How to Paint Warp Stone - HC 570

Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video. And today it's time to talk about glowing green rocks. Let's get into it. >> The the strict technommancer that is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it. Vincy V. So, given how long I've been doing this channel, it's truly amazing to me that I've never really deep dived on warpstone, something I paint quite a lot of, having painted multiple Scaven armies over the years, and just countless thousands of these little glowing green rocks. So, today we're going to use uh a fun little figure and we're going to talk about how to do warp stone and make it look cool. So, let's head over the desk and let's get painting. All right. So, with Warp Stone, we're going to use this selection of colors right here. This is the set of paints. Now, I'm going to use the deep green basically as my base tone, but that's just to get everything in line. The black and the white blue end up being my initial value control, my highlights and shadows. Uh, and then really where we're going to make the magic happen is with the fluorescent green and the fluorescent yellow, which we'll use in later steps to wrap it all up. Okay. Now, what we're going to use today for a figure is Kritok. It's this little guy. He's a cool rat guy, and I wanted to paint him for a little while, and I thought this was a good excuse to do so. He has a big special magical sword in the story. It's like some kind, it's basically a demon trapped in like a warp stone thing. So, that's what we're going to do. We're going to put a warpstone sword, and it has a demon in it. So, that's fun. And, uh, Kredo is cool, and the sword is a great surface to show all the different things we want to do with warpstone. So, great. All right, let's start painting. We begin. Uh, I just have Zenithl highlighted in him as you saw. That's just because, you know, that's going to be useful for the boat, not only this, but for the rest of the paint job. In general, you don't want to try to work warp stone up from black. You're using greens, which is a lot of transparent colors. I laid down some green over the entire sword. Just want to get and establish a nice smooth base coat. It doesn't really matter that I blew away the zenithl. We're not actually going to use it because it works in the warp stone is going to work in reverse. So, we want a full opacity base coat. Um, having a lighter color underneath just makes achieving full and intense opacity with the green more easy. Nothing too complicated about that. Paint the sword. Turn the green sword green. Okay. Once that's in place, we're going to start setting shadows. And warpstone is effectively a gem, which means that it's going to have a lot of gemlike properties. namely the shadows will be towards the top because it is slightly translucent and the light filters through. So I take some of that intense black, mix it with my green and a couple of different intensities, thin it way down and then begin applying my shadows. I'm not too worried about layer lines here um because we're going to come back in and fix that later. But what I effectively do is over a couple different steps of black and black green and black with more green, I just place in my shadows. The key being they need to be towards the top of each little volume change. Now, you might ask yourself, how do you decide where the shadows go? And the answer is on the tip of the sword there. It's going to be towards the top because that's where the light would filter through, hit it, and it would become darkest. So, easy enough. In addition, we're going to uh make sure that we have uh all the different darks opposed by lights. That's really the answer. What looks cool. Um so I want to alternate a lot with light, dark, light, dark. When you're working with multiaceted faces like this, as warpstone often is, you want a lot of darkness opposing the light. So basically, every dark spot has a light spot directly next to it. That's what keeps it visually compelling. and will ultimately make it feel like a gem. I then come back in with just some normal of the my original green and just smooth out a little bit of the layers. I don't need it to be perfect at this point, but I do several thin glazes of it just to make sure that we get a nice uh uh you know smoothish transition from the shadows into the midtone as they are. One thing to say about this is of course I'm doing more more repetiti repetition of these steps than what you see on [music] camera. So in general to get this stuff kind of smooth and like with a gem you do want it to be quite smooth. Um I'm generally doing two three four passes of all of this. Uh I'm only showing you one or two on camera. Okay with that good. Now it's time to place some highlights. Where do those go? Well, they go to the opposite place of where the shadows were. Because again, warpstone is a translucent gem, the light is going to gather towards the bottom of things. [music] Wherever the light would naturally filter out of this very strange shape. Uh, as a side note, if you're painting just a normal gem like warpstone, I recently did a video on painting gems, and that will teach you exactly how to do that. Consider this the second part of that series. the same rules would apply. Just turn everything green. This is for more complicated surfaces. Okay. So, I then start placing all of my lights. And basically, again, I'm working fairly thin here, doing multiple applications to build up the transition into the lighter color. Uh I basically do a couple again of different steps. So, like uh a little bit of a little bit of white, blue, and green, more white, blue, and green, and so on and so forth. until I eventually get to a nice place where it's rather bright. The other thing that I do at this point is also do all of my edge highlights. Now, these aren't going to be my final edge highlights, but they're an important thing to lay down now because they really do tell you where you need to adjust your shadows, your light, clean things up, find your edges, stuff like that. It's important to do it early on, even though you know you're going to need to repeat it later. I end up doing my edge highlights on most models quite a few times because it helps me really read and set the model and make sure everything's nice and [music] tight