 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video today We're gonna talk all about a major feature of a lot of figures Especially characters and things that are special in your army or display figures, and that is cloaks They're big they're flat and they're often real challenging to paint. So let's break it down. Let's get into it The strict techno man sir that is Vinci V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vinci V style So I'm painting up this amazing figure from Mind Works miniatures. This is Morgana Le Fay And really this is an absolutely stunning figure. I'm very excited about it But one of the major features of this figure is Her big giant cloak. She's actually holding it open now Her starts from more her lower back whereas as opposed to coming off her shoulders But all the lessons we're going to learn today would be the same regardless of whether you're talking about The full cloak a half cloak something that's flowing off of the waist whatever it happens to be The challenges that we see with this sort of shape is that it's often very large and very flat This presents a problem for us with a lot of our traditional techniques Things like layering with a small round brush just look crap and create tide marks in the paint We can't really wash the surface because washes are meant for high texture Areas where there's lots of changes and sort of the elevation and recesses the figure not present on most cloaks unless they're Extremely wavy and so we have to very subtly modulate the light today I'm going to take you through the techniques of how exactly we do that How we apply sort of these colors and then bring them together to create convincing fabric So let's head over the desk. Let's get painting All right So the first thing we're doing when we're going to paint a big thing like a cloak is we got to pick our mid-tone pick a nice punchy strong Saturated mid-tone. That's going to be my signature series royal purple for me here Then we want to pick two shadow tones in this case a diox is in purple and it's a nebulous gray, which is a near black Doesn't matter what you do what you pick could be the same thing with blues greens purples reds I mean don't use black and yellow cloak, but you pick two shadow colors that are two solid steps down Now when we're working on the cloak itself. Here's my next piece of advice get a bigger brush Bigger than that This is a big cheap synthetic brush. I buy these in multi packs. This is a size 8 I'm working with here. This is the kind of thing you can even go up to a flat brush You often get those in big packs of brushes and we stare at them in our miniature painting world and say What do I use this for? Hey, guess what? This is the kind of thing, but something really big The next thing we're going to do is use the appropriate technique for this space You want to be combining the right techniques for the right type of surface and on a large flat surface Wet blending is your way to go and we want to start by wet blending the basically the deepest shadow up to the mid-tone That will wet blend the easiest. These are all largely transparent colors. They will blend together very easily I am grabbing a relatively sizable dollop of paint. I'm using the word dollop here This is not thinned in any specific way This was just squeezed out onto the wet palette So it's a little bit of moisture in my brush a little bit of osmosis to the wet palette But for the most part, this is straight paint and I am painting on the miniature Apply the dollop and then smooth and smooth and smooth and smooth and smooth with that big brush You want to sweep it around constantly work it for a few minutes and then let it dry Get out the hair dryer if you want to speed this up, but let it dry Completely as you can see there the paint all settled. It's all dry when you start putting very wet layers over the top of this You don't want to be pulling up wet paint Now with my mid-tone I'm going to identify all of the areas that are going to be highlighted as the mid-tone or above Okay, so I'm not worried about anything that's going to remain a shadow And I'm just going to block out all of these areas where I know I'm going to need to paint the mid-tone or higher If it's going to end up brighter than this eventually, that's fine But I want to focus in right now on all of those areas the cloak Which is the upward-facing ridges and where it flares out Remember our guide to highlighting We highlight the top and the sticky outie bits see my video on highlighting for more information on the top and the sticky outie bits Now it's time to actually start applying some highlights and when we apply highlights You'll notice this is true for purples for greens for blues for anything when you integrate even a little bit of a brighter color Something that has white in it or something similar as I'm mixing here It's going to immediately show extremely hard layer lines Don't worry. That does not matter all we are doing right here is Setting our values people focus a lot on trying to get things blended as they're working ignore that Make it look like crap. We will blend later. There will be plenty of time for that The much more important thing at this stage is to set the light to push the contrast and to get your values Where they need to be Including placing the volumes where they should be that's most important Now look at this point It looks like crap as you're applying these initial highlights You're gonna see these very hard layers with almost any cloak We do if we start integrating brighter colors on these big large flats It becomes