Painting Like the Warhammer Box Art is a LIE

[Music] [Music] there's a job you're gonna do for us what how you'll be supplied with all the tools you need no no no ah the sirens call that is that sweet sweet warhammer box art now don't act like you haven't grabbed your boxes off your shelves and stared longingly into those tiny painted eyes and they really do a good job of making us feel that painting like the box art is within our grasp don't they they even go so far as on the back of the box they give us the color breakdown of exactly how they were painted and even on the build instructions have nice little lines that show us these colors are exactly how we painted this and i can hear you saying john that's not them saying that's how they painted the model that's just giving you the color scheme what i submit that they are in fact absolutely implying that by using the color scheme on the back of the box you can achieve the same results as the box art so today let's test it for this test i will be using a random plague marine from the new space marine heroes series 3 box these models are so friggin cool and who doesn't love a blind bag opening i'm looking at you youtube kids watchers it looks like we pulled good old gerg the fowl in his rad zombie face and two cute little pinkie pie nurglings after priming black i work a solid coat of death guard green over the whole model that's the base coat for the armor which takes up the majority of the model so we may as well knock out that early if you don't have an airbrush you can either use games workshop's primer spray death guard green or base coat with a brush be sure to use two thin coats or the gates to the nine hells will open in your refrigerator a lot of the different materials on this model are all shaded with agrax earthshade according to the back of the box so let's save ourselves a little bit of time and base coat all of those first and then we can wash them all in one pass and i know i did say that i was gonna use all the paints that games workshop recommends on the back of the box but i did have to make one exception look i just cannot bring myself to use games workshop metallic paints anymore they're just so much worse than many of the other brands out there in terms of coverage shine and size of the metallic flakes so i just matched colors that they use for the far superior pro-acryl metallics and i do have a link below in the video description should you want to check these out and i've got a 10 off coupon no less [Music] when i got to the parts of the model that were supposed to be painted black i realized that we already have our first little fib by games workshop these aren't exactly true or bad in black they're not that dark so i decided to make a call and mix in some dark reaper which was the first edge highlight color with a bed in black and base coat them in this color and this looks just like the box art does you'll notice that for the majority of the paint job today i'm using a pretty small brush way smaller than i typically use and we certainly don't need to use a tiny brush to paint like the box art but because it's such a crisp and precise style i felt that making mistakes would be more of a pain than usual to fix so i painted as slow and steady and as precisely as i could after my first all-over pass of egg rack's earth shade dries i come in with a second pass just to specific parts i want to make sure that all the spots where the armor panels meet gets extra dark as well as those pock marks and cracks in the armor and all of the little rivets around the metal i find this is an important step to replicate the box art because in the games workshop painting system they never go back and get darker than this this is our opportunity to get our darkest darks on the model so we need to do it now [Music] now is where the real heavy lifting starts and that's starting to highlight our materials and we're going to start with the armor and this is where games workshop tells its biggest and most egregious lie it tells us that we are to go back in and layer on these lighter colors layer consistency is quite opaque and will create a very stark definition where you place it compared to where you don't the box artists are certainly not layering their paint on sections like the armor they're glazing which is a much much thinner paint consistency that slowly builds up to the new color over many passes glazing an entire model is a massive test in patients you need so many coats usually i'm doing a minimum of five layers of glaze over each section of the model and you have to let the surface completely dry between each one and you have to make sure the end of your brush stroke is where you want the majority of the paint to deposit so when painting a brighter color the brush stroke should end where you want the brightest highlight to be [Music] oh and i like to add a little bit of flow aid or flow improver when i'm mixing up my glazes in addition to a bit of water what this does is it gives us a little bit longer working time and the paint doesn't separate so much as pure water can tend to do this means that this very thin paint won't dry quite so fast on the model surface and give us the chance of creating any ripping or tearing of the paint particles the back of the box tells us to go right into layering with ogre and camo which is our highlight color but that certainly isn't the truth with the box art they go back to the base color death guard green again and glaze up because we have that egg rack's earth shade over it would be too stark of a difference to go right into our highlight color so i do five to eight passes over every bit of the armor with glazing of death guard green and then i do a 50 50 mix of death guard green and ogre and camo do the same five to eight glazing layer step and then finally pure ogre and camo for another five to eight layers this is the opposite of speed painting but i will say this learning to paint in this style with so many layers of glazing will make you a better painter look i don't glaze this much in my usual paint style but i do use glazing to help create those nice smooth transitions and all this practice will serve you well and our final step of the armor is to edge highlight with krieg khaki now i've got a couple of tips that i try to use to not screw up my edge highlighting so often it still happens but it happens less with these tips first i make sure my paint isn't too thin i keep it a layer consistency if your paint's too thin it means you're going to have to go back in a second or third pass for your edge highlight to really build up that color ain't nobody got time for that