How to Paint Red - Airbrush vs Drybrush

Transcript

Hello, it’s Monday. Today we’re going to paint these two mangler squigs inspired by the mangler squig box art, which if you’re not familiar, looks pretty sick. It’s just a really nice red squig—orange highlight, purple and blue shadows. It’s very nice looking. So we’re going to do our best to recreate that because they’ll also match my army colors and it’s just going to look really good. I’m going to do them—I’m going to use an airbrush on one and just a brush on the other—because I want to compare the two approaches and maybe if you don’t have an airbrush or you don’t want to use your airbrush, I can show you that you can do both and maybe one way is actually better.

I’m starting with a zenithal prime—white zenithal over gray primer. This is one of the goblins I’ve been working on. If you’ve seen my Vlog Day 33, which I’ll link above, we did these guys from zenithal prime all the way to the end. And the zenithal at the time looked really good for what I was going for. I was going for that old-school, two highlights and a shadow type feel. But these guys, I really want to recreate the box art, so we’re really going to lean into the volumetric highlights. And that’s why I have the lamp here, so I can see where the light is hitting on the actual squig.

So this right here is Hexed Lichen. It’s a purple Vallejo Game Color. One thing I noticed when I was working yesterday—I’m going to go ahead and move this down so I can work better—is that yesterday I was really struggling to get a nice smooth thin coat with my airbrush because the paint kept coming out really chunky because I wasn’t stirring the pot. So another reminder, every paint you use, make sure you’re stirring it.

So, I’m going to hit this—I should have primed it zenithal beforehand, but too late now. So, I’m going to look where—I have an eye on my lamp here—I’m going to start mapping in with this purple where the light is not hitting it to get like a pre-shade established.

So, like these—it would be cool to add like subtle hints of purple in here and I think even just a touch of purple where we might not have it—I guess—can I do? Let’s see. He’s so weird. I really want to do this guy, but I’m kind of stumped on even what it would be.

So with an airbrush, you can kind of see like the shadow is already being established, which when I’m painting them I’ll have to pull up a picture of the actual box art to see how they did that. So now I’m going to switch over to a brown. This is Burnt Umber just from the 3D print paints that I got. This is going to be for a midtone for the skin.

So, since I sprayed the whole model with brown, our purple got a little bit covered. So, what I’m going to do is push in that purple again where I think my shadowy places are. So, the purple should be like—I’m going to push it in, but it doesn’t need to be as strong as it was before, because really just a hint of purple in the shadows is what I’m going for. And the brown will also mute it, too.

Okay, so now onto red. And the biggest thing I’ve learned from watching videos and trying to paint red myself is less is more. Like, you can always add more red, but it’s really hard to take red away. So, I’m just going to establish where the midtone is going to be on this guy and then I’ll build up the orange highlights from that.

This is Primary Red from Scale Color, which is very thick and does not make my airbrush happy. Like, it’s not a very good paint to go through an airbrush. So, after several—oh my gosh, this is so much better. After several thin coats, we’ve got the red down where I’m going for and you can kind of see we have kind of like a spectrum happening. So like, I do have some purple in the shadows—it still shows through. I could push some more purple to actually like solidify them, but I have a cool trick I want to show you at the end, so I’m going to leave those alone.

We’ve got our red going and then I can start pushing in the orange—magenta. I want to push in like a rich magenta ink to re-establish the highlights. So, this is a magenta ink. I’m just going to push this into the shadows. I have pink in my airbrush now, so I’ve got to be careful.

Okay, it’s going to be interesting. So this is tangerine, which is more of a yellow ochre color. Let me get this setup going. I’m going to do tangerine and then probably mix in some red to get like a red orange for our shade. So, I want to try putting some Tangerine kind of into the places where our warmest highlights are going to be. It feels really weird because it looks like—you know that Garfield meme where it’s like “I hate Mondays”? That’s what this is looking like right now.

So this is a bad picture of the box art, but you can see on the original you’ve got—it’s like very red. It’s not orange, it’s red. With orange, like, inside of it. So, I’m going to go back and glaze more red on this. And I think that’ll get us back into where we need to be. Let’s see.

