Critiquing my Viewers Miniatures (A LOT of Beginner Advice!)

this paint job is raw it looks dull it's not right it's disgusting non-metallic metal more like horrible metallic matter where's the contrast what are you doing are you sure you're in the right hobby what's up everybody warhammer keanu reeves here you're breathtaking they're keeping me in this basement and they're making me review these painted toy soldiers please send help a while back when i released my video where i was critiquing my uncle demon winners some people said it would be nice if we had a video where i would be critiquing other people's work and i figured it would be a good learning opportunity for all of my audience to draw entries from a broader range of skill sets and people in different stages of their painting progressions so i was asking my discord server members to send me pictures of their last finished projects to give feedback on now everyone who sent a submission did so out of wanting to improve so everyone knows what they signed up for and because of that i will be honest because otherwise feedback does not really make sense i'm sure you can also roughly estimate where you are on the painting skill progression and you can see which of these advices will be good for you as well and if this video gets 10 000 likes like that will ever happen but what if it happens if this video gets 15 000 likes i will do another round where everyone can submit an entry in the community section of youtube and not just the discord members and i will make a video critiquing every single one of these submissions chris cross painted these three miniatures and he said this is the first time i've been painting miniatures and he also adds that it is harder to do than it looks like when you're starting out with miniature painting try to be as neat as possible from the get-go make it a staple in your process and don't slack about this small mistakes on small minis big impact in the final picture try to paint within the lines and avoid spill especially when using wider metallics these just stand out even more another thing if your goals to improve from the get-go don't make yourself too dependent on washes i know i know washes are convenient to get something on the table quickly but you signed up how to learn to get better at miniature painting and not to learn how to paint something fast washes are okay but learn to apply them in a controlled way and learn the strengths and weaknesses if you are using washes make sure you don't leave any parts out again we are going back to being consistent from the get-go and not rushing and leaving out parts because it's just going to destroy all the other effort you put in because it's just so noticeable the next thing you want to aim for is understanding shading and highlighting like you need to make the white on the inside of the cloak darker than the white on the outside because this is what our brains expect otherwise brain confused the next picture has been submitted by night eyes and one tip when you're taking pictures of your miniatures don't use flash make sure that you have enough light on the miniature i will add a link how to take quick and nice pictures of your miniatures with just two light sources and a bent background and that way you don't have to use flash you need to rethink your choice of colors a bit it almost looks like you're using animal colors because everything is just way too glossy and the result of this is that not only do you get all these artificial highlights because it's so glossy that you have the light reflecting off of it everything looks the same regardless if it's clothing metal skin and what you want to do is be able to distinguish these with more properties than just colors it could be that the culprit are washes again try to stay away from them and study how to create highlights and layering to be able to control where your highlights and shadows go it will also avoid mishaps like the washer used on the skin not really going into the recesses and accumulating on the top parts in general you have way too many chromatic colors in there chroma is the intensity of color if it's fully saturated the chroma is at a maximum you have chromatic red yellow orange in there the browns are intense too the container on the back is orange even the skin has an orange hue too many chromatic colors on a miniature overwhelmers my advice is to look at references if you want to paint the face study different pictures of faces try to replicate the colors don't pick a color just because it says skin tone again we need to create something our brain is seeing as credible and whenever something looks unexpected it's confusing will make the miniature look weird a good example is the lips just don't use like a primary red for the lips it's really not realistic and if you use a primary red like in this case it almost looks like lipstick and it just throws us off and if there's too many of these things on miniatures we don't consider a miniature good because it's too confusing the next mini has been submitted by bob wallace and a lot of things that we mentioned earlier can be applied here too and oh my god what do i see mold line bad so i have a personal pet peeve with mold lines because no matter how good the paint job is if there's a mold line it just just takes you out of the immersion and it just ruins the overall effect so always try to get rid of as many mold lines as you can and if it's just running your hobby knife across the mold line to reduce it and not have it cast any artificial shadows that should not be there that's already better than nothing obviously you also want to drill the gun barrel and he was using contrast paints on most of these parts at least from what i can tell now i always recommend using contrast paints thinned down over an already established base color they just don't work as advertised over a white base color and they have the tendency to look untidy you can check the video i made about the blood bowl orgs on how to do this properly and whatever you do don't use contrast paint on the rim of the base use a normal black color because the coverage of contrast paints is just not good you know mattie p submitted this one and he's saying can you critique this sculpt now i really find this one ugly i don't think the paint job particularly makes it any better with just the edges highlighted and so much flat black jumping at you and just drawing the tension and i get that vampire should be pale but the face really just they did nothing with the scalp it's just one layer of paint with like a small shade below the cheekbones and then oh look all these bats braiding his hair like aren't they cute why it's just no