 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about doing the Crimson Armor that I do on my Slaves of Darkness. I had a lot of questions about it for my Crimson Cabal Force when I posted up my chaos warriors and in recent hobby cheating videos so I thought I'd take a do a whole video where I show you exactly how I went about it. So here I have my chaos lord on Karkadrak. He's all puttyed up because the parts under here are already painted since they were beneath the armor so then we just have our putty over him. I didn't bother to putty the whole cloak because I just set that black so I could tell kind of how light everything else was looking in comparison. So now we're going to get to the painting. Now I'm going to warn you most of this at the beginning will be airbrush and then we'll finish up with brush but that being said I thought we'd start over here so you can see the paints that I use under this. So our highlight is going to be Glacier Blue from Vallejo. This is actually a game color but this is my thinned down airbrush version. I just pre-mixed some for airbrush really like them. I have some Nocturna Fantasy from Vallejo Crimson. I have some Scale 75 Fantasy and Games Bloodfest Crimson. You can see the difference there. You see how this one has more red in it, more red orange. This one has more purple so we use both of those. Then we have a little bit of Inks we're going to use in some amount. We have a Process Magenta here just for a light tone. We have Red Earth which is using a very, very, very, very, very, very, very minor amount to just influence the red tone and push a little more orange back into it. Then we have Payne's Gray which is what we use for our shadow color. When you put this blue together with the red you get a nice purple. Now technically this armor breaks a rule in that it has a cold highlight and a cold shadow and I don't care because that's what I wanted to do with them and I like that effect. So you can sometimes break the rules when you feel like it. So I'm going to pause here. We'll jump over to the airbrush booth and I'll show you how we attack this. Alright so we're over here in the airbrush booth. Now so we understand this whole time I'm going to be using my Iwata HP CS Highline. This has a really fine spray control. I have the actual like air nozzle down here turned way down so very little air comes out. I'm going to be here then or not. It's very quiet. We have we're set at 18 psi and we're going to start with a 2-1 thin, so 2 thinner to 1 paint of the Bloodfest Crimson. So the first step is just setting the kind of base tone over the whole armor. Now this is going to be very very pink when we do the first layer. You'll notice that when I'm hitting this armor I'm trying my best to be really really controlled with how I apply this. I don't want it pooling anywhere. Nothing like that. Very thin, thin, thin paint and that's okay. We can do thin paint. We just have to really control how much we're actually spraying out and if I hit stuff like the other things that I haven't painted yet like his sword or his arm or the fur I don't care because that's all going to get covered in different colors later so it doesn't really matter. So we just kind of cover this all up here. Nice thin coat of it and we're good to go. There's his armor and his hand. Great. Okay, so easy peasy, lemon squeezy. There we go. Now he's all he's a pretty pink knight. Oh sorry his little leg back leg plates almost forgot those and we'll get this little thing too. We've got a lot of different little armor plates. Okay. So once we have that done then what I'm going to do is I haven't changed the paint but I'm going to go in with the same crimson and we're going to find and start establishing some initial areas where I want it to be deeper. So basically in the area that I'm going to pick is my shadows. I'm going to start laying in a little stronger amount of this crimson. So like here on this plate for example I'll bring the shadow up toward the top, right? Here on this again shadow toward the top this is tucked away from everything so I just want to make sure those areas are really saturated. Here on this arm plate we're going to come in and get the top real strong under there that plate. So you see what I'm saying here I'm using the angles of this thing. If it were rounded I would be doing the same thing with the whatever area, whatever area is going to end up being in shadow I'm pulling up toward that and making sure that I'm setting that just quite, quite pink basically, right? And again there's, it doesn't have to be, you can kind of pick the logical sense if you have a good part of it of where the shadows are going to be. If this were like a chaos shield it'd probably be the, it'd probably be the bottom of the thing that would be in shadow depending on the angle of the shield. The new chaos shields in the new kit are all over the shop crazy so it's kind of whatever. So this is the shadow scheme for your, your minis and you're good to go. Okay so good to go there we've got that reinforced. Now what we're going to do is just walk down the progression. I still have that same thinned blood fest crimson in here and I'm going to dump most of the excess out. You can see now that's what I've got left in there. I know it's kind of dark I apologize but there you go. Most basically most of the paint's gone. Then I'm going to refill it with