Mastering Object Source Lighting - Painting Magical Light OSL on Warhammer and D&D miniatures

we've all seen his amazing OSL and night atmosphere paint jobs today we're going through the ins and outs of how to paint OSL on your miniatures [Music] yes you're watching squid Mar miniatures and I am emailed when painting miniatures we're not always looking to imitate life but basing something in reality even when painting sci-fi or fantasy will make it easier for your viewer to understand what's happening in the piece instead of breaking this grand illusion that you've created I know sometimes we're just painting to create an awesome effect and that's totally fine but today we're going to dive deep we're gonna try to understand why some OSL paint jobs look better than others why they read better for the viewer and during this video we're also going to talk about how you can break these rules to make it more effective on a miniature compared to real life this video is going to be packed with a lot of good information and as I said in the end I'm going to show you the process of how you can apply these techniques to your miniatures and there are also tools that you can use to kind of sheet to understand how light will hit and I will talk about that in the end of the video and if you like these videos they take some serious time to produce so leaving a like a comment and subscribing to this channel it really helps out in the long run helping me spread this message and getting these videos out to new people so yeah let's start digging so let's start discussing a bit about how light sources look out in the nature maybe you made a campfire during daytime or you're holding a flashlight outdoors or a magic green glowing orb out in the daylight The effect of these lights will most likely be fairly modest they will probably not read as very bright at all out in the daylight and the small changes that these light sources would make will probably not read at all to your eye because your eye really adapts to the environment and the light that's available around it just bringing a flashlight outdoors and turning it on while the Sun is blazing outside and comparing this just turning a flashlight on indoors maybe in your basement or in a darkroom and you'll see what I mean so depicting your miniature in a night scene instead of a daylight scene will really enhance the effect of this OSL because when we look at the miniature we come with these preconceived notions of how light would look and if it doesn't look like it does in real life it would be hard for the viewer to understand exactly what's happening so if we can make it read as real as possible that's when you're gonna have an OSL effect that's smaller so the picking a miniature in the night scene will really sell much better and it will make it easier for your brain to kind of understand what's happening and another thing to really sell this effect of the OSL is the composition the best way of enhancing this effect is to have two lights opposite of each other for example we can pretend that it's the moonlight hitting from above and a campfire from below if the lights are coming from the same angle say you're having a streetlight from this way and the moonlight from the same way it won't be very easy to separate these lights they will blend together and the effect of the hotel will not be as strong as if you have opposing lights just take a look at this awesome piece from Marko for Sony he painted this go track having the master une casting a light from above and the light from his axe from below and this way you have really awesome contrasting colors and lights and a great composition and don't forget to subscribe to not just make that what can I do for next week [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so let's start dabbling a little bit into creating this night scene let's start with creating the blue ambient light have you ever thought about in movies that night scenes are often lit with blue or turquoise colors and these color effects are added to really sell the effect with being in night scene but the blue isn't added to create a blue moonlight it is done to enhance something called the Purkinje effect this is due to the fact that we have two systems in our eyes that are adapted to seat color so during daytime we have cones in our eyes that see the colors but in a low light or in the night setting we have retinal rods active and these rods that are active during the night time have their max sensitivity to the blue and green spectrum compared to the daytime ones that are more into the red and green and a little bit of blue of course spectrums so that is the reason why we see more of the blue during the nighttime then during daytime so does this perk in effect mean that we only paint with blues in a night scene not really let's talk about it a lot of you have probably seen this photo of strawberries making its way around the interwebs these strawberries are green but they really sell as red because of the environment it's in so even if we're using only blue colors we need to mix in some of the original colors of the miniature to this blue to really sell the effect of it being in a night scene compared to just being a monochromatic blue paint job I learned something from Roman Gruber in its workshop how to implement this easily into my painting and this is to pre-visualize my miniature and the colors it has in a daylight before I start adding the nighttime colors this way it's easier for