there's so many awesome vampire models coming out i don't like this one carnaccio's submitted this chaos cultist without a base and the paint job applies a few of these ideas that we talked about earlier where we now actually have something like controlled highlights you can see it in the brown areas however they are kind of just like a game's workshop style on the edges of the folds you really want to define the folds a bit more with a volumetric highlight one thing that we could criticize is that the beige highlights are really intense while all of the other highlights for example on the red and on the skin they are more muted they are not as intense so it's a bit of a misbalance between those elements and the pants and the chest plate are just really standing out one thing i like is the metallics i think you could have just went for a bit more of an edge highlight and just more reflective areas right now you have a good shade color you could have maybe just shaded everything a tiny bit more that would be another option so you either highlight up this a bit more or you shade everything down a bit more then the edge highlights would be standing out a bit more no matter how early you are in your progression i always recommend to switch your thinking from just edge highlights to a more volumetric highlighting it's not that much more difficult you just define every shape if it faces up you just make it brighter and you don't just highlight the edge because that's not naturally how highlights work it's just how games workshop decided to do their studio paint jobs because it's an easy way it's not necessarily a really credible way so in that vein you would probably have to do something with the helmet or face mask it's just really not drawing that much attention it's not really brighter than any of the other reds even though it's higher up it should catch a lot more light in a senator volumetric highlighting approach let's face it y'all are obsessed with washes and that's okay but if you use a wash on all of the mini you've got to realize that what you are doing is you're putting a filter over every feature of the mini and that way you are also toning down your highlights and everything gets unified and this is the opposite effect of what we want to do with miniature painting which is to make our minis contrast rich and readable next up is madman 166 space marine and what is needed the most here is contrast start by shading the recesses i have a segment on how to do that in my edge highlighting video and then at the minimum place some edge highlights on top of that you can start to define elements of your miniature with gradients just use anything that will add contrast when using decals you can get rid of these edges where some air bubble stayed under the transparent sheet by painting these areas over with black that will integrate your decal a bit better on this bust we have a bit of the same problem i can see that you started to softly highlight all of the parts it still is not enough contrast it still reads as just the base color especially on the skin tones again it makes everything look a bit like plastic and not really like a large figure that has volumes we really want to simulate that and you have to be aware and for that you kind of need to see where which features catch more light than others and you really have to go overboard in the beginning with the contrast with the value differences just make everything bright you can always tone down things later but in the beginning just really try to get these volumes highlighted make them stand out make them feel like there is actual mass that is catching light and that is casting a shadow so for example the yellow parts the pink parts even the hair you can go a lot brighter on these and on the black i feel like you did the exact opposite thing you made everything a tiny bit too bright so if you went back in for the black parts on her arm definitely shade that down a bit towards black and also the the parts the mechanical parts on her knuckles if you want this to be metal you need a lot more increased contrasts for non-metallic metal one last thing to maybe think about is you can shade in different colors for example the purple would maybe benefit from a bit of a blue shadow and you're not introducing another color that's just making everything too busy so try to make your colors a bit more interesting don't just use the same base color just a bit brighter for your highlights and just a bit darker for your shades next up is the freight brush submission it's a dragon and i know that the idea was to have each of these five dragon heads to look different but again we have too many chromatic colors in the case of the black and white head i would recommend not starting off of pure white and black because pure black and pure white like we can get in these paint bottles just doesn't exist in nature and it just looks awkward because we're not used to it start off of a darker shade of white not a pure gray necessarily more like a blue gray or a beige and highlight it with white and for the black don't start with a pure black color either don't throw too many chromatic colors on your miniatures like the green the red and the blue what you can do to avoid this is to look at artworks of dragons or pictures of real life reptiles to get a better idea how colors work in nature which is and you guessed it what our brains are used to i would also recommend to have an element that draws all of these other elements together like a common color for the underside of the necks and then have the individual color on the upper side of the head and then keep the individual colors on the upper areas of the neck on the upper side of the heads so this bloodletter champion was submitted by a deck laser with this guy we do have a bit of the chromatic color problem again try to mute down your colors a bit less chromatic colors and another thing that stands out you can definitely define some of your shapes more especially the horns you can define these edges a bit more right now again it's just gray it looks a bit like plastic same thing goes for the sword you could have um highlighted the the shapes that are in there like these long parts in the middle of the flame sword make those brighter and maybe the in-between parts darker just do something with it that's not just a gradient and then regardless of what you do with this you definitely have to outline the sword somehow with some edge highlights or you know if you did a lava sword would have the glow in the middle and then the outside uh black that would definitely change how this sword reads yeah we'll do something for the upper horns like what you did with the lower ones