and speaking of the paint i make sure that i wick off my brush on a paper towel prior to starting the edge highlight this makes sure most of the moisture is sucked out of the brush as well as that extra paint this will ensure that you get a nice crisp edge highlight instead of the paint bleeding over and getting that fat edge highlight that nobody likes and finally don't be afraid to move the model around to get an ideal angle for you to hit that edge this is much easier to achieve than putting your hands in all sorts of awkward positions to get that right edge highlight remember we're using the side of the brush not the tip so we just want to get that correct 45 degree angle from the edge to the brush for a great edge highlight the metallic step is pretty straightforward i do go back in with the base color again to brighten up some spots that would catch more light and then use the highlight color to hit the edges that would have a stronger shine [Music] earlier i alluded to the dangers of making mistakes using this paint style and it's really because of the inherent steps of base coat plus wash that we start with if i make a mistake i simply can't go back in with my base color and fix it because it's not just that color anymore it's that color plus the tint of the wash over the top and i can't just base coat plus wash again over a mistake because the wash will leave a coffee stain on the edges and i'm not saying don't use washes i think they're a great tool that we should all have in our arsenal all i'm saying is it's a bit frustrating that the painting style most often taught to new painters is also one that is very unforgiving to making mistakes which we're all gonna make well john if this isn't the way we should be starting out as a painter or even trying to improve as a painter what is it's a great question and if there was an easy answer of a simple step-by-step process that would be better than this i think you'd probably already know about it wouldn't you if i had an idea of how to actually improve this method and still keep it simple and easy to follow for all of us as new painters i think what i would do is save the wash step to the very end other than the final edge highlight this way if i make mistakes in the process i can go back and fix them and then i still get the benefits of the wash at the end and i get those nice crisp edge highlights as well i will admit that one great benefit of learning to paint like the box art is it really is the same steps over and over again just with different colors so we get a lot of repetitions in to improve our brush control in overall final product every part of the model follows the same steps we've just covered base coat wash glaze up with the base coat again 50 50 mix of base coat and highlight then pure highlight slap on some edge highlights if needed and move on to the next part of the model [Music] [Music] like a big dummy i decided to paint all sorts of details on and around the base before i painted the dirt itself that's backwards i should have painted this dirt right after i painted the whole model death guard green this way i can go through with the wash and the dry brush and not worry about hitting other parts of the base you live and you learn [Music] for the life of me i could not find the recipe for games workshop and how to paint pink nerglings i looked all over on the internet i checked every box art i checked the back of the instruction books i couldn't find it but i did find how to paint their kind of irritated tentacle things so i decided to paint the nurglings the same way and see how that went [Music] and unfortunately when they were done these nerglings did not end up looking very much like those on the box art they seemed way too pale and not pink enough and i was certainly too lazy to repaint them a second time with 50 more layers of glaze so i decided to thin down some mephiston red into a very very thin glaze so it looks mostly like water with just a hint of red to it i then glazed this down into the shadows of all the flesh of the nerglings trying to bring at least some of that pink color in i think they are my least successful aspect of this overall reproduction of the box art but i think that came down to me not having that coveted paint list on the back of the box for pink nerglings pink nargling's color scheme make it happen i saved painting that sweet zombie looking face for last now again i did not know exactly what colors they used for this part luckily my guess of rack art flesh then ethonian camo shade then up to pallid witch flesh seemed to be correct [Music] faces are such a focal point on our models that i did this last so i could give it a little bit more love especially to his lone remaining eyeball in those sexy boils [Music] so here he is what do you think are those simple paint instructions on the back of the boxes all we need to recreate these awesome looking box art models to me it's a yes but yes those colors on the back of the box are all you need to have your models look just like the box art and that's pretty sweet i now know that i only need four paints to make my death guard army's armor all look just like that of the box art but but the way that they actually utilize those four paints to get that box art paint job is not accurate they're lying to us there and honestly i'm fine with that because when we're new painters we don't need extra obstacles that make us feel overwhelmed to even pick up a brush we want to feel that those results are achievable and they are but for now those few simple steps will come up with great models even if they're not as good as the box are if you made it this far thank you thank you for sticking around to the end of the video and thank you subscribers for being standard bearers in our slayers of the gray army if you like what i do and you want to support me to help continue to make videos you can check out my patreon link in the video description that'll show you all the cool rewards that i offer be good to one another and i'll see you soon egg racks egg racks are a shade egg rocks earth shade red leather yellow leather egg rags egg rags egg racks earth shade egg that's hard to say agrax earth shade

Channel: Ninjon

Views: 538,645

Keywords: warhammer, painting warhammer, painting warhammer 40k, painting death guard, painting space marines, painting age of sigmar, miniature painting, mini painting, mini painting 101, miniature painting tutorial, beginner miniature painting, miniac, army painting, duncan rhodes, games workshop, death guard 9e, warhammer 40k 9th edition

Id: iTJMipsp1_s

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021