 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about understanding contrast. You know I review a lot of minis every month for part of the PMP and the most common single piece of feedback I give is that we need to increase contrast. It comes up every video and it comes up in probably 70% of the feedback that I give. In fact the most common feedback I give could probably be you need to increase your contrast and leave it at that. So it seemed timely to do a whole video explaining this idea and why and how and what. Are you talking about Vince? What is this mystical contrast thing? I suspect we all pretty much have some kind of an understanding of it but I thought it would be good to see it in practice. So we're going to do that through an exploration of miniatures and miniatures that I've painted over time as well as art and just life. So here we go. Okay so there's lots of different forms of contrast but in its simplest form contrast is most commonly used as contrast of value. So contrast of value is pretty simple to understand. It's white on black, right? That's all there is to it. It is easier for you right now to read the word at the bottom of the page than it is to read the word at the top of the page because the word contrast at the bottom of the page has a higher value contrast to the background. It's pretty simple, right? The top word is very, very light. It's an ultra light brown gray. The middle is a mid-tone gray and then the bottom is black text. I mean this is pretty much other than the fact that black ink is pretty straightforward. Imagine trying to read a book that was written in that top font. I mean it would be, your eyes would burn out after five seconds of reading that book. So you know black ink on a white page is the reason we don't use other colors for pages or other colors for ink other than of course cost. So it just makes it easier to read. And in the same way it makes the word easier to read. This alternation of light and dark makes your miniatures easier to read. When you take something that's six feet tall and you shrink it down to an inch, which is basically a 25 millimeter miniature, obviously our minis are now often much taller than that being in 28 or 32 mil scale. They're still shrunk well, well, well down as far as scale goes. So we have to increase the contrast to increase the readability. I think where a lot of people get lost is I see people say, well I was trying to make it realistic. No, that's not really our goal here because you're not painting something realistic. You're painting a tiny, tiny person. And this tiny, tiny person to be readable has to have a higher level of contrast than if someone was six feet tall. If someone's six feet tall, you can be naturalistic. So if you're going to paint a full size one to one model, then your only concern becomes things like texture and detail. You don't have to worry about building in contrast. Nature will just do it for you. But when you get to very small scales, the light isn't interacting with the surface area in the same way. You have to take the reins and build in the contrast. But value contrast isn't the only type of contrast. It's just the most common. So value contrast is pretty simple to understand. The white against the black, what we've talked about already. There's not actually a whole pawn on the screen right now. It just looks that way. Your brain manages to see the pawn because of the contrast. There's not one line that's actually drawn there that is holistically the pawn. The absence of color of what surrounds it creates the pawn. But that's not the only form of contrast, value contrast. The other form of contrast I often talk about is contrast of hue. OK, so if you've looked at a movie poster in the past, say, 10 years, this is a rather extreme version of it and a fantastic movie. But this is the classic orange against teal movie poster. And you can just if you Google orange and teal movie posters, you will see that a while ago, Hollywood figured out that oranges and teals make flesh tones really stand out. And it's a really compelling contrast. And it just looks really good. And so every movie poster just became those kinds of colors, right? Just these unbelievably strange, sketched colors of these two extreme values, these two extreme hues. Now, there's plenty of value contrast in the movie poster on the right. In fact, there's quite a lot of it that's very much in a sort of noir style. But at the same time, there's the real dominating contrast is a contrast of hue of contrasting colors or complementary colors, right? Orange and teal. We most commonly see this in our lives at the time I'm recording this, which is over my Christmas break. So Christmas famously having red and green two complementary colors. So we tend to see these like oranges and teals a lot in things like movie posters and anything that involves human flesh tones, because flesh tones of all sorts of various colors look really good against orange or teal. The probably the rare when you don't tend to see as often as yellow and purple. Of course, you can make complementary colors out of more or less anything on the color wheel as it spins around. But you just don't tend to see the yellow and purple as much because it's not as appealing to our eye. Whereas red and green has this nice, soft, warm, complementary nature to it. That's why it's Christmas colors. They tend to tends to feel very warm in a very cold time of year. Orange and teal tend to feel very shocking. So they're great for eye grabbing, movie poster stuff. Yellow and purple just feels kind of strange and other worldly. The actual complementary or contrasting colors you usually see with purple is actually in comic books where you see purple and green. And although those are not