with the the beige brown ones you define the outline and the ridges of these horns nicely all the effort you put in into those kind of gets neglected or undone because you haven't done the same effort for the horns up here kyle mack submitted this necron and i have a bit of a hard time giving feedback because to me it looks like there is a lot of stylistic choice in there i don't quite know though what you were trying to achieve for example with the floaty bits in the front where each individual dot is a bit shiny and it looks like that light is just spilling over onto these flowy bits to me it just reads like orange front parts i feel like you would have to isolate those a bit more if you took all of these elements like the square elements and put the light dots in there and made that really intense and then made the the square rather dark and just have a tiny bit of shine spilling over from from that middle dot it would have made everything a bit clearer and more understandable right now it the orange just overpowers everything and it's not really clear what you want it to do especially because you have some of that orange also on the face it almost looks like you have so many light sources that they're just drenching everything in that orange glow in general i would just try to to shrink down all of these glow effects and maybe decide on yeah just reducing them on the back you have a glow you have the sword glowing you have the eyes glowing you have these dangly bits glowing maybe a bit too too much osl in there one other thing that would have helped in this regard loken submitted this space ring character all of the etching that's really defined nicely and it has this blue sheen to it on the back we have the glossy red again a nice trick to work with reds is to shade it black and not going up to a highlight color that is orange or pink have just a bit of a brighter highlight color than the actual red and just shade everything down that way you don't end up with a red that doesn't read like red at all like in this case there's these orange yellow highlights and if you shaded just the red uh black it would still read as red which is really dark shadows and i feel like in some parts like on the hazard stripes on the back you could definitely do a volumetric highlight where you put a highlight on the upper edge of that hose the base looks a bit lifeless i feel like if you added a few more colors to the scent parts and maybe also to the stone gray always is super boring stones really are just gray if you again look at some references you will see that spacemonkey75 submitted this one uh it's a paladin the thing that jumps at me right away is that the white is basically just gray highlighted with an opaque white in my opinion try to get a bit of a color into the white you have the choice of a warm white or a cold white for the warm white you would definitely add just a tiny bit of beige brown to make everything look less white because just pure white like the pigment that we can buy in a paint bottle just does not really exist all that much in nature and so we're not used to it and we're not expecting it so you could also do a cold white and just use a few blue shades in there just a blue gray will definitely help um making it a more credible white this stormcast eternal by yappy uses some of the recommendations i had for the models before he definitely uses a volumetric lightning and a senator light source for the front of the tabard it doesn't have it on the rest of the mini as much but this is a really good example for how you would define folds and the faults really look credible and realistic to me and this is exactly what i'm referring to when i'm saying we need to create something that feels like real life the other parts i think suffer a bit from being too monochromatic for example the steel is yeah basically if you were taking a gray and then just mixing in white and black to shade and highlight yeah it almost feels lifeless so i would recommend trying to use a couple of different colors to switch up the monochrome feeling and i get that the goal was to create um straightforward steel armor it just overall has a bit of a boring feeling we have talked about how grey just does not look interesting and if we use metallics then obviously that's just kind of shades of gray that are reflective so we need a bit of life in these colors for steel you can do that by adding a bit of a blue ink blue wash just filters just very tiny shifts of color will help here the weapon is basically just black on the or you know dark gray on the on the upper areas and then just an edge highlight you can definitely also do a bit of variety in there with a gradient you have it on the lower side of the hammerhead where there's a clear shift from a dark area to a bright area and then we have that dark area again that small strip noel legend au submitted this death guard nurgle marine he wrote that the base was a bit too small for the marine to stand on obviously a good way to avoid that is to create the base alongside the marine and create it around the figure that you want to put on there so you can place the model and and arrange maybe stones or elements you want to put on the base before you glue the marine together and before you finalize the base and before you start painting that way everything integrates better and feels more natural in the finished and the finished piece so this nurgle figure is clustered with this set of miniatures because like the others it could improve with a bit more added contrast there is certain parts like the knee pad that has nice contrast some other parts for example the trim of the shoulder pad you shaded that down without leaving some of the brighter areas to still show so it would have benefited from another edge highlight right now everything gets drawn together because all of these colors are kind of similar and they are definitely shaded with a similar color so these brown tones just draw everything together and it can help with coherency but it just becomes that mass of browns and greens also the the teeth they get shaded down a lot and the tongue and everything becomes this brown mask that's not really distinguishable there is some good contrast elements in there especially that little hose that runs down on the rifle it's highlighted really nicely even though it's quote unquote only dots of of white on a black surface but on the lower side we also have the the bounce lights added and this looks really credible really realistic we go from really black to white highlights and this is good i would have hoped you would do this on the rest of the figure as well so for example the bones that come out of his armor you can