again we'll go two to one but this time I'm just going to take the standard nocturna crimson just a little more red or sorry a little more purple I apologize go about the same ratio there but I'm also just going to put a single drop of that red earth in there so this has a lot this is about one to ten of the existing ratio okay so it's a very very small amount but that ink is very potent so you can see how much we've got in there we mix that up nice and nice and stirred you can see how that red earth just has a heck of an effect like it's it's shocking how much it actually influences that red color so once you've got that we of course do a little test on the back of our hand right sorry I was realizing his heads off camera here and I needed to get his head there's a little happy head okay so now what we're going to do is we're going to come in and we're going to just reinforce toward those shadows with this color it's not going to have a huge impact but it's going to set a little bit more of that red tone that we want because we do want this to be crimson not pink not magenta it's got to be crimson think like dark red wine that's effectively what we're aiming for ultimately trying to decide what on his leg is armor and what's a boot his weird feet I can always black that out if it's wrong no big deal so once again we just kind of push toward those shadows same thing as before we'll get up under you know way up under here under his arms and stuff real well that's going to be completely in shadowed basically nice simple step we're just strengthening up that color making it a nice strong version of that pulling constantly toward those shadows okay so the reason we're doing that is because we want to start setting some of those more aggressive tones one of the things you're trying to do when you're when you're trying to nail a sort of interim color like this you want to make sure that you know the airbrush a good tool it can work fast so let's use it to our advantage let's make sure we have all those tones in there working for us right so if we want a little more red let's lay some more red down now at this stage when we can easily then reduce it later back it out later this is often one of the ways I use my airbrush is I think what are the kind of tones that I'm going to want in here every paint is slightly transparent and when you incorporate more of those varied colors in there your brain doesn't even consciously see it but it knows it's happened so given that now we're good to go there our next step is going to be to continue shadowing so take that big bunch of paint we're gonna dump most of that out just dumping it into my paint cup there okay all right now so again we're back down to basically just an almost empty paint cup not washing the whole thing out don't need to but there's still I left a little bit in there now we're gonna get out our dollar roundy Payne's gray ink so this is a blue black what we're gonna do here is we're gonna go five to one so ten drops of thinner to two drops of ink okay because this stuff is real real strong and we want it to be real real thin then we'll mix that up and you can see now instantly how dark that is we test on the back of our hand there that's the color we get so now we're gonna reinforce our strong shadows so we have to be real careful about this because we don't want we don't want to go overboard so we're just real careful like a little surgeon with our airbrush moving over those areas that we want in that nice deep shadow don't have to get it all at once notice how little air I'm using how little I'm rocking the trigger back very very very light touch I can do it multiple times and keep working that right no issue at all so we can just very carefully work our way around the mini you'll see how I'm just finding each little shadow getting the airbrush right up in there working real close and just making sure that I get each one of those little shadows the most important part is on these big plates so we establish a nice strong directional shadow that's what's gonna draw the eye that's what's important so when we lay in these real deep shadows under the armor you want to make sure that as you can see here on this like back leg plate you can see how that's really causing that directionality that's what we want so continue this just reinforce some of my deepest shadows here as I make my way around the thing and then next now is when now I'm down to my deepest shadow so now I'm gonna clean out my paint cup completely I'll do that off camera and I'm gonna come back and we're going to then start laying in some of our highlights so I'm just gonna clean all this up hit all the rest of them I'll be back in just a moment okay so air brushes all reset and now we've just got pure thinned a glacier blue it's thinned a little bit more than two to one so let's flip our bad boy around here and now we're gonna do is we're gonna pick the opposite side of wherever we placed our shadows and we're gonna place our highlights okay so in this case they're rear of this panel again working very thin very intentionally with the airbrush treating it just like I would a normal brush right you see like the the motion I'm making almost as though I were painting with a physical brush trying to respect where the highlights would be stronger where they'd be weaker but I am gonna overemphasize the highlights the reason I'm gonna do that