Highlighting black

Transcript

The sink and the sickness

Hey, what’s up? Long time no see. So today this happened: it used to be a sink right here, but it ripped itself off the wall and took the water with it. I’ve been dealing with that. This is a 3D printed room, which probably sounds super echoey now because I had to take everything out of it to clean up. Luckily we caught it pretty quickly. I messed up that wall pretty good, but the room is mostly clean now.

I have been sick as heck, which you can probably see in my little eyes again. This is the year of rot for me. I’ve pretty much been sick since November. I think I had two weeks where I wasn’t sick. I just got my voice back.

Luckily the Kal Arath videos were pre-recorded as a teaser. So if you see any more Kal Arath videos, it was all pre-recorded at once — I’m saving those for when I can’t get out of bed again. It’s been brutal.

I’m exhausted from dealing with this. But let’s fit some hobby in. Let’s see what we can do.

The new wet palette

Rest in peace to the old wet palette. I went to replace the paper and the underside of it and the foam were covered in mold. Absolutely disgusting. I needed to get back to work on Maximus, so I went out to the LGS, and all they had was this Army Painter one.

I didn’t research this at all going in. I knew I wanted one that’s smaller, and this is substantially smaller than the other one, which I like. But what’s weird is it doesn’t lock. None of this is sealed — it just depends on this rubber band. I don’t really understand that.

The other issue is my favorite sable brush doesn’t fit in it. A lot of the other brushes I use — the Amazon special ones — also don’t fit because of the hump. None of my oil brushes fit. Brushes don’t fit and it doesn’t seal.

But the paint is staying wet. It’s letting me blend and do all my wet palette things. I think it needs a little more water actually, looking at it now. It’s been like 3 days, and I don’t think you’re even supposed to keep paints in them for 3 days normally — so it’s working pretty well. It’s a wet palette. We spoke.

Cutting in the dark areas

I laid in a little bit of shading — undertones on the head. Got a lot of work left on the face, but I started slowly putting in some color. The main thing is I cut in all these dark areas.

Looks like we need to do a bit more on that handle already. It makes the red look more done — because when so much of the model is this red color and we’re intentionally keeping it red, it runs the risk of looking unfinished. We’re definitely going to need to do a lot more love to the armor — more edge highlighting, picking out the more raised portions to truly finish the red. The leg looks pretty good, the shoulders look pretty good, but we’re going to add some more white to the armor too.

The glaze mix

Okay — just mixed up a little bit. This is Tenebris and a little bit of gray, more of the gray, a lot of the gray. Time to paint our model and go crazy. We’re going to do this pretty quickly.

This front leg is where most of the eyes are going to go. These are all glaze consistency — you can see on my thumb. I’m going to leave the straight Tenebris in the ridges.

Get a little more paint on the brush. I’m just trying to get a little bit of progress here before my body shuts down. This is very thin — probably a little too much on my brush still. I’ll only do one little highlight pass under there.

I’m hitting the bulk of the raised areas on these parts. Pretty much just layering. We’re not even really glazing — it’s glaze consistency, because that’s just how I like my paint in general. You get better control over it, and I’d rather just come back.

You can see on this thigh piece, we’re already getting the effect we want — right down through the middle of the thigh, it’s already brightening up because the paint just deposits there.

The no-effort wet blend

Now, while that last pass is still wet, I’m going to come into the midtone. Make sure it’s not super watery — I don’t want it to run everywhere. I’m showing you my thumb on purpose so you can see the method to the madness.

Do one pass very close to the recess line and then a little bit in the middle, to build up that highlight. Because that first pass is still wet, it’ll just blend itself together. This is like no-effort wet blending. Then hit it again real fast. Boom. There she goes.

Okay — while you were just sitting around waiting, I did the highlights on everywhere else except the leg so you can see. I did a little stippling on the straps to distress them, since the eye is going to catch those more from the top. Pretty straightforward.

I missed this shoulder — putting a little more in there. The shoulders, I just caught the arms and elbows, and of course the back straps. Just a quick pass on that arm. Got the grips.

The pearl gray highlight

Let me show you — this is just straight pearl gray. At this point I’ve worked it up with a couple of glaze layers. Literally just five more minutes of glazing, same thing I did at the beginning.

Now I’m going to paint this highlight — the brightest highlight — just on the spot closest to the crack. Very little paint on my brush, plenty of control. Just painting very thin lines, holding the model so I’m pulling the brush toward me for the greatest control over where the line goes. I’m painting that crack where those two panel lines meet.

Then I get a little more water because I want this back to glaze consistency, working it back down. There’s a lot of moisture there — definitely don’t want that much. There we go. Almost nothing coming off. Just glazing that highlight over. Boom.

Let it dry for a second so you can get a true look at it.

So now it still ties in because of the blue from our scales. It doesn’t take away from the model. We want it to look good if somebody looks at it, but it’s not super eye-catching. Your attention might go there for a little bit, but then it goes back to the red of the model. The cold blue tones in it are just like the scales, so it complements the red.

All right, that’s it for today. Going to go crash. See you tomorrow.