definitely go up to white or at least beige with some white um mixed in and then one thing that might help is just adding edge highlights a few more edge highlights to start with and then you could also add a bit of volumetric highlighting by making this edge up here on the chest area a bit brighter one general advice maybe sometimes when we start to paint a figure and highlight it and then we apply a shade everything gets toned down a bit too much don't be afraid to go back in and re-add some of the highlights so that your contrast is high enough on this figure submitted by gray epoxy i was a bit torn on what to feedback he set out with an endeavor of creating a rotten flesh dead skin tone he was trying to to go for something realistic so he was adding a lot of washes with purples and reds to a green base color and a general advice that i have in this case is that sometimes realistic does not work on miniature we cannot just treat this as if it were a one-to-one sized model then we would probably start to paint exactly like this but since this is a smaller scale we need to stylize and take a bit of a different approach and still highlight the volumes and not just try to focus on getting the colors so this hunter is submitted by skull breath overall i think it's a solid paint job what i tried to improve from there would be to work a lot more on the volumetrics so you have these strains of hair highlighted on the back pelt you would still highlight all of this up a tiny bit more and then gradually work in the strains of hair and these lines that represent them the same thing applies to the skin and how the skin is structured and the muscle groups are divided it's always a bit tricky to have these really dark dividing lines between especially the parts on the shoulder here on the deltoid i went over this in my myrmidon skin tone video you want to highlight everything more globally and then just have a bit of a shadow in these areas because just having a line here just kind of looks jarring and it doesn't make that much sense because all of this would be lighted a bit yeah brighter by just send it to light if the line was horizontal and would curve down and inwards you would still get a shadow here but if it runs like this and it's kind of inclined towards the light you just don't get these dark lines in muscle structures on this submission by john thompson a female rogue character a lot of the things that we were talking about are implemented you have a senator light you can see that on the knees with the upper part being brighter than the lower parts the folds are nicely highlighted and highlighted in a credible way and you can also see that there is not as many primary colors in in this all of the the blues and the browns and even the red hair are not really primary colors they are reducing chroma and reducing chroma in kind of the same way so this figure gets a nice uniform look and it definitely also fits the character it's a bit tough to say because the picture is a bit blurry but you could have maybe went for a bit more texture on some of these parts because everything is drawn together and now you kind of want to distinguish the different fabrics from each other so the mantle could have definitely had some wear and especially in the highlight areas you could show like fabric lines so this stormcast mage submitted by mortal wombat 29 it's a bit busy um on first sight i would definitely recommend trying to cut down on the colors a bit you have blue in there you have the yellow non-metallic parts in there you have more or less primary red in there you have magenta in there it's just screams um for attention all over the place not distinguishing like the the thirds of the body where the upper third would catch a lot more light because you put that much attention towards the magenta because that's almost the brightest highlight apart from maybe the non-metallic metal parts so try to put more focus on the upper areas the contrast is nice on on the metal parts i think you can work a bit more on these transitions and maybe incline your brush a tiny bit and use the broad side of the brush when you paint your highlights and your gradients it almost feels like you were making an edge highlight and then you were making the edge highlight wider instead of really trying to go for a gradient on these metal parts i think you could fix a lot of the problems that this figure has by treating all of your structures equally for example the belt and the leather parts around the belt they did not get as many highlights as a lot of the other things and so they they completely fall into the shadows and also the blue fabric that is hanging from his arms it just gets lost completely and swallowed and then you have also have the leather parts on one side you have highlights in there but the other one is completely dark and not highlighted at all also goes for the red the difference in in application of highlights makes your figure especially busy on top of using too many colors in there one last thing is definitely the face there is a lot of shadow colors in weird places and i feel like that's probably due to using a wash to shade everything when you're using a wash to shade definitely bring out all the elements again like you have this really dark eye rings which makes him look like he's popping out his eyes so definitely try to to bring back some volumetric lights uh on the cheekbones which would catch a lot of light so that it's not as jarring to look at in general faces are not something where you can just slap a wash on and then leave them be and expect it to look good you have to really work out these planes and shapes and yeah follow the general rules for painting faces so superfluous uh submitted this one and i think your colors work so the color choice is nice it feels like there's a gold armor in there and the steel metallics feel nice too i think you could definitely benefit from adding a bit of a mid-tone to your gradients so just adding a bit of a line of mid-tone here just make every transition a tiny bit smoother improves this a lot one thing i like about this one is that you went contrast over smoothness and i always recommend people doing that when they start out just make sure that the highlights are in there where they belong figure out the shapes and the volumetrics of your figure and and just highlight where it makes sense that the stuff would catch light and then worry about smoothness later because as you paint you are going to figure out dilution and thickness of layers and how to apply the paint to yeah get that extra smoothness one thing i think your blade might have benefited from was to try not to have that many white edge highlights next