is because later on I'm gonna want to come back in and do some glazes and knock these back down if my highlights are weak then I'm gonna go too far when I glaze if I over highlight with the airbrush which again is something I think a lot of us sometimes always fear that we can make things look kind of over highlighted or cartoony with the airbrush which is true you can absolutely do that but that's okay just don't make that your final step one of the real keys to using the airbrush is to not let this kind of a high highlight or something like that where you're where you can have this real kind of spread out powdery look just don't let that be your final step you can always tell when something has that airbrushed look and part of the reason that exists like that is because the person didn't go back in and then sort of do the rest of the glazing like you would do in anything like you have to do even with your airbrush to bring all those tones into line so you can see how right now I'm just making all these little highlights around him just popping all this stuff out and yes it looks kind of ugly at this moment and that's alright it looks overemphasized and kind of ago and that's alright our little castle it'll be pretty he'll be a pretty little he'll have his pretty little pony and he'll be a pretty little boy in a moment we just got to get there almost every miniature has an ugly phase well welcome to this one's ugly phase right where we have these extreme sort of highlights that are just way over the top and that's alright get the fingies there just go through make sure we've got everything nice and set make sure I didn't miss any spots like the bottom of his leg there right and now we've got them all nice and highlighted now what we're gonna do is again we're gonna go ahead and dump most of that glacier blue into the this is what I do a lot I don't I instead of changing the paint all the way I want a little bit of that previous paint in there so that it's actually like again mostly empty so that it's just constantly picking up a little bit of that color then we're gonna get out our process magenta ink this is a little bit weaker than the paints gray so I go about four to one here so in other words I'm gonna put in two drops of ink to about eight drops of thinner something like that again none of these are like exact ratios or should ever be need to be thought of in in those discreet of terms there's no exact ratio they can even vary because you have different humidity or something like that in your area what I'm gonna get it something very pink looks like that do a little test here on my hand good okay so now we're gonna do is we're gonna find the edges of that the edges of that highlight we just did we're gonna soften that transition up with some of this pink it's just a very quick step because you're just literally hitting the all the edges of your highlight just softening it down with that pink this is because here in a moment we're gonna do a bigger transition on it now we and we just want to have we don't want to be quite so stark and quite so powdery this helps smooth that out the more lighter colors you use like that the more powdery your work tends to end up again it's one of those things that contributes to that kind of airbrush look that's a quick step we just literally place that pink against all the whites or against all the glacier blues I should say sorry the reason I use blue with this magenta is because it just makes it colder it's more visually interesting than just using white in general when you're kind of when you're working avoiding white is is not a must a lot of people tell you never use white you can you can use white I use white all the time and stuff like non metallic but when I'm just trying to have like an armor like this where I want it to be really visually appealing I'll try to avoid white instead use a nice yellow or a glacier blue it's just more it's just more interesting because the way it sets the tone you get a nice cold light instead of just instead of just some standard you know yellow white okay so now I'm gonna empty my cup again completely because it's time for the next step of paint and that one's gonna be a real fun one so you'll see when we're back in a moment and we bring all this together so back in just a minute right so now is where the magic happens this is how we take this very crazy sketch and we bring it into line do you do that we're gonna get out some golden heavy-body acrylic alizarin crimson when this is a super thick you know artist paint I think when most people think of this they don't think about airbrushing but all you have to do is thin it down so here we've got it very very thin this is using both my traditional thinner and flow aid mixture of 80 20 thinner and 20% flow aid as well as a few drops of water at a crazy ratio again it's it's hard to count because this doesn't come out and drops it just comes out in little squishes so you know thin the better way to do it is you test and as you can see here on the back of my hand that's about the consistency that I'm getting there that's right where I want it so now what I'm gonna do is come in here and over not the most extreme but just kind of bring that up and just very lightly start glazing that red in that crimson and that alizarin crimson you know Bob Ross he was a smart guy you knew what he was talking about he he used that now