. So I happen to have some pure white ink plus HBA white over here on the side of my palette. Nice little recipe for getting a good, thin, sharp line. So I can take a sharp brush with some nice white on it, and I can come right to his, these little horns, or I could do this on top of his head if he didn't have a helmet, or something like that. I can put a little dot for a light spot right there. I just kind of build that up. Little minor touches, and that's it, takes a few seconds. It's not a long, lengthy process. I'm not going in and repaying anything. There you go. It doesn't make the biggest difference, but people notice it when you do little stuff like that. When you just give that miniature that extra little tiny bit of pop that makes it stand out. Those are the kind of things you can do. So the other thing that often falls into this time, I'm just going to clean up his helmet a little here while I'm talking, is look and say, do I have the opportunity to do some quick fun freehand or some quick fun weathering? You know, one of the reasons people love Nurgle is because they get to weather the thing like crazy, right? And who doesn't love that? Like it's super fun to weather stuff. But that doesn't have to be the only time we do it, right? So let's see what else we can do. Let's go look at a different guy. That we got his little horns popped, he got his little head popped. If that was a human face, I would just make sure the highlights, like if it was this guy, make sure the highlights on like, you can see how popped the highlights are on like the horns on his head, his nose, his chin, stuff like that. We'll come back to him in a moment. So one of the fun things that's happening on a lot of their shields in the Casuers is they have these big deep cuts in them. And I was thinking about that and with this color scheme, I don't really want to do like brown and orange rust and it wouldn't show up anyways and it would clash and it wouldn't look well. But it wouldn't look good, sorry. But I really like the ones like this that have a little bit of more of the turquoise color right because they have the dragon scales. And I was thinking about, well, how do I pass that around? Well, clearly I can do the weapon. But what if instead of these shields rusting, what if they oxidized in the cuts in more like a copper? So maybe I take a little bit of my deep turquoise. And maybe we just run a little bit of that down into that crack. Let's do a little tiny streak out of there. We'll put a little bit down on that one too, a little bit down there. And then let's take a little bit of my brighter turquoise and then let's go ahead and drop a little bit of that in there. Kind of vertigrity edge. Let's do a tiny little streak down. And then finally let's take something like a little bit of nilic oxide. Here, I'm just, those other colors were just like generic turquoises. You can use anything. I was using Galejo, but any kind of... I'm not trying to show the really color recipes for doing this in this case. I'm just trying to show you the more the idea. And then let's do some more traditional streaking. Because this is really transparent stuff. So we can just add a little bit of that. Maybe we can put a little bit around one of these guys up here. Maybe we'll kind of rust out one of these little screws. But instead of rust, we'll oxidize it. So we'll put a little bit of dark in there. And we'll just tippy tap the top of that with a little bit of that oxide. So it really pops. All right? So we can just have a little bit of those kind of elements. So we can take that farther. You know, I could do it to a couple of the leg scratches as well that are on here. But the point is, is that then I kind of help balance those colors. It adds a little bit of visual interest. So my point is, think about little tiny touches. Again, doesn't take long. I only need to put a few of them on here. And it's such a different effect when it's in that blue. Don't hem yourself in to the colors that you think something has to be. Well, I can't do rust on this because it's not the right color pattern for it. All right, if I do rust, I have to make it brown. And I have to make it orange. No, you don't. You can the effect will sell as long as it looks like it should in its place in the right place. So I don't know what their weird chaos metals made of. Maybe it's made of something that does tend to oxidize green instead of oxidizing brown. It doesn't have to be ferrous. Right? Who knows what chaos metal is made of. So whatever. You can you can push stuff like that. Little touches like that around here, just even if they're light, like I could stop that. No other weathering on here. No thing on this dude. I just kind of spread that around a little bit on all the figs and it's going to add such an interesting little visual pop of color. It's something that when people get close to your miniatures, they discover, right? Because when you set it way back and it's, it's, you know, one of a bunch of dudes on the table, right? They might not notice them. But when they then look closer and they look at the mini and they're like, oh, that's cool. You've got a little weathering on there too. That's a discovery, right? It's something that's just cool to notice. Those kinds of little fun discoveries make a big difference when it comes to painting miniatures. Finally, let's go back to this guy. When you have a, when you have a face, one of the things I like to ask myself is if you have open skin, could I do a quick simple tattoo? Could I do something like that? But instead, in this case, let's do something else fun, okay? So instead of worrying about like a tattoo or whatever, let's just give him a nice five o'clock shadow, right? So five o'clock shadows are like tremendously easy to do. You just take any kind of dark blue-black. I like using a little Payne's gray for it. That certainly works very well. You want it to be, you want your paint to be like really, really thin. So I'll show you the kind of thin I'm talking about, that way too thick, okay? What I'm talking about. And then we're just going to come in and we're going to take this very soft water, this very soft filter. It's all thinned out of the brush. And I'm just going to run it right over there after I've already done all my highlighting. All right, and we just give it that slight blue tinge that makes it feel like there's a nice five o'clock shadow there. Let that dry. You let it darken. You see how you feel about it. If you want it to be a little darker, easy peasy. You can come back easy peasy lemon squeezy. We come back in and we go a little bit another level and then boom. Just like that. We've got a little five o'clock shadow there, right? So again, any kind of like blue, black, dark color will work. You don't really, I couldn't tell you like the GW color, but I tend to use a lot of like Payne's gray for it, stuff like that. You can run it down. You can make sure it really gets into the sort of deeper shadow recesses, like under the nose and the crease and stuff like that. And if you want, you can come back into the flesh with that same color. Mix in a little bit of your highlight flesh and you can come back in and kind of just pop up the chin or the cheek or something like that if it darkened up a little too much, just to re-bring out your highlights, right? Again, little fun elements to discover that make it so there's a reward for coming in and looking at your miniature. So how to summarize. Taking your miniatures to a higher level and making them look interesting often isn't a level of needing to work every part of the miniature. It's a factor of when you get to the end of the road, when you get to kind of the, you know, you think you're done. You look over the mini and you say, where are my opportunities here? Where can I make sure people are paying attention to the face and upping my contrast? Where could I add some small additional visual interesting elements? A little tiny bit of freehand, a glowing rune, a bit of rust, a bit of weathering. Anything like that, that's a discoverable element. And when could I add something that makes the person, especially a unit champion like this stand apart, right? Where can I give him a simple five o'clock shadow? Could I put a small tattoo on his head? Could I give him a little scar across his face? Scars are another, if you have a lot of exposed flesh, obviously these guys are all encased in metal, but that's another thing. And so if you say, well, I'm not really comfortable with tattoos, do some scars. I've got a video on how you can do scars and bruising and cuts. Put some of those in there, breaks up those surfaces. These are all fast things. Even times 20 guys, you know, I've spent 50, 60 hours. It's maybe another hour to go through and touch everybody with these little tiny things. But it makes a huge difference to the overall impact of the mini. So there you go. That's three simple examples. Like I said, focus on your bases, your faces, your banners and your shields, but above all, faces. That's the most important part. But I hope that was helpful for you. I hope I gave you some things to think about that can help you take your minis up to the next level. These guys are almost done now, which I'm very excited about. I'm just going to go through and continue all the work on them to do those final touches. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one. Give it a like if you like it. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you have suggestions for future videos, go ahead and throw those down in the comments. I always love to see suggestions from viewers. Share this video. That's deeply appreciated. But as always, we'll see you next time.