to the pink because the values are kind of similar and you would probably want to have a really dark area next to the pink because it is somewhat bright and that would make everything stand out a bit better this kiliman submitted by miniatures to go suffers a bit from not enough separation of the elements and it's a bit of a curious thing because i think you tried to separate the parts when we look at the shoulder for example there is a dark outline around the metallic trims but i feel like it's the wrong approach so you have a really thick line that is dark and then you have the highlights every single element highlighted up to ultramarine blue but i think you should have tried to make a bit of a gradient first and ignoring the metal trims and just painting a gradient on the blues and then applying the metal colors and then doing some pin stripping just making sure that you have really thin lines around these metal trims to separate those because yeah though there's going to be a shadow but it's not going to be as large as it is with your example here right now you can definitely add a few more highlights especially on the helmet really make sure that the helmet stands out and gets a lot of attention by having a lot more contrast than the other parts so especially because there's not that many edges to highlight on on the elements of the armor because all the edges are metal trims you can make the helmet send out a lot more by doing these intense edge highlights and drawing more attention definitely also put a few shades into your whites right now the white ultramarine parts are just one color make sure to to shade them down a bit you can just use a gray in this case and and just start shading some parts just make sure that not everything is white that just always looks jarring and it takes the miniature out of scale and it just portrays the scale because this is a really large dude with a lot of large armor plates and there is going to be some curvature and not everything is going to be really bright there is going to be distinctions this black orc by mr e enigma 79 looks really familiar i think you followed my tutorial for the bloodball orcs personally i think with most parts you are at the level where i leave off with the first video and then you have some elements of the second video but i definitely think your piece would benefit from following the second video where you're just defining all um the facial features a bit more with controlled lines and volumetric highlighting and some stippling on the leather just controlled highlights and yeah definitely put in lines um for the horns right now they are the base color and wash approach just adding lines to these horns is going to make everything stand out a bit more another thing i have to honestly say make sure to tone down the eyes because right now that's the the number one thing that's dragging your piece down try to outline the white spill that you have on his right eye and i think also on the left and also a general trick to do never use white for the eyes always start with a bit of um yeah tones down white mix in some gray or um brown never start off with a pure white it's it just looks jarring you don't see my eyes popping out like that um because there's a shadow here and we kind of have to mimic that so on these orcs by dreadpool i have some really concise suggestions definitely add more variety to your axes and swords and weapons in general they all look the same they don't look bad but they're boring you have a black wash on top of metal and then some highlights there's no color variation in there orcs are the classic example of just snapping on an orange brown for rust just into the recesses it doesn't have to be super tidy you can add all kinds of discolorations maybe they hit some some yeah other armor that was red and then you have like these red streaks there's so many things to weather up these axes you could apply different materials they don't all have to be steel they could be copper or they could you know have cut some parts out of yeah maybe a colored metal just anything go crazy you don't have to be super tidy and just adding a bit of variation is going to bring these weapons up a lot another thing you have um an interesting yellow and this yellow approach always works just using a base color of yellow and shading it with an orange brown or bastille brown or something like that it's really intriguing even if you don't highlight and there's not that many highlights on there there's i think one layer of highlight color on there i know this has probably been a quicker approach a quicker paint job but just using the extra step that i also show in my chipping video where you place down like these brighter chips and you can definitely just use a sponge for that just dab it on exactly the same way you dab on the darker colors and then with a brush selectively put in the darker color so that you have the lower edges still showing as highlights is going to massively improve this because right now there's no depth to the chips so the other approach is a really easy way to get more depth in there without that much at a time i'm not quite sure what you did with the shoulder pads and the black parts but you could definitely benefit from starting brighter on these and if you want to keep the speed of the paint jobs just shading down on these brighter areas towards where everything bends down with contrast paint just the way that i do in my black orc video that way you would still have the upper parts show as brighter areas and you would have a lot of contrast in there and that would be an easy approach to make these not look as monotonous at this point i feel like you could definitely still add some edge highlights and and bring out the contrast a bit more but you need to do something with the shoulder pads and definitely also add some minor free hands maybe just some scribbling or check your patterns or anything like that to break that large monotonous black blue area up a tiny bit because you have broken up your your yellows with the chipping right um but there's nothing going on in the blacks nemeth submitted this old-school sculpt of a sorceress and i like the orange a lot and the blues on the rope looked nicely blended i would have brought the rest of the blues also to that same contrast because right now the lower parts of the mini look a bit brighter than the upper parts like the shoulders and that's kind of confusing the main point to think about here is what to do with the whites in my opinion you have a lot of coffee staining in the shaded areas of the whites probably because you use the wash consistency and couldn't get even coverage when doing white a fix for this