actually true complementary colors, they do complement each other in the sort of non-hard technical sense of the word. Well, but contrast of value left hue on the right. OK, let's make this real. Enough theory. Let's get into some miniatures. So here are two space marines I've painted. The one now both of these were done relatively recently. Both of these guys showed up, I think, in some kind of video or another. You might have seen them in the past. But the and obviously they are different chapters and different colors, but they still have a great deal of difference in contrast. The one on the left was done on a pretty straightforward explanation of how to paint a Blood Angels color scheme. And it has contrast. You can see there are things like the panel lines in between the armor and there's, you know, deeper reds and brighter reds and stuff like that. There are places where the light is clearly reflecting on the armor. To me, that's a more soft contrast, right? What it implies when you do contrast like this is that the armor is a fairly matte, maybe slightly satin, but mostly non-reflective surface. And this is where we begin to get into the discussion of textures and how they reflect light. The space rain on the right, our little crimson fist friend. His armor is much more reflective, right? It's glossy because I've painted much higher highlights, much deeper shadows and, most importantly, secondary reflections in the shadows, showing that it's so bright that there's other light points that are getting in light catches that are happening in the armor itself. So, for example, if you look at his left knee, our right side knee on the crimson fist, you'll see that it goes from very bright white at the top down into darker blues into a dark black. And then there's a little bit of red reflection in there. And then it goes into the actual reflection from the silver that's directly below it, right? So it's, you know, really showing that that is an ultra high reflection surface. In that it's picking up all this environmental lighting as well. Both of these, by the way, could be clearly smoothed out with a little bit of additional refinement. Nothing makes your work look worse than looking at it at this scale. All I see when I look at this is everything wrong with both of them. But my hatred of my own painting aside, it's a good example of a difference in contrast, right? Now, is one of these necessarily more correct than the other? No. OK. And I don't push people when I say you need more contrast. I'm usually not talking about moving from the picture on the left to the picture on the right. What I'm usually talking about is something much different. We'll look at an example of that in just a moment. But what I wanted to show you here is the amount of contrast that you bake in of value says a lot about the nature of the surface and its interaction with the light. And in the end, all of miniature painting is basically about light, how light is interacting with the surfaces, the colors and everything we're doing here. What we are on about when we're a miniature painting at anything above sort of the base level of the thing is we're trying to capture the light and really show how the light is being trapped and how it's reflecting on the surface. Is the surface very matte? Is the surface diffusing a lot of light? Or is it a glossy, high reflection surface? OK. So guy on the right, clearly his armor, super shiny. And that's why we've jacked the contrast way up through the roof. Guy on the left, more of a mad armor. So it's about how you see your space brains and how reflective they are. Now, let's take a look at actually going on the journey that I just described. If I were to look at the piece on the left, which is something I painted quite a few years ago, I mean, other than telling the person the feedback would be, you need to clean up your painting style some because it's a little messy and there's lots of like mistakes. What I would also tell this person is you need to increase your contrast. So fortunately, I love this fig so much, I've painted two versions of the thing. So here is original Iquit Claw on the left on my very old and long deceased cutting mat. And here is new Iquit Claw on the right. Now, given the guy on the right is done in non metallics versus true metallics on the left, but it wouldn't matter that less than we the same as we'll see later on. And I want to point out certain areas to you where I've tried my best to capture the nature of contrast in different surfaces. So first, we're going to look at this blade up top. It's really nice since we got the same figure. You know, originally the metal on the left is basically my, you know, and what probably most of us did at some point in time where we put some kind of bad metal paint on it, then we washed it. And then maybe I did a little bit of a highlight up toward the top of the thing. Now, that's not really how metal works. The one on the right, however, you'll see that I've done my best to capture the light in a non metallic way. So you can see how there's edge highlighting. There are strong reflections. The miniature runs from white to black or near white to near black and has those values sitting very much next to each other. The shape is much more defined. The reflections are much more clear, right? That is much closer to how metal works. I'm communicating the nature of the surface, right? I'm communicating here with the non metallic, the reflectivity better than I am on the true metallic on the left. Now, again, the same thing with true metallics. We'll do it in just a moment. I promise for those of you who are ready to riot because you're thinking I'm telling you that the only way to get good contrast is paint non metallic metal. Please put away your