How to Paint Pale Skin - HC 571

Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video. And this week we return to one of my favorite subjects, painting skin. Let's get into it. >> The strict technommancer that is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V sty. >> So this week we are again going to do another video all about painting credible display rich skin tones. And today we're going to tackle very pale skin, very cold environments. So, without any further ado, let's get over the desk and let's get painting. All right, I have this awesome figure from Nerken. Uh, just a great sculptor. They have a Patreon. I'll link it down below. You can check them out. This isn't a sponsored video or anything, but they did give me a couple of the prints. So, there you go. Uh, but I that was at my request because I just think their figs are awesome and wanted to paint a few of them. So, this particular figure was a really nice opportunity as I looked at her to do some very cold skin. And so we're going to set her in an icy environment, things like that. We're going to have a lot of blue infusion. So, we're going to go from there. Okay. So, let's begin. These are the paints I'm going to use. Uh the, as you can see here, when we're doing pale skin, we want to focus more on pinks and very pale colors. We do not want to have a lot of the brown tones in the skin. That's going to bring in a darker tan warmth we don't want. So, we're sticking to pinks and very pale highlights. We bring in blue tones like a white blue in the highlight. There's several you could use here. You could use pastel blue or my white blue from the monument range. Whatever. All of it works. And we're still going to have some coldish shadows, but we're going to mix the dark color in them to make it a warm blue. You'll see. All right. So, once I've got all my paints laid out, I do make half steps in between many of these. So, we're going to, you know, turn these uh five steps into about 10. And we're going to start going. Uh, so I start laying down the paint. Now, we're going to talk about general strategy here. First, as you see me painting, so the first thing I want to say is we all need to remember the painting pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, we use thick paints and we work on broad areas, large areas. We're not paying attention to minor detail. We're working on big stuff, big volumes. As we proceed forward through the paint job, we will work thinner and we will focus more on the details, bringing each of those little volumes and micro volumes to life. The other thing I want to say here, as you can see from what I'm doing as I'm painting on your screen, is I am placing the light where I want it to be. I'm only painting that area. I didn't start by like painting all of her skin pink, right? I had her primed in that light blue to red. And that's because I wanted cold highlights and warm shadows. That's our general rule. If you've got warm highlights, you have cold shadows. If you have warm or uh cold highlights, you have warm whatever you get it. Opposing temperatures. Now, I'm working over top of that, but and and most of that's going to be gone, but it'll still provide a slight influence to the paints as [music] we go. And I do not place the paint the any particular mix anywhere but where I ultimately roughly think that layer is going to go. These layers are thick. Uh and you know just it's a layer paint. There's a little bit of water in there, but I'm not thinning paints down extremely. I want to build them up. And in fact, I go over most of these layers two three times [music] just to get really to nice full opacity, tonal purity of the paint. I start with the highlights first. And the reason for that is because it's generally easiest, at least in my brain, I don't know if it'll be the same in yours, to figure out what is my spotlight area. Where is the highlight going to be? What are my chief areas? And there I can just kind of follow a little bit of what I did with the airbrush and priming it. And I can go from there. I can work over top of that map and it makes it easier. So, I start with those highlights and then work my way down into the shadows. And there will come a moment here where it's it's going to look really weird and clownish when I'm in like the high highlights, but as you can see as I go, it's suddenly going to kind of snap into place. The other thing I will say at this stage when you're placing all these layers, as you watch me working, working from the bright, very pale highlights, those blue infused, to be clear, I never go to the pure pastel blue, nor am I ever going to go to like pure the darkness, the lowest tone. Those are for mixes, not for pure colors. And as you see me sort of working down, I you you'll notice it's not perfect. Like you can see layer lines. [music] That's okay. What you're trying to do here is get your values in [music] place. You're not concerned at this moment about perfect blending. That's for later. What's the most important thing when you're at this stage is getting a a nice solid base coat of that paint down and making sure that we have uh the light the values in the correct place. That's ultimately what matters because [music] the story of skin tone is one of very minor variations. We can play with a lot of different colors and tones, but we have to have the right values in place for what we would expect because we all are very used to staring at other human beings in various and sunundry lighting situations. So, our brains bring a lot of subconscious bias to it. So, if some of the light doesn't look right, if it's in the wrong place, it's going to be very evident. I layer multiple times. I work rough. Now, one of the things that helps when you start broad and thick is that you don't get caught in the muscle island trap. You'll notice I'm not trying to make sure that every little ab has like huge runs of value on it or is completely circled by color. The recesses often in the top left, like uh her right, I should say, left as you're viewing it, of the abs have almost no color variation at all because they're so minimal. Now, on the far side, the shadow side, away from the light, we're going to eventually bake in some very soft transitions. We're going to want some light