is to start from a darker color like whatever color you used to shade the whites you could have started from that and left the recesses dark and then highlighting gradually by adding more white to the mix in my opinion it's easier to highlight towards white than to shade a pure white down simply because white is the brightest value that we have in our arsenal of paints and will shine through any glaze consistency you need a bit of experience to do a proper shading of pure white and that's why it's not that smart to start off of pure white but make it easier for yourself and start from something darker this imperial fist by tommy gun i feel like is a good example for using approaches on one area and works and using the same approach on another part of the miniature and it doesn't work that well the approach of using contrast paint over a color is a really neat one in my opinion and i have shown that in a couple of videos to just use the contrast paints as washes because they settle really nicely if you thin them down and and just create gradients that way as you can see in this example on the yellow armor however i feel on the face it has not worked as nicely simply because we have been over this a couple of times but i want to mention it here because it's a nice learning experience you have to go over the areas of the face again because it's still going to be a wash and it's going to sell like in all recesses indiscriminately and you're going to have to define these planes again because right now you have again these dark really dark eye areas um that just don't look credible and he looks like he's spilling oil from his eye sockets other than that i really like the result could have maybe benefited from a few more hr lights especially on the reds and some of the yellows and also on the blacks this submission by hierax i feel like is really nicely composed i don't have that much criticism clearly the black background helps with creating the mood so i would like to see that one with a bright background i think the colors work really nicely together even the temperature of color fits together really nicely there is some yellow highlights on the steel metallics that go along with the orange yellow of the armor one minor thing on the hip guards where you added the stippling or sponge chipping or patina over the really bright highlight you got to be careful with that while the bright turquoise works over these darker shades of the rest of the armor over the bright areas it changes completely how it looks and how it appears and sometimes it can look out of place so just something to be aware of for next time and then another minor thing that i have especially on his left shoulder guard you can definitely outline the plates a bit more don't be afraid to put in edge highlights and especially on the lower edge i think you have it here a tiny bit and i think that looks good definitely don't be afraid to to put in these edge highlights to distinguish especially armor plates from each other because any edge whether or not it's facing up or down is going to reflect light a lot more than any other of the surfaces this submission by nuba startus was a lot of fun i'm saying that because he's in my feedback program on my patreon and we worked on this prior to maniacs painting competition which this piece won and of course he did because of my coaching we already talked about this in private uh it's a piece that has been created for um atmosphere and in this particular atmosphere which is a warm light source probably a fire in the distance at night time we usually have another weaker light source like for example the moon which we normally would not perceive as cool light but in the context of being next to a warm light source we perceive this light as cool typically blue so we can play on that perception and add in this blue outline and create even more atmosphere with this piece this submission by scadon also tries to achieve some atmosphere i feel like most of the the piece works especially when it comes to where the highlights are placed the only criticism i have and why i think it does not work as well is that you would probably have to create a bit more of a dark outline for this piece trying to exaggerate exactly what we said before with the slightly blue um yeah feeling of a secondary light within a composition that has a really warm light source but you would probably have to make everything else a lot darker for the warm lantern lights to just really make an impression this scene horror by the paulie principal one minor thing is that your gradients are too abrupt so you would have to find a way to mix the colors a bit more that they integrate with each other so the purple running into the blue is a bit too abrupt you can see all of the the lines still there so i would recommend trying to work on that because it just becomes jarring and i feel like it takes away from the effect that you were trying to achieve i know it becomes difficult with so many color transitions but try to hit your volumes a bit better so you have it on the the deltoids of the arms there is some nice highlight here but then as we move into the purple i feel like there is not enough value difference there so you're kind of losing your highlights there and then on the front part of the arm you have it again try to be more consistent with your highlights and if the the volumes are in the same alignment you don't want this to be darker and this to be brighter again both of this is catching the same amount of light this space marine by al pacino is probably done after um one of my space marines i want to say at least the highlights are in really similar places the one thing i would recommend working on and you can definitely check out my basics video again is to try to avoid the chalkiness how does chalkiness appear when we highlight we add a brighter color to a darker color and then we glaze up and if the value difference is not a lot then we can get away by mixing it 50 50 and it's going to leave a relatively smooth transition but once we are starting to add white the value difference becomes a lot higher um so if you take a medium blue and a dark blue the valley difference is not that high but if you take that medium blue and you add white the valid difference is is really large and you cannot just mix it 50 50. so you have to be a bit more careful with your mixes to avoid the chalkiness here try to have a few more in-between mixes this death gesture by tanash is really well composed i think minor complaint that i have is you can get away by using minimal highlights like you did on the sky but i would recommend to also highlight the edges a bit more just highlight everything here