How to Paint Red - Airbrush vs Drybrush

The Goal

Today we’re going to recreate that Mangler Squig box art—speed paint style—using an airbrush. And if you don’t have an airbrush, I’m also going to show you how to do the same thing with just dry brushing.

Starting Point

These are primed black and hit from the top with rattle can white. I didn’t spend a ton of time on that since some people might not have an airbrush for zenithal.

The Airbrush Method

Purple Preshade

Starting with Hex Lyken (a deep but bright purple), spraying up from the bottom as a reverse highlight.

Brown Foundation

Then Burnt Umber—the best brown ever made. If we go straight from white to red, it turns pink. From black to red, it becomes maroon. This brown lets the red come through properly.

Building the Red

Primary Red from Scale Color, coming in from the top and bottom. Scale Color is actually pretty hard to airbrush with. And this Badger just chucks paint out—I’m barely touching the button.

Magenta Shadows

Too much paint came out, so I grabbed magenta ink to reestablish those purple shadows from the bottom up.

Orange Highlights

Tangerine ink at the very top. Look at the box art—they’re actually very orange.

The Drybrush Method

I’m keeping all the footage here so you can see I’m just blasting this thing. It’s not even really a dry brush—there’s tons of paint. Using a soft bristle dry brush so we don’t get brush strokes.

Same Layers

1. Hex Lyken purple in the shadows—hitting from the bottom
2. Burnt Umber on the white parts, overlapping into the purple
3. Red building up traditionally, way more paint than a normal dry brush
4. Orange highlights with yellow ochre ink

On Volumetric Painting

I’m probably going to get crucified for this, but I think high-contrast dynamic volumetric painting looks goofy on the tabletop with a whole army. It looks great in competition models and one-offs, but when you have a whole army in that style on the table, in the real world, it looks cartoonish to me.

If you want that style, just don’t take the red as far into the purple.

The Magic: Purple Oil Wash

This ties everything together. Very cheap violet paint from Walmart mixed with mineral spirits—very thin.

On the dry brushed one, there were still white spots where I couldn’t reach with my thick brush. This wash unifies all of that. It turns those areas purple and creates an optical illusion at tabletop level that blends all the colors together.

Use a makeup sponge (not a sprue sponge—it can scratch). Stipple it off, being gentle. We want to tint the shadows that purple color and unify everything.

The Results

After the wash, you really can’t tell which was airbrush and which was drybrush. They look almost exactly the same.

Total time for both models: 66 minutes from sitting down, including getting up for paints and supplies. If you were just doing one method, probably 20 minutes each.

Tomorrow we paint the details and really kick this up to the next level with all the time we saved by easy-moding the skin.

Transcript

Today we’re going to try to recreate this mangler squig box art uh speed paint style using an airbrush with one. Or if you don’t have an airbrush, I’m also going to show you how to do the same thing with just dry brushing. So again, our goal is to get as close as possible to that box art as quickly and as easily as possible. So we’re starting off with not even zenithol really. These are just I primed them black and then I hit them from the top with rattle can white.

Uh, I did not spend a ton of time on that cuz I knew some people might not have an airbrush to do that. We’re starting off with Hex Lyken. Uh, this is just a a deep purple but kind of on the brighter side. And we’re spraying this up from the bottom on the airbrush. So, think of that as like a reverse highlight.

And then we’re coming in with burnt umber, the best brown ever made. And the reason we’re doing this is if we try to come in uh on either the the white with the red, it’s going to turn pink. And if we try to come in with a red onto just black, it’s going to be like a maroon color or almost make a brown. Anyway, so this is going to allow our red to really kind of come through and show how we want it to look. So now I’m coming in with primary red from scale color.

And this is actually scale color is actually pretty hard to airbrush with. Especially this is my first time really trying to use this airbrush. And I definitely get why people say this badger is really just good for priming. This thing chucks paint out. Like I’m barely even touching the button here.

I’ve had my PSI turned down and you can even tell like it’s blasting that paint out. It makes me really glad I was actually wearing my respirator this time, but I’m coming back in over all of that with that red from the top and the bottom. I realized that too much paint was coming out just be because of how crazy this airbrush is. So, I grabbed that magenta ink and now I’m reestablishing that purple shade from the bottom up. So, this is me just trying to fix that and it got too wet and it was just kind of making a mess.