there. She does have a six-pack. We want to respect that. Respect the work. Okay. But ultimately, we're not tracing these around. We're not trying to run our entire value spectrum on every single volume. Her shoulder does not run from my brightest highlight to my darkest shadow. Her face, her chest, right? You'll see that there are areas, there are individual volumes of this skin as I paint it that only exist between like if one is my brightest and 10 is my darkest, they're like between one and three because that's what's appropriate for the plane and the direction it's facing visa v the light. But if you look at the figure as a whole, as I travel down the figure and away from the light, so as I move from her top right to her bottom left, I then proceed to get darker and darker as we go. Okay, we finish the layering. There we go. That was a lot of layering, right? We we had to work all the way around the figure, and that's fine. That then brings us to our next step. Now is when we're going to start worrying about getting things a little smooth. So now we go to the airbrush. Now I'm going to use the airbrush for this, but really what we're going to glazes. You could glaze with your brush. It's completely doable. I've done it 100 times on similar figures, especially if they're too small to get the airbrush in there. But in this case, she's big enough scale that I can use the airbrush. And I'm going to use the airbrush to glaze because it's easier and faster and just I find it more effective in my style. You may do whichever you like. But the point here is we're now going to take those mixes, those same tones we had that we just did the base layers in, and we're going to reinforce those colors and smooth the transitions with the airbrush. Here I am working with my harder and steambeck. This is a 02 needle, so it's very small. I'm working at basically 18 PSI. And I have a very, very, very, very careful trigger finger. So, you'll see how I just very lightly get the [music] paint out. Tiny little spritz and sprays. Very minimal changes here, right? We glaze, we smooth, we work very thin. All of the mixes in my airbrush here are three drops of thinner to one drop of paint at minimum. That's the floor. Okay. Sometimes as we go, I get thinner because I want less of an effect. So, we are working very thin and I'm going to work these glazes multiple times. You'll see how as I work my way around the figure, I, you know, make sure that I have each of those uh I have each of those uh uh different glazes placed multiple times, right? So, I don't sit there and like bang on one for a while because that's how you get spider webbing. That's how you get all sorts of bad things. I give a couple light sprits and I move on. Next area, next area, next area. Circle the figure. By the time I'm done, I can get back to where I started. It's dry. Boom. Second glaze. Circle again. Boom. Third glaze. Airbrush glazing is so fast that it's generally a much easier road to do lots of passes. Okay. Now, once that's done, what I ended up doing off camera was varnishing her. Standard mix of my 3:1 ultra matte to satin varnish. And the reason for that is because we're now every and whenever we go to the airbrush those very thin glazes of paints when I do future steps I could reactivate things. So to both create a sort of safe point where if I make a small mistake I can get my brush in there and wipe away very quickly but also just to make sure I don't disturb any of those lower levels. We're going to varnish here. And in fact on many display projects I'll end up varnishing 5 10 15 times before I get to the final uh [music] product. Okay. All right, great. So, with that locked in, now it's time to go to some brush work. So, we're back to the brush. This time though, we're working thinner. We're working smaller. The pyramid continues to build. So, what I'm going to do here is now again work with the same paints, same tones. I might make some more half mixes or things like that, but I'm going to go in and start working those smaller volumes. So, this means paying attention to some detail on the face where like her nose might not be exactly correct as to how I want the light or the upper part of her eyelid or the very top of her cheekbone, right? Or her fingers or her the tip tops of her abs or whatever, right? The point is is that when we were doing the initial layers and when we were doing the airbrush glazes, we were working rather large, rather wide. And so now we need to get in and pay attention to those much smaller volumes. The sculptor here, you know, Nerken has done a great job of providing us with a lot of detail. If you look at things like her knee, it has a very realistic knee structure to it. It's not just round. It has the full what is that? Patella. Is that what that thing is called? I think so. Um, you know, there where you can see it under the skin and the shape to it and those small details. We got to pull all that out. make sure that we've got all those little micro volumes with just very small deviations. That's one of the things that's critical with skin, especially at like a high level. When you're working at display quality skin, you don't need to have huge runs of value change to have a very big impact in how it's perceived. Even very small changes in value can ultimately have a big effect on noticing all those little details [music] and having you uh having those things read as credible to the viewer. Okay. So, I work thinner, I work smaller. The other thing that I do here is I go ahead and dark line around all of the connection points between the cloth and her skin. Um, so to do that, I actually just make a very dark mix of my darkest skin tone plus my my the darkness. So basically a deeper shadow than I put anywhere on her miniature. So I just mix in a little more of the darkness. And what I'm going to do here is just trace with some very thin flowing paint. It's very watery. Just and a sharp brush zoop zones. And the reason for that is because that helps me more clearly see the edge of the cloth. Those occlusion shadows are just really important for making your your figure look clean in the long run. But it also ma lets me make sure do I have all the paint up to all the edges? Do I have all the nice dark super dark recess shadows uh painted