very easy to see the layer lines between it. Don't worry. That's exactly what's supposed to happen Sometimes we've got to make it to something look like crap before we make it look awesome This is one of those times You're going to need to adjust volumes place highlights as you work and that's the thing That's why I'm not worried about blends because at this stage. I honestly am not sure exactly what I want highlighted But let me talk about the next error. I see all the time one cloaks People on soft, you know rounded cloaks that have these smooth transitions around they'll have these These sorts of big giant jumps in the value And the important thing to remember here when we're dealing with cloaks Is that this is a soft surface It's going to have a lot of different Very gentle transitions of the highlight volumes And so what you see me doing now is making sure that the shadows, especially when they're sort of upward facing Are not too strong and this is really important Notice i'm still working very wet blendy very loose really just still playing with the values And what i'm trying to do here is smooth out and make those transitions nice and gentle Which is what we ultimately want We want to make sure that when we're Working with something that's a cloak, you know, this isn't made of metal. It doesn't have hard edges That instead we have these nice gentle transitions and something like repeated wet blending is really a great way to do that And you see i'm not worrying exactly about mixes. There's no recipe to this, right? This isn't Baking it's not science instead. I just keep working and adjusting the values So here i'm going to continue to push that out because I realize I you know, obviously we can see there's Some very clear lines here. And so we need to smooth that out What that means is, you know, after I let it dry getting some new fresh paint and extending out Those particular highlights as well as then continuing to push up The key areas here. So notice how i'm constantly refining where my highlights are How bright they go and so on and so forth When you're working in colors like With for for cloaks and other flowing fabric Like purple or blues and greens and reds Anything where your your sort of cloak is a primary Or secondary color right a sort of dead center hue where it's going to be saturated You can you can over highlight and that's really important. I'm actually I don't intend For the final cloak to be this bright But it's really important That I push those highlights up now one because as the paint dries it will it will weaken But also so then as I come back in and glaze later And start trying to bring these colors together. I have room to sort of knock those back Bring them more in line and you see i'm constantly slowly extending out those highlight areas Rechanging the shapes and you can really have a big impact on how the overall model is read And the contours of the model and how people perceive the volumes The way I push that highlight out there makes it seem like the v of the raised cloak stretches farther across if I left that in shadows It wouldn't Right and as i'm working on this my paint keeps getting thinner and thinner and thinner, right Uh, so like as i'm as i'm moving towards those glazes Uh right now it's still just a lot of wet blending, but you notice how little paint there I used to stretch out across this whole miniature And this whole thing is done with this big fat brush Now notice the little upward facing parts here and how I don't have those recesses in the lower parts of her cloak Those aren't dark because they are upward facing I want the darkness restricted to these these hidden areas directly under a fold, right? The light is coming in from this side Now it's time to sort of bring it all together. I'm going to do this final step with an airbrush It's a big open space. You can do it with your airbrush, but if you don't have an airbrush, you can do this with a With a Normal brush as well But the idea here is pretty simple I'm just going to use this apply multiple thin layers of that purple glaze to bring all of my previous work together Smooth out the layers and unify the hue as a filter. This is very thin. This is like 10 to 1 thinner to paint So it's going to take me two three four layers of this glaze to bring everything together There we go. Her cloak is all done. I'm very excited that we managed to get that This particular component painted up. I'm still working on her, but I'll share some pictures here of what that looks like Overall, she's just a tremendously fun figure to paint a lot of really nice volumes And I've been having a great time if you want to check her out check out mindworks games I'll link it down below. They have a whole bunch of really amazing miniatures And I just really enjoy their line. I've got a couple of them So you might see some more of these miniatures coming up real soon But for today, thank you so much for watching this if you liked it Hey, give it a like subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future Remember we have new videos here every saturday if you've got any questions drop those down below I always answer every question asked As always if you want to support the channel you can do so through the patreon link down there We also launched a new game uncle adam and I have a brand new game out So if you are a wargamer and interested in that sort of thing The link for that down there is down there as well as well as our previous two games Space station zero and rain and hell. So thank you so much Very much appreciate it and we'll see you next time