most of his projects and it's just such a wonderful tone it just adds this great color to this and when you put it over that that sort of pinky magenta that we've got you just get this really nice red tinge I hope that's coming through on the camera just how nice that looks so we're just gonna go through and we just cover almost all the dark and most of the light is basically what we're doing here so by laying a little bit of that crimson over all of that dark blue we end up in the end warming up those shadows a little bit and some places I will cover the light completely like say down here on the bottom of his foot like down here there wouldn't be as much light so that would be completely in the crimson color and that's fine up here in these more exposed areas I'll leave a little bit of that blue there for us or sorry yeah a little bit of that glacier blue I know it sounds strange because it doesn't really feel like blue again always just turning the figure to make sure I get it how I want just little things painting with it painting with the airbrush just like I would with the brush okay you can see how this is how we glaze with the airbrush and most importantly this is how we get rid of that airbrush to look when we do this final glaze of something highly pigmented like this you can do the same thing if you don't have that same heavy body acrylic you've got like any kind of crimson ink you can do the same thing I mean this is a very specific kind of color but there are other crimson's that are like it it's just a really really nice tool in your toolbox let me say to have that the listering crimson I'm a big fan of heavy body acrylics in general I use them quite often because they are so rich in pigment and what they do is because they can be thinned way down but still maintain their color they become really transparent you'll get the same thing out of inks I just happen to like this option a little better for this because I don't really have an ink that has the same richness of tone and that's what I'm aiming for here it's real nice rich crimson color alright so that feels pretty good we'll go ahead and do his head here so what I'm gonna do next there's a little head is we're gonna go back over to the painting desk and I'm gonna show you how we can touch this up with our brush and then continue to pick out the details continue to focus the pyramid down so that we establish the sort of full range of what's going on really pop those highlights out and control those shadows especially on this guy where we have all this ridiculous detail it'll be a good example of kind of showing you how we we deal with all these different services because the airbrush in the end on a figure like this it can only do so much for us it's you know this guy has a ridiculous amount of tiny tiny tiny detail so it's gonna be brush time now one thing I will do before I go back over there when you thin paints to this level especially reds and crimson colors especially with this much medium in them they are gonna get real shiny and we don't want that because that'll influence our ability to see and understand our color our true color and our blends later so once that's all dry I'll give it a few moments then I'm gonna hit everything with a nice mix of varnish in this case I'll use some AK interactive ultra matte just to make sure it's nice and dull I'll probably put like a drop of satin varnish in it as well maybe one or two just to thicken it up a little and increase the durability but it'll still be a very matte much more matte than it is here take on it so back over to the painting desk in just a moment but now you can see look how much more rich and aligned all those colors look because of that glaze now we've got this beautiful transition taking us up through all these colors and that's the that's the beauty of what you get out of that glaze right that final step that's what snaps it all together so back at the desk in just a moment all right so we're back over here at the painting desk you can see everything is nice and even in its finish now as the varnish is all dry so now becomes that there now is a time where we just we want to finish out our details so part of what that means is getting everything in order here adjusting all the small things edges all the stuff that the airbrush is not fine enough to control right on any miniature you're going to run into like this this one's kind of a hyper example of it but the reality is no matter what the miniature is the airbrush you could stop here I'll say that like if you're just interested in kind of you know having the piece and you're happy with this hey stop cool you're good to go but my recommendation would be at very minimum you want to take you know here or something dark so I've got my paints gray ink with a little bit of flow improver okay and what I'm going to do is come to each of these little cuts that are in his armor gonna darken those right down by getting the ink where it shouldn't be we can easily just wipe it off there we'll get the center of this chaos star he has this guy just has like chaos stars everywhere the ink makes it really easy to do this because ink already flows very well when we mix the ink with the flow improver it gets even easier we're gonna trace out that chaos star very lightly that way I can make sure I have a nice shadow for that because that'll obviously be metal later and that