4 Techniques that Improved My Miniature Painting - Level Up Your Airbrushing With @Miniac

it's time to step up your airbrushing game [Music] this video is sponsored by audible hi friends it's squid Mar time I'm a male I feel like there is a lot of misconception out there about how to use an airbrush effectively and how to make things look good with an airbrush to me the airbrush is one of the most powerful tools and together with a really good brush and a wet palette I feel like the airbrush is the thing that leveled up my miniature painting faster than anything else and also I feel like there was this notion a few years back not so much anymore but people used to say that you can see directly when something is painted with an airbrush and I don't like the style of things that are painted with an airbrush and to some extent I can understand that because if you use your airbrush in certain ways you will clearly have these spraying marks from an airbrush and you can really tell that something has been highlighted with an airbrush and today we want to deviate from that and show you the techniques that I use every day in my painting to make my miniatures to look better with an airbrush and really fast as well and when using these techniques you won't have the same effect of it looking airbrushed [Music] but really I guess there's no wrong ways of creating art so whatever makes you happy with painting do that technique but today I'm going to show you what I've learned through the two years now that I've been using an airbrush and how you can apply it to your miniatures [Music] and that leads us to today's three topics a meal aren't you forgetting one okay so the three things that we're talking about today is airbrush blending post shading and airbrush glassing dude how could you forget but my favorite airbrushing topic pre shading and before we get started if this is the first time you watch a video about airbrushing I recommend you to go check out this video that I released a few months back it's about how to get started with an airbrush and how to clean your airbrush and all of that things I won't cover any of it today today is more about the next techniques you take to develop your airbrushing skills so go watch that one first and then you come back to this one a lot of people now might be surprised but the first couple of layers were putting down is being done by a brush not by airbrush and the reason for that is when we use the brush we get better coverage than with the airbrush if we do it the first base coats with just a brush we will have to do a lot of layers to get the same pigment density the same saturation as if we do it by brush so I'm just using a old dry brush because it's a big miniature an old dry brush and just slapping thick coats on this miniature I'm sorry Duncan - thick coats it's the best way to go deal with it and for this specific miniature this troll that's sculpted by a Leonardo I will do like a pig like skin on the belly because the troll kind of looks like a pig so I want to have like pale Caucasian ish type skin on the belly and then on the back muscles and the side we will have like a green orcish skin tone [Music] I had to do two thick layers on it to cover everything and it looks great now and what we're doing now is adding the first set of highlights and how are we adding these highlights well we're adding it with thick coats again I'm sorry Duncan you'll be surprised how well things are going to look in the end I'm not going to blend anything together what's most important in this step is the placement of the highlights and for the placement of highlights there's a video in the works about how to work with volumes and where to place highlights to emulate where the light would be hitting until then you have to either look at references and I will teach more about the light theory later and this painting style to me is just so forgiving it's so much fun because it's not about every blend has to be perfect I'm just working on the highlighting layers thick coats again layer upon layer you'll see then that it looks amazing when we start bringing out the airbrush and while I keep adding these nifty layers to the miniature let's talk about this week's sponsor audible you all know if audible at this point and a lot of you also know that I really don't have a lot of time to read these days with three kids and YouTube channel to run so how do I get more books into my system well obviously I listen to them while I paint I myself recently listened to the audio drama realm Slayer it's about God Trek the dwarf who is just smashing his way through the mortal realms it's an awesome Warhammer book and in cue I also have this book dark harvest by Josh Reynolds and yes it's a Warhammer book because yeah I'm a Warhammer nerd and really there are 277 results when searching for Warhammer that you really set you up for a long time with Warhammer stories on top of that on audible you can also find anything audio related such as podcast Muse bestsellers wellness programs if that's what you're into or maybe just more books about Warhammer because that's what I'm listening to and guys you can join audible now by going to audible.com slash squid mark or text squid mark to five hundred five hundred if you're in the US and by joining you get thirty three days one credit every month where you can select one audiobook and on top of that you also get two audiobooks originals from a monthly selection so with that out of the way let's bring in the airbrush airbrush blending brush blending is one of these techniques that I feel that I need to practice on a bit because this is just one of the