How to Paint BRIGHT White Hair - HC 564

Hello everybody and welcome to another Hobby Cheating video and today you'll be filled with fright as we learn how to paint your hair white. Well, well, not your hair, the the model. We're going to learn how to paint white hair. Let's get into it. >> The the strict technomancer that is Vince V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vince V. >> So I am working on this awesome uh Madame Yokai bust uh from Heroes and from the Heroes and Horrors line and I wanted to give her some hair that has a nice contrast. I could have just gone black, that's fine, but I wanted something more interesting. I thought white hair would be a great contrast, bright against the fairly like warm and dark uh rest of the composition. So today we're going to go through all the steps of how to get your hair your white hair looking crisp uh and clean and credible. So the three C's, I guess. Let's get over to the desk and let's get painting. All right, so first off, let's start with the paints we're going to use. Now I'm going to use this selection of white paints. They're uh a little bit on the colder side cuz I want a more cold white hair. This is the kind of recipe I would use for something like a Sisters of Battle or anything like that. And in fact, most of these techniques, even though I'm doing it on a larger scale, would be the exact same thing I would do going all the way down to 32 mm miniatures. So we've got the the hair and the first thing I did was, you know, sort of off camera, I just painted the whole thing in my kind of darkest color uh which is the sort of like very dark gray and I even mixed a little bit of purple in for the shadow side. And what I then do is just kind of put a second base coat of everything down. This is really important. When we're painting very bright hair, you need to start from a fully opaque base [music] coat. And using a sort of mid-dark gray is a great place to start. Now, why purple? Why the purple in the shadows? Well, we want to make the shadows more visibly interesting. The rest of this piece has a lot of purples and reds in it. And when those purples and reds, which would naturally bounce up off of the figure, mix with the sort of normal blue of of shadows, we would get something that's a little more purple-toned. But as I've always said, the most the best thing you can do when you're working in grays, whites, and blacks is mix in some kind of color, some hue, something on the color wheel to make it more uh compelling. It also just works as a really nice natural shadow. So, everything's coming together here. Okay. Once I've got that solid fully opaque base coat down, it's time to start setting our color zones. So, what I'm going to do is work my way up the figure slowly. So, you're going to watch this happen over several minutes, me talking as I explain what I'm doing. But basically, what I'm going to do is start half-stepping up. So, I start from the dark gray, mix it with my uh next step up, which is my dark ivory. Then I go to the pure dark ivory, and so on, and so on, and so on. The important part to to uh understand here is that when I am painting this, I'm painting a slightly smaller version of the area than I eventually want this color to actually reach. And I am painting everything, even the recesses. I am just filling in effectively the zones where this is the lowest tone [music] present. Okay? And the reason that I am working like this is because one of the most common mistakes I see people make with very bright hair like white is they leave the shadows very, very dark. But that's not how hair works. If we're in the bright reflective halo area of the hair, then our shadow is at best, at darkest, a midtone. Those very, very dark low colors need to be reserved for only the deepest shadows. So, [music] by hitting the zone and including everything, even the recesses here, and really you can see how I'm just filling in these blocks, these bands of color, what we do is we establish the low tone, the base tone for that area, which we're then going to break up later and make it look more like normal hair. But for now, what's important is that I climb those half steps up and just use it we can just use traditional layering to build that up. You could also, if you knew exactly where you wanted your highlights placed, just jump directly to them, but I like building it up and kind of discovering the sculpt organically. The next thing to talk about is why I'm placing the highlights, why [music] I'm placing them. So, in general, the rule for highlights is the top and the sticky-outy bits. But hair is a little bit different. Hair is satin, it's glossy. And that means it's going to have a halo around it, uh because it will be more of a specular highlight. That is to say, assuming the light is coming from [music] something above, which it usually is when we paint it. The light is usually above, assuming like the sun or, you know, something like that. So, as a result, what I'm doing is taking, in this case she has a bright spotlight coming from her right side. So, that area of the hair needs to be the most shiny, the most intense. But you'll notice on the other side of the hair, where those braids are worked in, the shadow side, where it's sort of, the braids are built up, I work a little bit of that light in there. Right? So, [music] carry it around. I do still heed the sticky-outy bits, and that's still true. The universal rule of highlighting sticky-outy bits, boy, it's a it's it's You You can never go wrong with highlighting your sticky-outy bits. So, where the hair flares out, curls out, has upward-facing planes, right? Anywhere where because of the shape of the the the hair, the little clump, it creates a plane that's pointed upward towards the light, that's going to be brighter. So, you'll see how I pass in between, >> [music] >> you know, like a low