me to separate which colors would be wealth and what I need to add to the blues to make it look like the real minute not just a blue one color piece making a reference photo where you have your miniatures with all the colors in the right place maybe do it in Photoshop or paint it on a piece of paper and also mixing these paints on your wet palette before you start painting are two great ways of always having these things available and ready so you do place the right colors in the right place so we covered the technical parts let's start painting the night scene so I'm going to start with the base of Vallejo dark sea blue but you can just take any dark blue and just add some blacks to the saturated and you will have a nice nighttime base for your painting so when I painted this goblin for example I know that his robe is black so this one would be mainly blue but the squares on his cloak is maybe yellow so I need to add some of the colors to that to make it brighter than the black parts of his robe also maybe his staff is like a dark brown so I need to add some Browns to my blues when I paint the staff and most important to his face is probably both brighter than his cloak and it also has more greens to it than his cloak so hearing me to add maybe some yellows to make the blue tint towards green now we're painting this storm cast so we take his fabric here and this one I would paint normally blue so I'm just adding a brighter blue and highlighting it slightly adding a bit of sunny skin tone this is kind of add a bit of green to the highlights it separates the shadows of it from the highlights but it still reads as a nighttime scene I'm not adding a lot just a tiny bit of this sunny skin tone is perfect and when painting is armor we're kind of lucky again because the armor is yellow so adding sunny skin tone again which is sort of a yellow highlight will once again read as a natural highlight of this armor [Music] but with his face on the other hand so I'm adding a bit of kadian flesh tone to the palate mixing this with the blue bass tone and I just need a little bit to sell the effect of it being more skin tone than the regular blues that were already painted with and when highlighting the skin tone I'm not adding this on a skin tone to the blue but I'm adding it to the caelian flesh tone and blue mix and this way once again we're highlighting it using the natural color that it has mixed with the night scene light and with natural highlight that it would have also here we kind of want to break the rules a bit because the armour would naturally be the thing that reflects the most light because it's a metallic thing but we want to draw more focus to the face so we're painting the face a little bit brighter than we would with the armor and this is kind of sheeting but once again we're not imitating life exactly but we're drawing things that would be naturally in the painting so now I'm just going to paint the rest of the miniature using these techniques adding some of the base colors and the blues and then highlighting it I'm not going super bright with this my highest point would be almost like a mid-tone naturally when painting something in daylight so this is how it would look when it's finished let's get on to the next phase and this of course is the object source lighting there's a couple of laws and rules of physics we need to follow and painting a big horse lighting and these are number one the light is strongest and most saturated at its source we need to remember that the thing that emits the light is always the strongest and the brightest part of the model so for example if we're sitting outside around the campfire the fire will be the brightest thing so if you're painting something like this lord ordinator for example example I will have my brightest point which will be a yellow source and the further away we get from it the less bright it will be and the less of the yellow saturated color we will have as well and this also brings us to rule number two the inverse square law and what it really means is how light loses its strength over distance the inverse square law is something you have to learn when you start cinematography or photography for example and you need to learn how light works but it's really something you can keep in mind when painting your object source lighting as well the law itself is something as silly as the distance of separation is proportional to the inverse square of that look I barely know what that sentence means but I'm going to explain to you how it works and I know I probably lost some of you coming to this point but bear with me so none of us are probably going to be able to replicate this law exactly with our bare hands and I'm not gonna ask you to do it either but it's important to remember kind of how quickly light loses its intensity so if you have one part of the model that's 1 meter away from the source it's going to have a certain strength and if you're double that distance away from it the light is going to be 1/4 the strength and and that's kind of a good thing to remember as a rule of thumb that three times as far away you have 1/9 of the light strength and to remember that the furthest point away from the light source will never be as strong as the point closest to the light source and the third one light can only travel in straight lines so when you have a small light source kind of like the fire we talked about earlier it's going to be a fairly harsh light source and the light could never bend