things that adds so much speed and it makes painting so much more fun and still maintain that high quality even though it takes like half the time or even less to paint these large miniatures that I'm painting today for example so what is airbrush blending and how would I use it say we're painting a miniature with a large wavy cloak a large piece of armor or a large area of skin we've done a rough sketching going from one shadow to highlights without doing any blending between them so when you have your shadows and light values sketched out you can go in with a thinned out mid-tones between those two colors so with a pale skin for example on this one we're using pugna's glow and kadian flesh tone and blending it 50/50 in the airbrush for the greens I'm using battledress green from p3 and I'm thinning it down if you use just water in this video I'm using airbrush medium it's not like a mix between thinner and flow improver it's really a luxury tool but for me lately I just found that it's easier for me to clean up the airbrush afterwards I've been using water just perfectly fine but when you have this thing out in your airbrush what you do is you go in between these where the lines break of the highlight and the shadow and do small bursts of spraying on these areas and you will have a super smooth transition between the two just make sure to do these small bursts when you airbrush hair so you don't get any speckling or in a spider webbing on your miniatures you want to have these super smooth transitions with the super thin when you're doing it and I learned this technique from one of my favorite painters setting you calvo and he's just a master of doing this and it really makes my painting process more fun and I think it could be the same for you as well [Music] thought y'all could use some more American I've seen midsummer under how you Swedes act what I've squid Maureen's I'm Scott the miniature maniac and I'm here to chat with you today but subject up preciate as many of you know acrylic paint is considered to be translucent and what that means for us is that we don't reach full opacity or full coverage in one quick coat of paint we need multiple that's why you saw ml apply to thick coats sorry Duncan of paint earlier onto his miniature to reach that nice rich opaque color well this is often seen as a bad thing with acrylic paint but when it comes to airbrushing it's actually super useful one basic idea that represents pre-shading in a pretty basic way is zenithal highlighting you have a white to black gradient on your model that represents where light and shadows will fall from here you can apply a translucent color like a red of blue or a green and start to develop some basic shadows and highlights for free virtually there isn't much thinking going on here we don't have to stress about where to place our highlights and shadows but we can expand our horizons here instead of using white and black we can use other colors what about white in red as an undercoat for yellow or white in blue as an undercoat for green what about using a metallic instead of why over a black undercoat and then applying blue to it so many colors have interesting combinations when applied on top of each other in translucent layers under next airbrushing project I want to challenge one I use grid margins to do an interesting pre-shading whether it's a simple white to black or something a little bit more exotic all right I guess I can give you guys back to ml let me just put this back on okay thanks mimic for that I guess check out maniac he's a good youtuber and apparently doesn't know the line between his and mine stuff but it's ok I'll let it slide for this time [Music] post shading this is definitely my favorite way of using the airbrush and this is one of the steps that you add in your last steps of painting your miniature when you've done all your highlights all of your smooth blends but you want to add some extra volume to your miniature or shape your miniature in a different way or just shape it a little bit more with colors and shades [Music] so why is this so helpful well let us compare the two different styles of shading one of them is with brush when you shade something with a brush maybe say a muscle on a miniature you can shade that area on that specific muscle but if you're using post shading with your airbrush and you have this figure for example that holds its hands up like this and I can shave larger areas such as the whole side of this miniature and still keeping the original values of highlights that I've placed so instead of being a local shading this one is more general helping you shape the miniature using lights and shadows for this step you can use both inks and classic acrylic paints or even go brave and mix both of them one thing to know why I often use inks for this is that inks have a wonderful property with pigmentation being quite high and still being translucent compared to the classic acrylic paints which often have a full coverage when you're painting would say like a dark brown or a dark green this one will still let the previous values you painted in shine through and if you're painting like a dark green or dark blue normally it would have a very disaccharide in green but with this using the inks you can still have a lot of colors in your shadows another positive thing with inks why I always recommend people to buy a couple to practice with them is that they have a little bit more of a satin finish and in shadows I find this to be a really good strength it just makes things more vibrant and it's just my personal taste but try for yourself and you can see the wondrous world of