and pay attention to the apex points so if you have this highlight here you definitely want to put an apex point and then fade out your highlights on the edge and just do that very same thing on all of the edges so on that upper one you dragged out your highlight a bit too much i feel like and on the lower one it did not do enough highlights other than that i really like the non-metallic colors and how they work together on this green reverb by ben i really like how the edges are defined and it really makes this figure super readable one complaint i have is even if these parts like the part on on his right arm are in shadow and should not be highlighted up as much as for example the knee they should still receive definition so you could have taken darker green um that is a bit brighter than the shadow color and just defined all of these because right now that little part on this picture in my opinion betrays your figure so much because everything else is highlighted really nicely and credible and that little part just not having any further definition pulls down the whole paint job a bit so yeah just try to even though i know it's tedious but try to pull through and define all edges even though they're maybe in a bit of a darker area this king busts by a frog jima jav i include it because you can see how much the way you photograph your miniatures influences a lot how they appear on the screen so while this one is a lot more muted and and dark this one stands out a lot more and and the mood just becomes really different i really want to say that you made a lot out of a really bad sculpt these deep recesses are just sculpting tools pressed in and the sculptor did not bother to try to mimic human features this is especially evident in the creases on the forehead it's really difficult to paint the bad scalp because at that point it's already not your fault that these features like the deep cheek wrinkles here and the wonky eyelids they already make our brains go nah that's not how our face looks it's difficult to convince them otherwise with just paint your colors however look well chosen and i like how your fur is built from a volumetric highlighting perspective down to more detailed highlighting with the fur pattern you could think about making these tear sags a bit more pronounced by adding more green or blue shades i think and just make them a bit different from the rest of the skin color again you can look at references of really old people and you get my idea and i would treat the beard on the upper lip a bit more like a volume too exactly like you did on the fur and the rest of the beard this passed by ginger smith it can be improved by some minor tweaks one of them is again applying the proper highlights to the face understanding of the face is going to help this tremendously and then just understanding volumes a bit more i'm just putting these tiny highlights into places like up here on the steam vents and adding the proper way of how light would reflect off of these shapes is just going to push an already really nice piece up to a lot more credible and a lot more nice to look at so with the next batch of figures we are moving into yeah highly proficient painters that develop their own style and at this point i have to be a bit careful with what i feedback because my job as a teacher is not to mold everyone into clones of myself or my style my goal is to help you achieve your goals for some the goal is to achieve a solid base a minimum consensus of what is considered good in miniature painting like if someone would teach you how to write they would teach you correct spelling and correct grammar and maybe how to write the proper application for a job and then on top once you know the basics there are several literally styles that you can dabble in you can write poems you can write novels you can write short stories with your own style and and your own use of words and how you put words together and that's the same with miniature painting once you know the basics you can apply them and leave some of them out deliberately and just play around with them and develop your own style and of course i can teach you my style i can teach you the basics or what is considered basics and what is considered to work in miniature painting but i will also try to help you find your own voice your own visual style so at a point where obvious artistic choices are made it becomes a bit pretentious to say this is right or wrong or you should do this and that so from here on out be aware that i'm respecting creative choices and from here on out a lot of the stuff i feedback becomes opinion and yeah can be heated or not so this orc shaman by raven shows a lot of the things we talked about like the volumetric highlights are obviously there uh you don't see these deep lines on the deltoids uh he highlighted everything up a lot more in the chest area and the face area and only where you have really deep recesses like under the cheekbones you have these shadows put in to create contrast and then as you go further down all of these dark lines like under the chest muscles but on the abs we can see highlights again as they catch more light the understanding of light here is really nice if i had to critique something i feel like on the strap the letter strap that whole volumetric light idea becomes lost again a bit because you would probably have to do the the whole strap up here lighter too to reflect your understanding of the the thirds of the body and the upper body being lit a lot more and then i feel like on some of the brown fabric or leather or whatever he wears around his waist um there could have been some more highlights on the edges and maybe some texture here and there just to make everything a bit more visually interesting another thing that maybe this figure would have benefited from would be like a small scar or a fresh cut the skin tones are super smooth and executed really well but maybe become a bit monotonous through that so just a tiny cut with fresh blood like running down a tiny bit could have broken up that monotony but overall obviously a really stunning piece murder manatee has submitted this beast and clearly we have another artistic choice here and the choice was to have everything be highlighted really subtle however if we zoom in on the bright areas of the body you can clearly see that there is streaks and and lines to simulate hair and and fur obviously i think it works pretty well along with the subtle shading that could have been done with an airbrush or just the subtle glazing i can tell but it looks really good and i also like how the the reds look with the subtle highlights and a dark almost purple maybe purple black mix put next to the