pitchfork and your torches. I promise that's not what the point of this is. OK, but I wanted to show how much more like metal the non metallic feels than the thing actually painted in metal paint. Because all the work I did basically on the left is killing the metal shine. Next up, let's take a look at this little thing on his back. First of all, I just now realized in doing this comparison that he lost his little tube. I must have broke that off at some point, a little exhaust board or whatever. What a shame. But anyways, here again, because you've got this globe and globes are always the most fun to try to capture light on because they have this wonderfully natural shape of the primary light and then the shadow and then the reflected light. It's just very straightforward painting. So that's why kneecaps are fun and globes and columns are just fun ways to show light. That's why space marine legs show up on Instagram and everything all the time. At any rate, here again, you can see how I'm saying this surface is really, really reflective, right? Because there is a reflected light that's coming in there on a green that's bouncing off. It's kind of barely visible, but if you spun the guy around, you'd see even more of it for our non metallic fellow on the right. But it's going up to, again, a near white shine on a copper surface, right? That's not gray or steel where it's already pretty close to white. So it's showing white light. Isn't that weird? This is a very different color, right? The primary color of that copper thing is some kind of red brown, right? Not to be confused with red brown, the famous star of 80s action B movies. But instead, we've really pushed the contrast on that piece, but it's not just that that I wanted to show you with this. Notice that as well in some of the shadows, I've hidden a little bit of green and turquoise to show a bit of oxidation around things like the joints. Again, creating tiny little areas of contrast of hue. OK, at the same time, I want to point out that dark black line running through the center along with the two white lines traced around it. Versus the sort of very crappy job I did on the left of actually showing that separation between the two halves of the globe. The reality is that that little line, look how much that stands out. And that's because the dark is put right against the light, right? So by running those two next to each other, we get this very powerful contrast. Now, the last area I want to point out is down here. This is the cloth. So in the original one, he's basically just purple and I have almost no real contrast there. It's minimal at best. Now over on the right side, there's still not a huge amount of contrast. But you'll notice I've added in some additional variants of hue. Little bits of those green vials are reflecting there. I've got the little green flames down at the bottom because this surface is ultimately both one in shadow. It's under him. It's at the bottom of his total volume. It's under this big bulky, heavy armor, but to its cloth. And in my head, it was probably some kind of cheap wool or something like that. So it's quite a matte surface. It's not going to be highly, highly reflective. So we don't have the same amount of light being captured with the area on the top. OK, all right, let's go to the next slide. All right, so now let's talk about the contrast of light in the extreme. Let's let's make this very real. So on the left, I have this painting from Olden Times and this is a Renaissance painting. And you can see that all of these figures are clearly lit by a single candle. It's actually right behind where the guy is pouring his his drink. And you can see a little tiny bit of the candle flame poking over top. And you notice the figure in the back has much less detail and light and refinement, though it's still there. But on the back left, she's lit very softly. You have our main central figure taking most of the light being quite well lit. Right. And then you've got high contrast lighting on the two figures in front, where you can see how muted and desaturated the rear of the gentleman's shirt, I guess, his outfit. There we go, is versus the front of it, right? We can see the light poking through. Same with our woman who's got her her hand on his shoulder. Now, the figure on the right, the bust is from the Deoregarde Kickstarter. And this is the same take on lighting where I'm showing the figure coming from shadow into light. And you can see how she's very strongly lit, but off to the side of her face, the side of her face turned away from the light. The back of her arm and so on and so forth is extremely dark. And it has these really high contrast shadows. So the lighting, when we're doing contrast of value, it doesn't always have to be captured in a way that's just from the top down as we tend to paint our miniatures when we go into other forms, say like busts or, you know, a competition piece or something for display. Oftentimes we'll have light being coming in from other angles, other colors, other tones, but it's still ultimately and fundamentally doing the same thing. It's creating contrast. Now, on her, you'll see that yet again, I've done my best to capture the various different textures and sort of surfaces that are there and show the different lighting. So for example, her sword, which is the front of it is facing directly toward the light source, has areas of very high reflection and areas of very deep shadow. I'm imagining those are actually the people sitting around the fire or something reflecting in her sword, whereas her skin has much more soft illumination. It gets quite highlighted, but it isn't as reflective as metal. Skin is ultimately somewhat satin and reflects light well, but it doesn't reflect light like