around the models so the only parts that could be affected by this light source are the part that are in a straight line from the light source if you have an airbrush it's a great tool to illustrate how light works because the pigments from the airbrush can only be sprayed in straight lines however life to bounce quite a bit so it could affect parts that are in different angles as well but let's leave that for another time so to illustrate this I'm going to use the airbrush to show you how quickly you can make the base of your oil cell by just using the base tone and spraying it in the angle from which the light comes from if you're interested in any of the tools I use I have all of them listed on my website squid marcom so in this case the light source is round so the light would be spread in all the directions from the glowing ball here in the center and if you have a simpler model and you use a light source from outside of the frame for example like I did on this goblin you can easily see where the light would be hitting but just checking from the angle where the light would be it's what I did here was just to decide a point from where the light would come from and then I just looked at the miniature from that angle trying to cover all of the parts that are visible from that angle with the color of the light that I have from the light source and when holding the model from this angle it's very easy for me to see where I need to add more colors or where I missed something and where the light would be hitting so you can easily do this without an airbrush don't let that hold you back so once we have our red base we need to work our way up and in up I mean in saturation and brightness so if you just want to make a subtle effect you can start by adding some brighter colors to the miniature and what I mean by this is you leave the outer parts of red red and then start adding some red oranges a bit closer to the light source than the red that's farthest away I've chosen to make this one like a fiery core so I'll be adding some oranges to my red starting with a red orange and then for my next step I'm moving closer to the core but adding more orange [Music] where I want the orange to be most vibrant I'm going to start base painting it again with some white and the reason for doing this is because you will never get as a vibrant orange if you just paint orange on this dark red because these colors are kind of translucent so if we have a white base it's going to be much more vibrant than if we don't have that so I'm adding some white dots and painting these orange and the closer to the source I get of course the more vibrant I want it to be and maybe I'm adding a bit of yellow as well not making it completely yellow as the core is but a bit brighter than the previous layer that's a bit further away from the core and this way we're already starting to see how punchy this orange is looking on this piece and it really contrasts well with this blue turquoise color that we have as the atmosphere light so in the core of this ball I want it to be the hardest so I'm blending in some whites first to create the base and then I'm adding in some yellows and blending oranges to really make it feel like it's hotter than the other part of the miniature for example on his face if you look at his face now it's mostly red with a bit of red orange to highlight some parts but it's kind of dark it's far away from the model and then closer to the core we have it yellow orange and it's really firing halt [Music] I promised that I would teach you some cheating hacks in the end of the video and here it is if you're having a hard time figuring out where light with hate buying a color filter putting it in front of a flashlight and taking a photo of your miniature using this light in different angles and then printing this light or bringing it into the computer and looking at this photo while you're painting is a great way of cheating and it will help you to understand where the light will hit and how it would look on your miniature so guys this is where we're at and I'm having a lot of fun still experimenting with OSL learning how it works learning how to apply the technique to the miniature in a creative way and don't be afraid of breaking rules don't be afraid of testing different colors maybe test some really saturated green yellows or maybe try some purples or Pink's just go nuts experiment and have fun so guys that's it for today and don't forget to subscribe and if you feel like you learned something had a bit of fun I'd love to see you join my patreon it's a great way of supporting this channel shout out to my top supporter Alvin and you get to take part of some cool rewards such as this epic discord channel we're hanging daily talking with some other squid links about miniature painting and it's life and having fun so feel free to check out the patreon and with that said have a great day bye

Channel: Squidmar Miniatures

Views: 268,087

Keywords: warhammer, miniature painting, painting warhammer, painting osl, warhammer osl, stormcast eternals, lord ordinator, gloomspite gitz, warhammer painting tips, learn to paint warhammer, warhammer effects, airbrush techniques, warhammer airbrush, Citadel Color, vallejo, harder steenbeck airbrush, glow effect warhammer, object source lighting, osl warhammer, object source lighting warhammer, osl miniature painting, how to paint minis d&d, d&d miniatures

Id: 4DR573EnCSU

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2019