highlight which increases the contrast in itself and it's a good way to increase contrast personally i would have liked the brown parts for example on the face to have more highlights and i think you could do that without sacrificing your style just like with the bright areas you could have done a bit more of a volumetric light and it would have still looked like the silky smooth result but it would have taken away a bit of that awkward feeling when we look at the brown parts for example and there's almost no highlights while the rest is really nicely defined we have that black hole example again where the absence of any highlights just creates that hollow feeling that the eye gets drawn to and something just looks odd i included this emperor's champion by ilo to yeah illustrate that sometimes it is really difficult to critique paint jobs because i mean obviously i could say there is some smoothness missing but then again the line work is a style adding those highlights with the line pattern is a really nice style and if we zoom out um all the highlights are incredible places and i feel like the the sky earth effect works really nicely so what am i going to critique here i don't have that much to critique it's different from my style and obviously it sacrifices smoothness for credible and interesting placement of highlights with the lines the only maybe objective thing that i found is i feel like you would need to define the sword a bit more with simple edge highlights so for example if you put this on a black background the sword would probably melt with the background so you want to just have an outline around your gradients so speaking about drawing eyes to a certain part of the paint job this rather large i think it's a kitchen magnet submitted by milbor is really interesting because he did not pay that much attention to everything else um no that's not true because he paid a lot of attention and you can see it clearly in the definition of the wrinkles but what i was trying to say is that the eyes just because they are defined in such a credible way draw a lot of attention and the example i wanted to mention was that the the hat could have definitely benefited from a lot more stippling and just bringing the features out but it doesn't really drag the piece down because the eye area is defined so much and also yeah just the face works so well because of the the shadows the volumetrics he put in the shadows under the mouth part make this really credible and also how the cramp of the hat just casts a shadow around the eyes i don't have anything to critique here uh even though we could of course nitpick and say there should have been a few more details in there but this piece just works because of the creative choices that were made speaking about creative choices and style again here a clear creative choice was made to highlight all edges with white and no matter if it's a red base color or black or the yellow base color um this piece really stands out because there is a white highlight on every aspect of the figure but you can clearly see that this creates a lot of contrast even though when we look at the backpack there's just a slight wash applied to the volumes of course there's deep recessed shadows but the areas you can also see it on the black are not highlighted up there's just highlights placed in strategic positions and because of that it works and i would not paint that way but it's a really effective way to create contrast and make this an interesting piece to look at and this emperor's champion has been submitted by tasso and he added a couple of lines said that he was using my pdf guides for this and all the space marine tutorials that i did and that he was really able to progress in a quick way using them which is really awesome to see because he has not been painting for that long one thing he added was that he didn't add enough contrast which would have been my first thing to comment on he also added that he was a tiny bit too scared to add decals and any extra at this point because he was happy with the progress and at this point he was afraid to screw anything up which we can understand because this is a really neat looking a really awesome piece but let's quickly dive into what can be improved here i think the goal has really nice contrast the gold parts are probably much better than the rest and simply because there is that much contrast in there he goes um all the way up to almost white and towards a really dark brown the leather parts also show that exact range of contrast looks really good the blues are the only thing that is lacking here chest part where you have that lower edge highlight it looks really good but on the helmet especially you could have placed one more brighter highlight and you can of course do that with just a dot of a bright highlight color and just highlighting the edges especially where the face mask of the primaris these slits get have these lower edges with curves you can put apex highlights in there and i think one thing in general that you could do without really having to be afraid to screw something up is to just work on these edge highlights and placing apex reflections in there you don't have to be too worried about having to blend these together with what you already have and it's just going to be some minor additional things to add and it's not that complicated and it's not going to take that much time and it's going to make a really great paint job even more awesome and that's it if you enjoyed this video don't forget to like it so that we can make round two happen hey it's only 15 000 likes that's easy if this is the first of my videos you saw why not consider subscribing and ringing the bell so that you get notified of all of my future uploads joining my patreon at the two dollar level gives you full access to the discord and to the official feedback channel and if you want to improve your painting with hundreds of hours of learning material consider joining at the pdf level or the video supporter level thanks to all my patrons for making these videos possible and if you like this video why not watch another one of these showing on screen i hand-picked them especially for you stay creative and thanks for watching you

Channel: Trovarion Miniatures

Views: 287,943

Keywords: miniature, painting, miniaturepainting, miniatures, warhammer, warhammer40k, ageofsigmar, aos, beginner, miniature painting for beginners, miniature painting techniques, space marines, miniature painting feedback, constructive criticism, miniature painting 101, CnC, miniature painting tutorials, feedback, discord

Id: SHugpiqanRE

Length: 58min 47sec (3527 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021