correctly? All the things like that. Think of these like the very darkest occlusion shadows that separate everything. Makes your paint job look really nice, clean, and professional while also making it easier to read as you go forward with additional work. Okay, that's a simple one. Now we're back to the airbrush. Here's the paints I'm going to use. And this is a couple speed paints. What we're going to do now is filter the skin. And for this, I love me some speed paints. Okay, speed paints are glorious. You've seen me use them before on this channel for highle skin. I love being able to work with these things and just filter the colors very lightly over the skin to create these small changes in color. Now, one of the ironic parts of working with very thin filters on camera is that you're going to see me spraying the airbrush, and it's not really going to look like much changes. So, I'm sorry. I know it just looks like I'm spraying nothing. I This is the world we live in. I What do you want me to do? Right? I'm showing you the technique. This is this is what it is. And so, I work very carefully starting again from the brightest one, so the sort of pale yellowish pink, hitting around the highlights. I'm not coating everything with these. I'm working extremely careful and once again even with these speed paints extremely [music] thin 3 one is the floor thinner to speed paint again now because the speed paint is so much thinner 3 one is basically [music] two three times as thin as it was when I used the paints and I come in and I work like around the edge of my highlights with the yellow pink. We want just a little bit of warmth. If she's standing in the sun, even in a cold environment, there will still be some minor influence of the yellow. And this pale yellow pink gives me a little touch of both. A slight kiss of yellow while also bringing in just a little bit of pink, which is exactly the where I [music] want to be. I then move down to the next shade, which is my sort of uh pale pink purple. And I use that in the shadow areas to just add more richness and color down there. That is getting nowhere near my midtone or highlights. That is transitioning in the low midtone to shadows only. So focusing these filters on the areas you want them is really really important. Right? You're not applying them everywhere. The one filter is meant to bridge the highlight to the mid midtone. The second filter is meant to bridge the midtone to the shadow. Now, this weird turquoise color I pulled out, um, she's going to be standing next to some snow. Like the base you see her on when she's being painted here is not her actual final base. Um, she's going to be on a different [music] sort of display base in the end. Um, but I wanted there's going to be blue light coming off the snow. Kind of a cold reflection up is where she's going to be in a very blue environment. So, I'm taking a little of that turquoise and just like getting it up there in the shadows effectively as a bounce light. uh to just add a little more visual interest of that cold environment reflecting back up and keeping some very icy blue light even in these slightly warmer overall shadows. So though we've kept the shadows as a whole fairly warm, we want the light that's coming off of that snow that'll eventually be there, you have to just use your imaginations to be a little cold. Just add some more visual interest and life in the shadows. [music] Okay. All right. Now that that's done, we go to sort of the last step on our journey here for the skin, which is, you guessed it, back to the brush work. [music] And now we are working super thin. So this is the thinnest possible glazes and filters, but you're doing it with the brush. And so here, once again, I hone in on those very small details. But I also if I see opportunities where I need to shift the color some. So like on her shoulder I saw I looking at it. It's like that we bit too much red, not enough pale tone for something that exposed in the light. So we can slightly just glaze and very naturally softly shift that up. Same with like the tops of her cheekbones, right? Same with the very tops of her her left her left abs. Just very gentle moves applying these very small thin glazes and then feathering them out. Again, I'm not going to get this in one. You can watch me apply these and you see that I do it many multiple times. Okay, once that's done, you're set, right? She's good to go. That's your skin. You're all set. Now, it's a long process. I'm not going to lie, but it's a very fun process. I love painting skin. I find it so unbelievably rewarding to uh to just like create these fun runs of color to capture the light in skin because you can you can play with so many colors and values and just variants. It's it's a really unique experience. So there you go. I hope [music] you liked this. If you did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We've got new videos here every Saturday. If you want to support the channel, there's lots of ways you can do so. Maybe you want to pick up some of the supplies you saw in this video or any of your hobby supplies. There's links down below. They often save you money and they really do help the channel, so using those is deeply [music] appreciated. There's also, of course, our Patreon focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey. Come join us. We'd love to have you as part of the community. If you want to support the channel in other ways, I make skirmish games with Uncle Adam. You can check out our newest game, Repent, Ye Foolish Gods, down below, as well as all the other games we make. And of course, elsewhere in the Vincy cinematic universe, there is my RPG podcast with Ninjan, Fireball the Gazebo, and my indie wargaming podcast with Uncle Adam, Snarcast. Uh, so check all those out to get more Vince in your ears if that's a thing you want to do, I guess. Uh, but hey, I want to thank you so much for watching this one. I really appreciate it. You may see a little more of this girl in the future. In fact, if you made it to this point, tell me if you want to see more of this figure and what you'd like me to paint. Maybe we'll do that. Uh, so drop that down below. But as always, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you [music] next time. >> [music]