How to glaze for fun and profit.

Transcript

Late night glazing with Matthew. Okay, we’re gonna finish up the skin on these squigs. We are starting off. We’re just coming in with that Primary Red from Scale Color and just their orange. Literally just orange. And then the Yellow Orange ink. This Yellow Orange ink we’re going to work into the final highlight of all our models army-wide. And that’s going to help us unify the whole army. Same with that Hexed Lichen in the purple.

So, we’re starting off just by kind of—it’s slightly less thick than you would if you wanted to layer paint this, but not as transparent as a glaze. And we’re coming in with that Primary Red that we dry brushed with because now that we’re using a real brush, and the pigment is going to be more concentrated. So, this will be a step up from the shade of red that we dry brushed. And we’re going to come in and we’re going to hit all the raised areas. Again, treat this like you would a normal base coat essentially at this point. As long as you add in a lot of water, again, thinner than a normal base coat, but in terms of the areas that you paint, think of this like a base coat.

And we always want to pull the paint from the shadows towards the highlight because that’s going to deposit most of that pigment where we want the paint to be brighter and a lighter color. So you can see I’m hitting all of the face, the cheeks, all these little spiky things. And I’m being kind of sloppy with it. One, just because our paint is so translucent that it’s not going to be a huge deal if we get it where we don’t want it. And two, this will actually help ease that transition from the purple into the red.

This is the one that we dry brushed. So, and again, you can’t tell that we dry brushed it, especially after the work we’re going to do tonight. What you’re seeing here was about 35 to 40 minutes of glazing. You could do this for much longer if you wanted to and just increase that contrast by working up towards the orange. But again, I really wanted to get as close to that box art as quickly and easily as possible and keep it as skill independent as possible and really just kind of give you the knowledge and break down the terms and the techniques in ways that are easy to understand.

So, now we’re on that top boy. Just working through again, we’re still on that Primary Red and we’re just hitting all the raised areas with that with a thinned version of the red. And here you can already kind of see the bottom one drying. And you can also get a better idea of the purple values in our shadows on this. And it’s—see that it’s way cooler looking than in the terrible photos I took at the end of the last video.

So now we’re just mixing in that orange. You can do this before you start painting, especially if you have a wet palette. But I like to do it while I’m painting because I just kind of vibe out. I think it’s really easy to forget that it’s not a job and you’re meant to have fun and it’s okay to screw up and get crazy with it. So, I just like to mix my paint in the middle depending on how I feel about it.

But now we’re coming back in and again, I’m pulling from the places of shadow or darkness to the point of the highlight that I want. Hitting all the same areas, but this is where I’m no longer sloppy with it. I’m still being like—it’s not super precise because again, the paint is so thin that it’s going to be forgiving. And we’re just slowly building up layer upon layer upon layer. I’m going pretty fast here. I actually have a fan that’s blowing on me and this model, so it’s drying my paint pretty quickly for me. So, I’m able to just hit these layers pretty quick.

And you can see here, like I’m—this is real time. It’s not sped up. I’m just glazing it, you know? 11:20 p.m. glaze it. Just slowly working through the orange. And we’re still on the guy on the bottom. And you can really see the difference now and the work that we’re doing from these layers building up.

At this point, I’ve added in that Yellow Orange ink. And now, this is a little bit of red, but mostly orange. Like, we’re fully into orange territory. And this is how we’re really going to kick it into that box art. Up until this point, it was much darker than the box art. We were missing that orange element. And here, we’re just being even more selective, hitting the very tops of things, but still being sure that we’re pulling that paint from the shadow to the highlight.

And now you really get an idea of all the dynamic colors from the lows to the highs here. And we established this with dry brushing and very quick, easy to do glazing on the body. We haven’t touched yet. I did that on purpose just to show you that we’re actually doing some work on the face here. This is what we started with.

So now just going to go back. Same thing here. You can be a lot more loosey goosey with it because again, most people aren’t really even going to look at the body. And that’s the secret to army style painting and doing it well is knowing what you need to focus on and what you don’t have to focus on. Especially when you’re on a time crunch. I’m trying to paint this full—really it’s going to be like 25 to 3,000 points of orcs and goblins this month for Orctober. So definitely still very much on a time crunch.

So, you don’t want to spend a huge amount of time on stuff nobody’s going to see because once you get the army to tabletop ready and you can play with it and get it out there, there’s always time to come back in and glaze this body. There’s always time to come back in and screw around on it. I don’t know how often you’re actually going to do that because you’re going to want to move on to the next project, but the whole point of army painting is to get it to good enough and it’s still going to look great. Like, we don’t—we want to take pride in our work, but we don’t need to spend a ton of time to get there.

So now, as I was rambling on, I want to go back and point out that for the top one, I mixed in more orange. Like, I didn’t actually start with just Primary Red. From the very start on this top one, there was that orange mixed in with the Primary Red because this guy’s higher up and the light is really blasting him. He’s just going to be brighter than that bottom squig. And that’s going to give the effect that the bottom squig is in the shadow. And it’s just—it’s all going to come together nicely.

So, it’s not a huge difference. Like, we don’t want them to be different colored, but by just starting one step above the bottom one, it’s just really going to reinforce that it’s below the squig and in shadow.

So, here, same exact thing as the bottom, just working through the face. We’re spending a lot of time on the face because that’s where all the vision is going to go. And once we tomorrow when we come back in and actually finish the whole model and we paint the eyes and the tongue and the teeth and those chains and the goblins, it’s really—we’re going to really spend a lot of time on that tongue, a lot of time on the mouth. But right now, we’re just finishing up the skin with the glazes.

The secret to this type of glaze is to—you have to know your paint. Like you can’t—it’s very difficult to paint swap a ton and be able to glaze with it because you’re not going to know the correct consistencies. And when I was a beginning painter, that was the biggest thing I struggled with because I was always buying like the next greatest paint that I saw on videos or the next really the next greatest paint that I was reading about in forums. And I never actually learned how to use the paint that I had because I couldn’t get the consistencies right.

So, as long as you’re not using like craft paints, and the reason you can’t use craft paints to glaze is because they don’t have enough pigment in them, and when you water them down, the pigment breaks up and it’ll just look like junk on the model. As long as you have like any form of halfway decent tabletop paint, you can get to learn it and glaze with it because you just need to learn the how much water you need to add for the consistency.

So here we are just purely in that orange and working through the high spots. And you can really see this model transform. As we’re working on this top one, you can see the bottom one start to dry. When it dries, it does get dulled back down towards red, which is good because we don’t want it to be that full step of orange, but it’s just something to plan for and not freak out while you’re doing it.

But the other part of this of this method is I’m actually getting a lot of paint off the brush on my thumb and that’s why I have all those lines there. You can use a paper towel. It’s just so much easier for me to use my thumb. And we’re using gentle but assertive quick flicks of the brush to deposit the paint.

And then this freeze frame, I haven’t touched the airbrush one at all. So you can see like just how much of a difference we made. And then here I’ve gone back. I’ve done everything that we did on the dry brush one to the airbrush one. So now they’re both ready to move on to tomorrow. So I’ll see you then when we finish these both up. Have a good night.