ink so if we for example are going to shade a large area like this tour so for example I'm mixing a few drops of blue ink and green ink to create a nice dark to punch the shadows of the miniature I'm spraying this from slightly below the miniature it just gives a really nice transition because of it because of its translucency and it gives me a lot of control to shade any muscle part that I want on the back side for example or here on the sides where we want to have more a punch to give that grandeur shape of the miniature and give it more volume and when you start practicing this the first couple of times you might see that oh I kind of deleted some of the highlights that I did before no worries it happens to the best of us and that's also why I recommend to add the final highlights in a step after you've done the post shading so going in again with the regular brush just adding the tiny details that you want to have highlighted again this makes for a really good workflow [Music] let's talk about airbrush glazing this technique can be used in so many different ways and everyone has a different way of doing this but today I'm teaching you my technique that I use this is something that a lot of the Spanish painters do like Savio Calvo and Antonio Pena and once again we're using inks for this step well guys you know we talked about post shading earlier and how this can change the volume of larger areas this is pretty much exactly the same but we can color different areas and add tonal variation to it glazing with inks through the airbrush a great example of doing this is for example when we're doing this orc warrior or a barbarian and you sketched out the volumes already but you feel like there is some tonal variation some colors missing and you want to get some variety to the skin tones airbrushing in some magenta inks red inks on the knees elbows or the hands where the or like on this troll for example where we want to have like a more natural gradient where the skin is thinner on the orc like the elbows and the knuckles for example it will give more life to this miniature and make it more realistic than just being like a two-tone like this pale beige skin tone here and then the greens will have some nice reds and magentas on different areas of the miniature I like this technique a lot and I use it a lot for steel nonmetallic metal as well and rushing in some tonal variations like this piece for example from raging heroes that I did as a commission for a client I felt when I had painted the skin that I needed some more variation to it so I added a magenta ink and sprayed on the legs and like the arm and a little bit on the torso to get a little bit more of a pink to the purple also on the sword to make that pop even a bit more I added some turquoise and green inks and sprayed it on the sword just to make it more lifelike than the flat gray sword that I had painted originally and this step can be used in many creative ways you can take a look at this wonderful shield that Antonio Pena did I'm not sure used exactly this technique but it's very possible if you compare the first working progress image that it has to the final one from grey tones and just airbrushing inks on top would give it some really nice pop colors as I said Savio Calvo does this a lot as well on like Mesa miniatures elbows hands for example and for being like a one-minute process it just changes the whole tone of a miniature isn't that amazing [Music] and now it's just up to me to add those final highlights that I talked about and while I do that before I show my finished example I just want to thank you so much for sticking around with me watching this video leave likes comments feel free to ask questions check out mini AK as well if you're interested in the sponsor audible as I said go to audible.com slash squid Mar or Tex squid martouf 500 500 I'll add it down here so you can see and maybe you want to support this channel even more I have two main ways of doing that you can either go to my website squid marcom use my Amazon affiliate links that I have there or in my video description as well pick up any of the gear that I use I've listed it all on my website and even better way of supporting this channel is by joining my patron family there are 250 patreon supporters at this point which is still so freakin crazy and by pledging a few dollars you help this channel keep running and also you get to join me and these people on a discord chat where we talk every day about miniatures life and just having fun so guys here's my final version of the miniature I will probably go in a little bit more later as well to add some details and polish up things a little bit more but I painted this one quite fast actually it was less than a day's work and I just enjoyed the whole process because I get to skip a lot of these tedious steps of just meticulous blending and working on small separate parts I get to work on the whole grand piece as a whole and it just makes my process so much more fun with that said guys thanks so much for watching have a great day [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Squidmar Miniatures

Views: 232,216

Keywords: warhammer, miniature painting, painting warhammer, age of sigmar, squidmar, warhammer 40k, dungeons & dragons, d&d, how to paint warhammer, space marines, squidmar miniatures, emil nyström, airbrush, vallejo, citadel color, miniature painting 101, how to airbrush, airbrushing for beginners, harder & steenbeck, p3 colors, citadel colors, how to paint with airbrush, airbrush 101, miniature painting techniques

Id: TVviMQFr8gM

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020