So, I had to let it sit and dry for a little bit. So, now I’m coming back in just again with that magenta ink to reestablish my purple shadows, the purple tones in the shadows. Cuz this is still very much a a red squig. it doesn’t have that high contrast or the dynamic volume between the highs and the lows. And if you want to do that, you you could do it.

You could just not hit all all over the model with that red. Um, with this army, I want to get as close to kind of that heavy metal box art style while still in like a speed paint easy to do methods. Um, so I did I didn’t do that here, but if you like that kind of volutric paint job, I think it’s pretty common these days. cuz it’s very easy to do. Just don’t hit it from the bottom like I did.

So now I’m coming in with that tangerine ink at the very top to just highlight it up because if if you go back and look at that box art, they’re actually very orange and it’s it’s hard for me to get that on camera. I don’t know why. Um it it’s kind of coming through here, but again, the paint is still so wet and there’s so much paint coming out of that airbrush and it just kind of looks like a mess. But there’s way more it’s way there’s way more values in the actual model than is coming through. And this is me telling you about how I messed up about how much how much uh paint was coming through that airbrush, but I forgot I had my mic muted uh because I don’t want the air compressor or the air purifier coming through.

So now it’s time to switch over to the dry brush only version. So I’m sped up here, but I’m I’m keeping in all of the actual footage for this part so you can just kind of see like I’m blasting this thing. It’s not even really a dry brush. Uh there’s a ton of paint. I was just working paint into the bristles.

This is one of those very soft bristle dry brushes. And that’s so we don’t get brush strokes. So I’m just coming in. This is that hex lyken from Vallejo game color, but it can be any purple. This is a it’s just a very deep but bright purple.

And hitting the shadows. I’m doing the same thing here that we did with the airbrush. And part of the I it’s not really a problem, but just part of the difference of using the the brush over the airbrush is there’s just parts that I can’t get to. So, you’ll see that here and we’ll address that in the final step. So, don’t worry if there’s parts of your model you can’t get to.

We’re going to do something at the end to fix that and really tie in all the parts together. So, and it really also makes it so it doesn’t look like you dry brushed everything. So again, I I I speed it up and in the future I cut out a few extras so you don’t have to watch the whole process to just get the idea of it. But here, I really wanted to show you that I’m really just slapping this on. Like I’m not it’s not rocket science.

If it’s on the bottom, you hit it. And even up into the face, I’m establishing shadows there where maybe organically or naturally from a light source that might not be. But I’m just doing that cuz I think it’ll look better, especially on the face where all the attention’s going to go. And with these squigs specifically, most of the attention is going to go right to that face. So the the rest of the bodies aren’t really that important if we’re being honest.

Man, these things I want to try this thing out. These things are a pain in the ass. This is like I’m seriously like the infomercial where the people just spill everything everywhere. I go right back to my my traditional paint pot. That thing is just not worth it.

I spill that thing every time. Um it seemed like a great idea, but it’s nowhere near as good as a normal paint pot. So now burnt umber coming back in. And this again I’m hitting all the white parts with this burnt umber. Uh it looks pretty cool if you wanted a purple and brown swig of this part.

It really starts to look pretty cool on its own. And again I’m hitting the white part, but now I’m also overlapping into that purple because that’s going to establish our midtone when we come back in with the red and it’s going to unify the color scheme. If you don’t want to have a unified color scheme and you want those high contrast dynamic shifts in the model, just leave a lot more of that purple. And in on this dry brush one, there are parts where I left some of the purple cuz I did like how it looked. Um, but I don’t plan on painting the whole army with those high dynamic shifts.

It’s just not my style. I think it looks great. Um, I think it looks cool in like competition models and one of models, but when you try to have an whole army in that style, it actually, in my opinion, uh, I’m probably going to get crucified for this, but in my opinion, looks really goofy on the tabletop, especially uh, like it’s very hard to do, very difficult to do. I don’t want to take away from that. and it looks great in competition models, but I think when you have a whole army on the table and it’s also very hard to paint that in a unified scheme across the whole army and it’s in the real world, it just looks it looks cartoonish to me, which again it can be great, but I don’t know.

I’m rambling about it now, but I didn’t do that here. If you want to do that style with a dry brush, just don’t take the red as far into the purple as I’m about to do here. At this point, we are doing more of a traditional dry brush. We’re still It’s still thicker than you’d want a normal dry brush to be because we don’t want any of the brown showing. And again, I want to take out a lot of that purple.