shiny polished metal. Now, at the same time, her clothing is very much cast in the contrasting light and shadow, but still not as strongly as the metal. It doesn't come up to appear white. It doesn't go down to appear black, right? So we have different kinds of contrasts all working together. Each element, each texture, each surface being set to a level of contrast that's appropriate for its particular way it would interact with the light. Now, this is a couple of different Shaggoths I painted. Obviously, these are two different models, but painted over quite a long period of time and difference. But that's OK. The point will still stand here. On the left, we have a Shaggoth I painted a long time ago. This is the official Shaggoth on the right. We have the Dracon, I think as we always call it, or something like that, from Creature Cast. And what I wanted to talk about here, of course, there's a lot more contrast of value in the guy on the right. But what I really wanted to talk about with this guy is contrast of hue. And I wanted to talk about it in skin. One of the things I'm always pushing people on is the contrast that they put in their skin. As I just mentioned, skin is a satin surface. It tends to be quite reflective of light. At the same time, skin also is a very translucent substance. And you can prove this by simply holding a flashlight up your hand. If you've ever done that, you see the light kind of, you know, go through and make your hand light up and it looks real neat. If your skin was opaque, that would not happen. You wouldn't see the light. If you put a flashlight up to a piece of concrete, you don't see the light light up the concrete, right? That's an opaque surface or a paid substance. And because skin is translucent, it shows a whole cornucopia of exciting colors. There's lots of pinks and magentas and reds and purples and blues and all sorts of stuff, depending on the environment the person has to be standing in, depending on the ethnicity of the figure being captured. Is it some kind of fantasy race? All sorts of different possibilities. But the point is, is that skin, for it to feel realistic to us, often has a wide variance of hue. And if you look at the skin on the left, like I have some variants in there. I have a little bit of brown, which is what I often see people do. You know, probably I wash the whole thing in Reiklin Fleshade. That's what it looks like to me. I don't know how I painted this thing six years ago, you know, today. But it tends to be that's the way we go. The problem is that creates this very like monotone shadow and it isn't really the correct shadow because skin hue variants doesn't always happen just around shadows. Now, the lit parts, the parts directly exposed to light tend to be the brightest again because of the satin nature of skin. But at the same time, skin also has lots of different tones in it, both in the shadows and throughout on elbows or knuckles or stuff like that. If you squeeze your knuckle, you'll tend to see a bit of red and pink in there, as well as the white of the bone pushed toward the skin. If you relax your hand, you'll see more of the red and the pink, right? Same with the palm of your hand versus the top of your hand or the lower part of the jaw on a male figure, which tends to have a very blue tone to it, often because of a beard, right? Unless your beard is completely blonde, if there's any kind of darkness to it, it will basically get this blue shadow tone to it. And so just a simple wash isn't really enough to capture the contrast of hue that's in skin. So if you're interested in taking your skin to the next level, the real way there is the integration of contrast of hue, right? Working in these different colors. You can see the guy on the right, our big giant Shaggoth. He has these very bright, you know, highlights of near white reflections on his skin. But he also has these magentas that the skin is traveling through, right? Like soft pinks and then down into almost a more purple red color, which was probably something like black leather or something like that. I also built in a tattoo, which created more contrast of value because it's more white on black, right? Not actually, that's not actually black ink, but it's close enough that it's giving me the same impact. OK, so now let's put it all together in a single fig. This is one of my keepers of secrets, which I love this figure. I paint this figure many, many times more and I've painted it many already. But she's such a fun, beautiful, wonderful fig to paint. So let's start off up top. Hair. Hair is quite satin. It's highly reflective because it's oily. And so there you can see where we've captured the light and the dark of her hair. You can see how reflective, how high contrast her hair is. Notice how I've captured the texture there by doing individual thin lines of light and how they smooth out. But notice there's also darker lines running even against the light parts, right, where it would be in shadow. So what you have are higher areas of reflection, but also deeper areas of shadow, right? So hair has this thin line texture that I'm then using to build the high contrast. Her skin in the same way as this mix of these grays with very soft magenta tones and purples and things like that. You can see how we've captured the individual volumes and volume just means shape, right? In other words, like your bicep is a single shape. If it's well formed, your shoulder, her breasts, anything like that. Those are just the volumes we're talking about, right? Those have a travel to them from light to shadow, right? But it's not as extreme as the hair. It's still bright because I assume her skin, even though she's a weird demon creature, is still roughly satin like a like a humans would