Alright, I’m back. I cleaned out the airbrush. I hit it with red again and then I went back and re-established the zenithal a little bit. I changed my orange. So, my orange before was—give me one second—my orange was Tangerine, which is not right for what I’m going for. So, I switched to Yellow Ochre—Yellow Orange. And that’s a lot closer to what I need.

So, it looks good. It feels like I have decent control with the airbrush. I think the only thing I’m struggling with is going back and forth. I should have just kept my colors loaded in from the beginning and then—oh my gosh, it’s so chunky. We’re back to the Badger—the old Badger. This thing chucks so much paint out, but I think that’s fine. It’s good for priming. Okay.

Alright, so that’s the airbrush one. And with the airbrush you can see we’ve got the shadows, we’ve got the midtone, we’ve got the highlight. There is variance there. There’s like an underpainting. I’ve seen people call this slap chop, which is just absurd. It’s been around forever. Back in my day, we just called it underpainting or pre-shading. But I guess slap chop catches on and is easier to say and remember and market.

So, that one’s good. Now let’s see how we do with a brush. So, for this one—I’m on a time limit, guys, so we’re going to have to speed this up—for this one, I’m going to try just using a brush. So, we have zenithal primer on him. I’m going to try hitting the shadowy bits with that same purple—the Hexed Lichen—with soft bristle dry brushes. Soft bristle dry brushes because they don’t leave as many streaky brush strokes as the hard bristle ones.

So, I’m looking at where the light comes in and looking at the shadows and I’m painting into those shadows. And you know, it doesn’t have to be perfect because I’m layering it up. So, already you can see we’ve got like purple recesses. We haven’t done our brown yet. So, let’s do our brown—the Burnt Umber. And for the brown, I’m only really going to hit the medium spots because the brown is a midtone.

So, just looking at it already—and I have like a lot of brush strokes that I didn’t really want—but we’re getting there. So, now red. And the benefit of doing this dry brushing style is that I have way more control over exactly where my paint goes because I’m going over so many times—like, I’m very precisely placing my pigment. The difficulty with it is it takes time. This is Red Leather from Vallejo Model Color.

So, one thing that I’m noticing is that with this approach, I’m getting the colors where I want them. The problem is getting them to be smooth and not splotchy or not streaky. So, like, what I think I’m going to do is after this just do an all-over wash, and I’ll probably do an oil wash—violet oil wash—and that’ll unify it all. It’s the streaking grime technique but just with violet instead of brown.

Alright, and now just orange. Using Model Color Light Orange. And this is the lightest bits that we want.

Okay, so on the left we have airbrush. On the right we have dry brush. Both of these are pre-shaded or whatever you want to call it. Both of them need more work, but this should give you an idea of how they both turn out.

So, for the dry brush one, you can see I’ve got some brush marks. It’s a little bit messier. The airbrush one is a lot smoother. But I think after—I’ll do an oil wash on both of them just to see and that’ll kind of unify things.

Alright, it’s been a bit and I have—I used violet oil paint and I thinned it with—what did I use? Mineral spirits. I thinned it with mineral spirits and I applied it to both of these. And this is what we get after I dabbed off the excess.

So, on this guy—the drybrush one—you can see we have very nice smooth transitions and it kind of unified everything. It pushed a bunch of purple into the recesses and overall looks pretty good. And then on this guy—the airbrush one—you can see the same thing happened. We pushed a lot of that purple in. The shadows are really strong now.

So, I think the results are pretty similar. I actually kind of like how the drybrush one turned out a little bit better because it’s got more of a painterly, rough feel to it. And the airbrush one is smoother, but it almost feels too smooth. But both of them are very close to what I was going for with the box art.

So, in total, this took about 66 minutes for both squigs. And I think that’s pretty good for a first pass. Obviously, they need more detail work—the mouths, the eyes, the teeth, all that stuff. But for establishing the skin tone and the color, I think we’re in a really good spot.

So, the takeaway is: you don’t need an airbrush to get good results. You can absolutely do this with just brushes. The airbrush is faster and smoother, but the brush method gives you more control and a different aesthetic. And in the end, after the oil wash, they both look pretty similar. So, use what you’re comfortable with and don’t let not having an airbrush stop you from trying these techniques.

Thanks for watching. See you in the next one.