Just a video about painting a belt buckle

Transcript

I don’t know what happened. I think I—I’m hoping I just recorded a 20-minute video on how to do this. But I looked up and my phone was off. It’s not dead. It was just off. But hopefully I just recorded it.

All right. Back at it again for the belt buckle. Going to be using pretty much I think the whole palette of Scale 75 Artist shades of gray. So there is art white, art black, buff, pearl gray, violet gray, and gray or green gray. This time since I still have not found my wet palette, which is just so typical. I was painting with the kids and they were doing their thing and I was doing my thing and I think I put my wet palette in with the kids’ art supplies and I just realized that right now, this second. So, now I’m going to have to go check.

It was also a little crazy. And I think I’ll probably have to go back and darken it up a little bit because I honestly thought that once it dried it would dry darker, but it’s still pretty bright. So, I think I’ll probably go back in and do some glazing over it. But, I’m very happy with the texture we built up. So, I really think I just probably need to go back in and glaze in some of those purple shadows. But again, I’m going to wait until I get more of the model painted before I go too crazy there.

Water. I’m going to take some of this—dash of this. This is that gray green gray. And let’s headbutt our camera.

Okay. So, going to just come in first with our base coat here. And I’m going to leave some black in those recessed areas.

Oh, can I? If I can back this up and you can still see it. I can actually get in here. And I need to—I’m still like I’m at my airbrushing booth, but I’m still in like goblin mode painting style if you caught that video. So, for this I definitely need to go and get the real desk cleaned back up.

Okay. So, I’m leaving—trying to explain what I’m doing as I’m doing it. So, you can see almost like a black lining effect. I’m going to leave that black just to make those areas pop more. And I absolutely hate to say “make it pop.” It gives me flashbacks to graphic designer days.

And I really—I have my heater going because it’s cold as balls down here and I had a dehumidifier because I’m technically underground. And I’m wondering if that is also something I need to stop doing when I’m painting just because of how fast the paint is drying on the brush tip.

And again, I’m really just focusing. I have my—so, I have my light and my air compressor on a remote switch. I really got to get a second switch for that compressor because there’s no reason for that compressor to be on right now. And I wonder—I should probably maybe even have this here. Does this solve all of our problems? The issue is the light source is from a different angle now. But I have—I took a reference photo. But hopefully now you can see a lot of paint.

Can I zoom out? So I have—all right. Let me go back a little bit further. All right. So, you see—my feet out of here. Surprise feet. You can see I have this hand is on the table and I’m in a weird posture just because of how the camera is, but I have this wrist on the table and I’m coming in and I’m cupping. And that’s what gives me the control that even though I really want to be much closer to the piece, it allows me to get up in there relatively easily, right?

So the brush control is not 100% in my fingers. The fingers are doing those quick motions, but really the work is coming through—or the stability is coming through my whole arm now.

I don’t know if I can get this. All right. Oh, maybe that’s perfect.

Okay. So, I’m painting where an edge highlight would be and just like a little bit beyond where the edge highlight would be. And I am using my brush strokes to create that reflection. And I’m using the box art to tell me where the reflection should be.

And I talked about this last night. I think if I have a problem with this figure specifically, the problem is going to be that I was not consistent with my light sources. So, I was thinking like the belt is not a huge deal. The belt’s actually pretty close to the light sources anyway, just because of how I was vibing on it. But, if I just follow the light sources of the box art, even if I’m not really painting in that style or with those same colors—just following how they have their highlights—it’ll at least be consistent.

Hopefully, it’s not jerking you guys around everywhere. We’ll hit this bottom one.

And I think the other thing—like my—I know something that I struggle with when I’ve tried to paint this way in the past is when you’re painting—and I don’t really know what to call this—like a competition level painting. It seems like to me, trying to make sense of it, the way I think of it in my head is it’s volumetric, right? They’re painting in volumes.

So when in a traditional Games Workshop system, if something is green, you’re typically thinking in, okay, it’s green. I have a dark green, I have a midtone green, and then I have a bright green, and I start at the darkest point. I layer in or maybe I glaze in brighter things. Maybe I’ll do some washes. But if something is green, you paint it green. If something’s metal, you paint it metal. Right?

So now with volumetric painting and even—like this is non-metallic metal so you can’t use metals, right? So you have to simulate the metal with paint. But like even the belt—I actually didn’t—except for the first brown that I used, the belt didn’t actually have any brown paint in it. It has purples, pinks, and a gray—I think—or a whitish, a white, like a very warm white.

And when you’re thinking and you’re painting, thinking like a painter, then even though you see leather as brown, it’s not actually brown. You’re seeing a ton of different colors there.

Thanks for watching. I’ll see you tomorrow. This will either be a very short video or a video that has all the steps in it. I don’t know. Wish me luck.