How to Paint Trench Crusade Communicant

Transcript

I want to see all the coolness. Where is this stuff?

Welcome back, guys. Today we’re going to kind of do a janky painting video, painting tutorial of how easy it is to paint in kind of the grimdark style while still keeping kind of like a painterly touch to it. So, I’m just coming in with Army Painter Broadsword Silver, which is their speed paint. And then I’m coming back in touching it up with half like gold. And I’m fast forwarding this just because I’m slowing this part down. So, you can see these are now oil paints. I’m mixing in burnt umber, black, and yellow ochre to make this brown here that I’m swirling up on the palette. And all of the parts that I just painted with that silver—I skipped over that pretty fast because it’s pretty straightforward. I’m just going to slather this. I let it all dry earlier today and it’s coming back now. I didn’t seal it or anything. I’m just going right on top of the acrylic and this is fine. I did let the oil sit on this palette paper for a little bit so the oil evaporated a little bit, but other than that, coming in raw, occasionally adding a little bit more black and a little bit more mineral spirits in so it just flows down into the cracks. And I’m doing my best to not get this on the skin, but it’s not a huge deal if it does because we actually—we want a little bit on the skin. Just globbing this on the gun and making sure I get every piece of metal covered in this stuff.

Oh, you can see here my son was playing Legos across from me and he popped the Spidey head off, rolled right into the paint.

So, now I am mixing in some blue and this is a modified Zorn palette. If you’re interested, I would definitely recommend checking out Marco Frisoni’s—not just Mecca’s—his videos on a Zorn palette. Very cool, very grimdark. So this—I realized I had a little bit too much black here, so just took it in black and blue. Mixing it up that way.

“Ooh, I like that blue color.”

So now all the skin I’m covering in this. And this is to keep that almost undead look. If you look at the official art, the skin is very blue tinted. So that’s how we’re going to achieve that effect here. And we’re really just going to go—you see my son trying to show Legos to the camera, but I don’t think it picked up.

“All blue and brown.”

And again, I’m just slathering this stuff on here.

Here we go. Now, a makeup sponge. And we’re going to wipe it all off. So, again, I’m going to be kind of careful at the start to not mix the dirt in with the skin where I don’t want it. But like on places like the hands and the torso, I’m going to let some of that brown come up and mix in with the blue. We’re taking like most of this off. Like I didn’t really let it set that much. I probably let it sit maybe 10 minutes tops. Because especially with the skin—and I’m going pretty heavy. I haven’t actually used mineral spirits on the skin, but I’m taking off as much of this oil wash as I can get with just a makeup sponge.

“Dad, why did you wipe all the paint off?”

Look how it looks now.

“Before all that paint was just globbed up on it. Now it actually looks cool, doesn’t it?”

Oh. Well, I’m going to come back in and we’re going to finish the metal. The skin’s pretty much done by the end of this video. But the metal we really need to come back in and finish tomorrow once the oil dries a little bit more.

So, here mostly white with just a little bit of the blue. And I’m using just that same busted brush to paint all the top of the muscles, parts of the arms that the light’s hitting, and the like fingertips and knuckles. And again, I’m just dotting this on right now. You don’t really have to have a ton of brush control. And I’m coming back in with what’s called a filbert brush. It’s just a wide rounded tip on it. And I’m feathering this and blending it into the shadows and the mid tones here. Very easy to do. And this takes away the stark brush strokes. And this blends everything together for you. This is why oils are so great.

And watching this, I’m realizing that I need to get like a different camera setup or something if I’m gonna do more painting tutorials because this camera angle is terrible. But hopefully you can figure out what I’m doing. And see, this really just polishes and finalizes the skin. And we still kept in all of the shade from that first like black wash and the zenithal highlight in. And that really just served as our guide on where to put this final color. And the skin is like perfect. And it took like three paints really.

This whole model you probably could do—I think probably like an hour total. I was working through the whole warband. I’m going to have more on those guys tomorrow. But I’m going to have been able to finish my whole warband in like 2 days real time of painting, which is kind of crazy. So again, just feathering this out. I’m pretty much leaving the armor alone now. I’m going to come back tomorrow. The oil is not going to be completely dry tomorrow. Oil paint takes a couple of days to fully cure, but tomorrow it’ll be dry enough for me to come back in with acrylics and then we’ll really kind of punch in the highlights on the armor and be done with this guy. And tomorrow I’ve got some more tricks on how to easily do grimdark that I’ll share with the rest of the army.

Almost forgot. So, here I finally do have mineral spirits on my brush there. And I was just cleaning up the final bits.

And here’s what we have. This was seriously, if I was only painting this guy, this probably would have been like 20 minutes of actual paint time. And just because oils are magic, the result is great. And this model is also easy because he’s skin and guns. It’s three colors. The bullets are bronze, the metal is silver, and his skin is white. Really made this a no-brainer for the oil wash method.

And also, if you have Rakarth Flesh and you wanted the skin to be a little bit warmer, you could have just base coated the skin in that and then just slathered it in something like Streaking Grime and wiped the Streaking Grime off and you also just would have been done that way, too.

So, thanks for watching. I’ll catch you tomorrow.