be, right? Because that's what we expect to see. Over here on the left, her this metal is true metallic metal, but you'll notice how strongly I've taken control of the light. Notice the dark black ink that's creating areas of darkness versus areas of reflection. So part of that metal has been turned matte. Part of it has been brought up into the pure silver spectrum. So that way, despite the fact it's true metallic metal, I've painted it in a sort of non-metallic style that has given me control of what's reflecting. But you see how bright and high reflectivity that is. It's the brightest thing on this miniature, other than the thing we're about to look at in just a second. And that's because it's supposed to be it's metal. It's near polished chrome. It's going to be ultra reflective, right? Next up, let's look at the non-metallic sword, the non-metallic sword. Again, I mix non-metallic and true metallic all the time on my minis. And you can too. Anybody who tells you you shouldn't is wrong. There you go. That's that's I'll say that simply. You can do whatever you want. Sure, many paint however you want to. This is your world. You're the creator. And but here again, you see how I've recreated in non-metallic form. The exact same thing that's going on with the true metallic, right? I have these bright edges where light is catching. And by the way, as far as light catches go, if you look at the upper part of her true metallic claw guard, notice how that light is tracking along those edges up near her forearm, right? Like that's why we paint edge highlights on super reflective surfaces. Once again, we're coming up to this bright white highlight because of the reflection and we're going down all the way into basically black for shadows. Notice down here, I wanted to take a little moment to point this out. Now that could have just been completely in shadow. And as a point of fact, if it was just her walking around in the world, it probably would be, but that's boring. So instead, what we did is we have some little lights that are next to her, which are creating a soft glow in the scene. Now, assuming that she's still primarily lit from above, but to add a little contrast of hue as well as value, we have a little blue light reflecting up on the bottom of her crimson robes, right? And lighting that area. Now, there's still a lot of deep shadows down there. You can see how much I reinforced the dark shadows to kind of sell this OSL effect, right? But that little bit, again, more areas of travel from light to dark, more areas of color, alternation of variance in hue increases your contrast. I thought we'd end here on a very recent figure I've painted. Mr. Sigbald, the Magnificent. You saw me do the shield last week. If you didn't, the tutorials last week. So you can find that little link down below in the description or right up in the corner. But this is really a big experiment in the various forms of contrast, because Sigbald himself, his armor is highly reflective. And so the pink travels up into this extremely bright pink and then comes down into these deep shadows with a secondary reflection of sort of that is unmotivated completely like it's there because rule of cool of these blue colors, right? They're just sort of there and hidden in the deep shadows. His shield being ultra reflective is basically a mirrored surface and so is showing the world around him. His sword, which isn't polished quite to the same degree, so you don't see the same definition, but reflects in many of the same tones again about capturing the world around him. The gold is again true metallic metal combined with the non-metallic. And yet again, you can see the various areas of darkness where we've taken control of the light to build in shadows, but also with things like his hair, which is blonde. We don't go super dark, but again, we travel all the way up to white. If you look around the crown of his head and so on and so forth, you can see where the where that powerful, you know, near white light reflection is on his head. Meanwhile, the cape that's flowing out below him or the tabard between his legs is much softer in its level of contrast. So hopefully you can see how on this miniature we're really bringing it all together into one big project. You've got little things hidden here like the gems, which are ultra reflective, even more so than the metal, right? Because they're also they also allow light to go through. So there we have the extreme reflections, right? Lots of different studies in contrast. But notice how many times on this mini we travel from light to dark. Every edge is traced, right? There's a dark line separating all of the elements. We have a high contrast of value and of hue in the various elements of the piece, for example, the turquoise against the pink, right? So there you go. That brings it all together. I hope this has been helpful in understanding contrast, especially contrast of value and hue. These are really the two most common types out there that you need to worry about in painting. There's lots of other contrast you can bake in contrast of texture, of material, of subject matter and time period. There's all sorts of fun things you can do like that. But for the most part, when we're painting, what we're talking about is the contrast of value and the contrast of hue or color. So with that, I'll say thank you very much for watching. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this. I know this was a long video, but I really wanted to get deep into it. So if you enjoy this, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future and share this video. That's always so helpful. If you've got any questions, drop them down below. But as always, I thank you very much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.