mid, a low tone, a shadow tone up into brighter, brighter, brighter, and then eventually the halo, and then I come back down again on the opposite side. And having those waves of light is very much what we would expect, especially for hair with some curl to it or some motion or something like that. If it's like a more traditional bowl cut like a sister, then you have pretty much like the halo around the center, and that's probably it because there are no sticky-outy bits. I mean, unless they're in movement or something. So, once I've got all of those different color zones laid down, I build up to basically, uh what is like my not brightest white, but my highest normal paint white. Okay? And that lets me get all of these zones in place. That's just the starting work. Now, again, if you're working a smaller model, this is a lot faster. You see how I've been running my way through all of these different, um all these different bands of light over this whole video. And [music] you might look at that and go, "Okay, Vince, well, that doesn't look very convincing yet. That's not really looking like hair. It just looks like you have weird light bands across her head. >> [music] >> Like, how do we make it look like hair?" Now comes the magic. So, the next step we're going to do is we're going to, and again, you're just going to see me like work this in the background as I explain the technique, is we're going to run up from uh the lowest tone again. Not the darkest shadow, but from that that basically that low gray all the way up to my highest highlight and beyond with little thin lines. And now comes the secret. The reason that I only that I said you have to make the bands smaller than where you eventually want that light is because you're going to extend the bands randomly on both sides with long thin lines. You're also going to go over the top of the existing ones just to build it in and increase the opacity. [music] Putting down another layer of the same color will often times just intensify the brightness of it. When you're doing these sharp thin lines, the important part is to have a brush with a nice sharp tip. Uh so you can use like a size zero or a size one or anything like that. Do not get out your do your double zero or something super small. You don't need to go that small. But what you want is something that's got a nice sharp tip and you want some well-flowing paint. Something like some flow improver or a surfactant can help here. [music] Uh just go to your art store or look in the links below. You can find uh links for all that kind of stuff. And those affiliate links really do help support the channel. So thank you in advance. But you thin it down and you're just tracing lots of these little thin lines. And basically what I'm doing is overlapping all of my previous work. Drawing it down so the highlights come down into the lower level. So I start with the deepest gray tone and I bring that into the area that I previously had as the shadow. Then as I work my way up, I bring it down into the the low gray. And then as I work my way to the dark ivory, that comes down into the 50/50 step. And so on and so forth. Every time I'm extending those sharp thin lines down into the color that's directly lower than that on the value. And in fact, you'll notice that sometimes I extend even a a farther. Hair has follicles and those follicles catch random light. It's not a perfect like smooth metallic surface. It's satin, it's shiny, sometimes hair is even glossy if it's really conditioned and stuff like that. But it's made up of lots of little strands. And so, well, theoretically, I mean, I don't know myself when I look in the mirror, but I can look at other people and get that. And so, you've got to sort of scatter the light a little bit. And that's what we're doing here. You do not want these sharp thin lines to be regular. You're not trying to draw even lines down. So, when you're taking the color into the lower value, every line should not be stopping at the same place. They need to You need to sort of like [music] actively stop your brain from being symmetrical and instead, you know, force the randomness. Where you have a line coming down and a line coming down and then you, you know, you This one's a little longer than this one, this one's a little shorter, long, short, medium, medium long, and so on and so forth. Every line just a slightly different length. And you repeat this, overlapping some of what you do, going longer with a highlight color than you did with the one before it, and you mix them in. By overlapping those lines, those sharp thin lines, you create the illusion that there's a lot of different follicles going on. And in fact, as I climb up here, it starts to look more and more and more like hair. And the key is this is a very lengthy process. I'm not going to lie. Doing all of these sharp thin lines, it takes a decent amount of time. But, I will say there's also a zen to it. Uh you're just getting into the paint, tracing a bunch of sharp thin lines, going back to the paint, sharp thin lines, repeat, repeat, repeat. There's nothing hard about it. It's time-consuming, but it's actually quite uh cathartic, I think, when you when you do it for a long time, at least I find it so. Maybe you will as well. So, I work my way all the way up to my brightest white and again extend those lines a great deal. You can also in this stage sort of fix, if you're not happy with your bands, if you didn't get the highlights exactly right, you can use this step to trace them out farther, shrink them, bring a low tone up and as the thin lines and so on. You will have the opportunity here to correct and perfect your previous work. So, you don't need to worry when you're doing the bands of light about getting them perfect. You just need to get them in place so that you can really shape it later with the lines which are going to ultimately