But this is definitely still very much a dry brush. And we’re using these big soft bristled brushes because that doesn’t show our brush strokes. So, you can see I pretty much turned this whole guy red. Um, I’m going to bring up how if you don’t want the whole thing red and you want to leave that purple in, it’ll still look cool. I just chose not to, but you could definitely do that and it look just as just as good.

So, now I’m letting everything dry here. Uh, in real time, it took me 66 minutes from the time I sat down and started counting all the time it took me to like get up from the desk and grab paints, uh, get up and grab the water bottles, get up and grab any other supplies I needed. And that was two of them. So, if you were just painting one of these or if you were just dry brushing or just airbrushing, you could have probably gotten them all done in like 20 minutes. And again, this is just the skin today is all I got a chance to do.

And we’ll come back in and we’ll paint in some details on the skin, right? Like where the skin is not 100% done, but the foundations are there. And I also just wanted to show you a way of kind of achieving that airbrush-like effect without actually having an airbrush. So here I am slowly, we are now 100% in traditional dry brush area where there’s barely any paint, any pigment on the brush. And I’m just working this in and establishing highlights here.

I’m slowly adding more of that like tangerine, I think it’s called yellow ochre ink in. And what we get here is that the one on the left, the dry brush one had is way more orange because I haven’t actually introduced any orange to the first one I airbrushed. And that’s because I wanted that to totally dry. And it’s also glossy just from the inks. Uh so the the color is not coming through completely correctly on the video.

But they are different. And that’s just from the gloss coat and from the violet. So I wanted to just kind of show you where we’re at now. And I’m going to come back in with an orange. With that orange, the same method I used to dry brush the squigs.

I’m just going to use that orange ink and another round. Oh, here it is. Getting ahead of myself. I’m going to use that orange ink to build up the highlights on both models. And that’s going to bring them more closer together and look more like the box art cuz that box art is very orange.

And now we’re going to speed this up now that I’m done yapping. And again, I left this part in so you can see that this is very much a more traditional dry brush where most of the pigment is off the brush. And we just really want to slowly work it up so that it doesn’t seem like we’re dry brushing it. I think the if you’re dry brushing and it looks obviously dry brushed, that that just means you have too much paint on your brush. And I also didn’t want to make like another slap video.

I think uh I think the world has seen enough slap chopping. This is also like the very the same concept as slap chops. Uh this back in my day, we just called it like underpainting or pre-shading. So here’s here’s the magic. We’re doing the thing.

Uh a violet. This is very cheap paint from Walmart. I got like a whole pack probably for less than a dollar a paint. And mineral spirits. Very thin.

You can see how thin it is in the tin. And I’m slathering this all over the place. Uh just like how we did with streaking grime. And the reason we’re doing this on the dry brushed one is for all those spots we couldn’t reach with our thick dry brush. There were still parts of this model that were white cuz I couldn’t get the the brush in.

What this wash will do is it just unifies all of that. It’ll turn those areas purple. And even if it’s even if it’s in an area that shouldn’t be purple, it’s almost going to create an optical illusion and it’s just going to especially at tabletop level, it’s going to blend all the colors in together and unify them. So, this kind of covers up for any mistakes that we couldn’t reach on the dry brush. Um, I would definitely recommend using a makeup sponge.

I’m using spruce sponge here. And the reason that uh the spruce sponge can actually like scratch our paint cuz it’s so fragile because it hasn’t actually hardened yet. So you see me kind of like stippling here. If you had a makeup sponge, you could actually rub and get more of the paint off. And I was trying to avoid scratching my paint.

So that’s why I grab that paper towel here and I’m stippling it off. Just trying to be really gentle, getting most of that wash off because again, we really just want to tint the shadows that purple color and unify everything here. We don’t want that purple all over the place. And now that we’re we’re here, I almost dropped it right there. I It was It was a really It doesn’t come through in the video how close it was to me almost dropping it and ruining everything on the airbrush model.

But now you can see we are almost at par with each other. These two guys look almost exactly the same. And you really can’t even tell which one was dry brush and which one was airbrush. There is a lot of volume that is still it’s just not coming through. I’ I’ve taken this picture so many times.

Um I’m working on my lighting and my photography skills, but there all of that work we did with the purple pre-shading still shows up across the whole body. Um I’m just not doing a very good job at capturing that on film. But thanks for watching and I’ll see you tomorrow where we paint in all the details and then really kind of kick this up to the next level with all the time we saved by uh easy modeing the skin.