for use. For though for my edge highlights, I just use a little more white blue into the green. Okay, so once all of that's done, we now have a good progression. I go through again with the green glaze. Smooth it out just a little bit. Repeating the same step as earlier to smooth the highlight down into the midtone, but more or less just getting a nice smooth transition of all these out. Again, it doesn't need to be perfect at this step. We're going to do more work over the top. But you want it smoothish, like looking relatively good to where you only have minor spots you're going to need to correct. Here's how he's looking at this point with just the progression of the three tones. That is to say, the deep green, the white, blue, and the black. And honestly, this has an already kind of a warpy stone feeling. You might look at this and go, "Well, Vince, that looks kind of okay. Why are we doing more steps?" And the answer is, one, because I'm a pedantic jerk who can't ever stop myself. But two, and most importantly, because Warpstone also needs that more radioactive feel and radiation or as we perceive it in our minds thanks to years of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cartoons and so on, just has a very different yellowish green color to it. So, let's do that. I take some of my fluorescent green, mix in just a little bit of the fluorescent yellow, not a ton, and then I thin it down. Fluorescent colors are already incredibly transparent/transucent. [music] a lot comes through, but we're going to push that even farther. This is the area where we want to build up nice and slowly through glazes. We're climbing the painting pyramid. And remember, as we do so, we work thinner and more targeted. And so, at this stage, what I'm going to go ahead and do is thin that down. And then I begin running it over the surface. I'm always pushing towards the shadows where possible. That way, I deposit the larger amount of paint in the darker areas where it will have less effect, but it'll effectively even out what it's doing. Now, I don't touch the very brightest, hottest spots completely. The very teeny tiny little small volume of the highest highlight, I will leave in that near white. Everything else, I just apply these very thin layers. And I do several passes of the glazes here of the yellow green. But you can see how much this enriches that entire process, right? It's crazy what it does because it just gives you such an intense uh more feeling of like radioactive dangerous stuff like that just by getting this rich saturated yellow green in there. Now, that's going to take several steps to do, but I repeat this glaze multiple times just to make sure I get a nice intense color. What I then do is a series of cleanup steps. So, my end here is really just tightening everything up. That means getting anything that I messed up from my previous edge highlight in place. That means recovering my edge highlights. Um, I thin down some of the previous white green mixture, mix it with a little bit of my fluorescent yellow to reinstantiate some of my highlights. [music] Darken down again some of my shadows and clean those up. Make sure we've reached sort of full opacity on the shadows and everything is a nice smooth transition. Effectively, what you're watching right now is me doing all of these different steps where I'm just highly refining the blade, right? Working back and forth, putting on more of the fluoresence, then more of the black green and more of the highlight, then I reedge highlight, and so on and so forth. This is nothing more than the fiddly work of making something look finished and polished and good. And this is a really cool character in my army, so I do want to spend a little more time on him. and another 20 or 30 minutes of just doing some glazes and polishing things on a character that's pretty cool is worth it. Okay, so with that in place, we're almost done. The thing is though, this is meant to be a translucent gem. Now, with a shape like this, it's hard to do our normal light catch like you saw in the gem video, but we can do something. So, we're going to do two different steps. First, we're going to put some little tiny cuts into the uh into the blade itself. These are quick and simple. We just basically take a white, blue, and then a little bit of that green and yellow. And we just little lines, little tiny scratches. These need to be razor thin. Sharpest brush, flowing paint. Right? And you see how I just cut in a few tiny [music] little thin scratchy lines and we're ready to go. Okay, that's number one. Number two is we're going to put a little tiny dot. Our finishing move is our little tiny specular dot highlight right on that top cut where there's a cut into the sword in the shadow area where we want to show that a little bit of ding, the light reflection is happening from the gem. We place that little dot. We can draw it out a little tiny bit like a little star. Like a little star of Bethlehem or something. And we're done. That's it. Here's how he looks, how he all came out. I think pretty cool. That's the warp stone effect. Uh painting warpstone is really fun. It looks cool green when it runs from black all the way up to these bright colors is really compelling, especially with a saturation of yellow green. So, I hope this helps you paint your warp stone and get your rats ready to go and on the table. Uh, if you liked this, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating. We've got new videos here every Saturday. If you've got a question about anything I did in the video or anything I used, hey, drop that down in the comments below. I always answer every question. If you want to pick up any of the supplies you saw in this video or any Hobby Supplies in general, there are affiliate links down below that don't say they don't cost you anything extra. In fact, they save you money. Uh, and they really do help the channel. There's also the other podcasts in the Vincy Cinematic Universe. There's Fireball the Gazebo, which I do with Ninjan uh all around our favorite role playing games. [music] And there's uh Snorlcast, the indie uh wargaming podcast I do with Uncle Adam. Finally, there's 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. As always though, I want to thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time. [music] >> [music]