tell the story of the hair. By the time you're done, you won't really see the dividing lines of the bands anymore. The hundreds, maybe even thousands of sharp thin lines will cover over that and make it so that it looks like it's just a very natural progression. You're effectively layering again, but this time instead of doing it with one brush stroke, you're doing it with 20 or 30 sharp thin lines instead. Once I get up to the highest highlight, now is when we bring in our secret weapon, the thing you saw me introduce earlier with the paints, and that is our heavy body acrylic white. Now, this stuff is super thin, or sorry, this stuff is super thick. I wish. It's super thick right out of the out of the tube. You certainly can't just grab this on a sharp brush and expect it to start making sharp thin lines. This is where something like using water to thin it down and then some flow improver to get it going is going to be really important. Now, what I'm doing is in all of the highlight areas and beyond, I start taking some of those lines. And I actually do about four passes of this. This is really important and I think something that's often slept on. When you're dealing with the white, it is a very [music] uh uh like bright color, but the opacity of a single thin pass of that white line is not going to be very high. It will tend to fade and get weaker, especially once it's dry. When it's wet, you see the reflection, the glossiness of the water reflecting, and it looks nice and clean. But once you uh let it dry, it gets a lot weaker, a lot dimmer. By repeating those thin lines multiple times and stretching them out each time to varying degrees, you'll see how as I'm going over this, I'm stretching it out, taking the lines lots of different lengths, lots of variants, covering up some of my previous work and beyond, and sometimes just working right in the highlight area alone, I'm increasing the opacity each time. And each one of those little strands tells a different story. Sometimes where they get two or three hits, [music] they're very bright and intense. Sometimes where they get uh just, you know, one, it looks both basically just like a very small bit of light is caught on a follicle of hair. So, I work that all the way up until I get to that full opacity that I want and have the lines really nice and spread out. Now we're starting to really get there where it looks like that overlapping hair. However, as always, the end of every road is glazing. And since the rest of this figure is in some warm light, but the hair is very cold, we still need to sneak a little bit of warmth in here. So, I'm going to use this very warm bone color, thin it way down into a glaze, and begin glazing just outside of the highlight area. From basically the mid highlight into the shadow, I'm going to glaze that tone in. Now, I actually do about three passes of this glaze overall. And the reason for that is because I am working really, really thin. This is like four drops of water to one drop of paint. So, this is dirty paint water, okay? And by glazing it, you'll see how we create that illusion of a little bit of like yellow, warm light right outside of the bright specular cold highlight where the light is directly striking. [music] It really does radically change the overall perception of the hair with just a simple application of a glaze. It also uh smooths down some of the transitions and edge lines we might have where some of the little lines came to an end. It will just hide and obscure a little bit of that. I then go back and forth. I grab a little more of the white paint and I do some more sharp thin lines scattering it over the top to again have some of those follicles just catching light. And then I go back and do another glaze and then another set of sharp thin lines. So, it's back and forth about three times. Okay? And once that's done, we're all done. There you go. That's white hair. Here's how she came out. All in all, I think this is great-looking white hair for if you want something in the more cold tone as I said something like a more traditional Sisters of Battle. If you want something warmer, you can follow the same progression. Just use more buff aligned ivory bone colors, that kind of thing. But, you can get the same effect. I love painting hair. It's a lot of fun to kind of and as I said very cathartic to just create all these little thin follicles and the illusion that it's much richer and that there's much more going on even than maybe what the sculpt has there portrayed in the resin or plastic. So, I hope this helped you out. If it did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating videos. We've got new videos here every Saturday. If you're watching on mobile and like the first 48 hours, you can hit a little hype thing. Do that, too. I don't know. Click everything. Uh if you want to support the channel and help us keep making videos, there's all sorts of affiliate links down there to pick up the hobby supplies you saw here. Costs you nothing extra. In fact, it usually saves you money and it is really helpful for the channel. There's also, of course, uh our Patreon focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey. We'd love to have you as part of the community. Elsewhere in the Vincey Cinematic Universe, I've got Fireball the Gazebo, my RPG podcast with Ninjon, and of course I've got Snarlcast, my indie wargaming podcast with Uncle Adam. Speaking of that, Uncle Adam and I recently released our newest game, Repent, Ye Foolish Gods. So, if you're looking for your new fun skirmish obsession focused on a dark world where you where you pilot a band of brutal warriors fighting against the dark gods until eventually you kill the gods themselves, check it out. Everything's linked down below. Thank you so much for watching this one. I really appreciate it. And as always, we'll see you next time. >> [music]