gives me the edges for that and let's me actually see kind of that space it's gonna occupy so a nice easy quick just you know sharp brush this is size 0 Raph 8404 and the idea here is it's hard to tell when you've got a lot of you sort of detail like this in the way the same thing is true on a lot of the chaos shields where you need to sort of establish this big blend but then at the same time you also have all this other nonsense in the way right and so it's good to kind of just give everything a nice little dark line understand exactly what all your your shadows are gonna be that kind of thing okay we'll hit all the rivets as well make sure those are nice and dark okay so once we've got all those down and we have a pretty good idea of what we're dealing with here as far as now it's much easier to see how that star stands out against everything so the other thing we're gonna want to do is obviously create all of our edges so here I've got a little bit of the original glacier blue and what we're gonna do is just come into all the armor we've got it thinned down with a little flow improver and we're just gonna side of the brush hit all our edges again we always turn the mini if we can't easily access the the the edge nice light touch just keep rotating the mini around in our hand so that way we always have easy easy access to the edges don't don't try to just draw it like don't try to attack it straight on if you can in any way just turn the miniature around just keep flipping it and achieve the same thing now we're also gonna need to get them the edges here these sort of stand out boxy edges that he has now here I'm gonna do this with this glacier blue but I doubt I'm gonna leave them all this color but by making it this light tone it's easy for me to come back in later and just apply some glazes here and there if I want to knock the contrast out so quite easily I could come back into that boxy edge and I could I could just take a nice thin glaze of that crimson like we saw me do earlier and we could just run that right at the top and boom because it's a super light color it's gonna transform any of the dark colors underneath would not we'll also want to hit the lower edges of all these cuts just like they were just like we would if they were painted on battle damage so if you've seen my how to paint battle damage video you know that I we always find the edge sort of away from the light in this case it would be the bottom of all these we give that a little highlight I want to make sure we get every one of them and again this is another of those things where like a simple glaze can correct it later so we can bring it all back into line if we feel like that's too extreme final thing we want to do is we want to make sure we come in and just kind of set our highlight to be really bright in the places where it's gonna be really bright so I start by just establishing a nice bright line like that then we add a little more water to the what's already on our brush and we just do a nice little glaze of it all around that okay that way we just fade it out and we'll take a little bit of that original pink color mix that in there as a nice thin glaze and just feather that edge right out and just feather that edge right out alright and then boom we get a nice blend just that easy if we need a little bit of time if it doesn't look quite as smooth just sit there let it dry just run up alright easy peasy so and if we want to just showing you what it would look like to turn that those bright whites into something a little more perhaps reasonable for this spectrum just grab a little bit of that glaze right over the top of each of these cuts and just turn them pink and there we can bring them sort of back in the line so you can see how they still show but they're not quite as obnoxious and bright if you don't like that you could always make a slightly brighter pink and continue to adjust a lot of the work is refinement with anything like this it's not just like oh we're gonna magically do it all in one step I think that's a challenge a lot of people have they try to just sort of like here is the steps I take ABC the problem is a lot of work when it comes to stuff like this is just sort of finding your way you test something you make it a certain color you see how it looks if it looks nice you keep it if it doesn't look nice you adjust it there's no there's no other way to really go about it so there you go that's kind of it the only other thing I might do is take a little bit of the darkest color here my ink thin that into a glaze and just as a final step come up into those dark corners and really make sure that my lines are nice and crisp and that those shadows are real dark and shadowed right so we just kind of the same way we pushed that that highlight up we can push that shadow way down and that gives us that nice full gamut of controlled contrast so there you go that's basically the armor now I'm just gonna repeat this around on everything else so if you like this give it a like I hope this was helpful for everybody who wanted to see this recipe it's a really fun color I love how this looks so throw a like down there I really appreciate it helps others find this video subscribe for additional hobby cheating we have new videos here every Saturday if you have any questions drop those down in the comments but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time