Techniques: Contrast Paints.

hey everybody in this video we're going to be showing you how I like to use and think about citadel contrast paints from Games Workshop which are a fantastically useful tool for your painting especially when using amongst other various kinds of paints that are out there now there are a couple of key things that you need to understand about these paints to get the best out of them and we're going to be going through that in this video so we really hope you enjoy it we'll see you the desk [Music] so the first thing to ask is what exactly is a contrast paint and at first glance it will look a lot like a shade paint or a wash but actually it's different and it's important when it's done a difference the idea of them is that they combined both the base coating stage of painting miniature and then the washing stage of that color into one step and the main advantage of this of course is that it makes things much much quicker it also means you can get some really nice bright vibrant colors too but there are some drawbacks to it that you need to be aware of and the first is that they're transparent so the color you put down before the contrast paint is really important and get all sorts different effects by changing this the second thing is that they are a little bit runny and can be quite free-flowing so if you're not careful they can run out of control so you do need to apply them neatly and evenly as well I'm going to illustrate this by painting the power arm of a space cream first of all I'm going to paint it like an ultramarine so we're going for blue the colour of course I need is ultramarine blue and well we're going to talk a little bit this bit more in depth later but there's actually different sorts of contrast panes and you'll find over time they behave slightly differently now the kind I'm using here is a slightly chalky one really and you can really see it it's standing out with that sort of whiteness that you get on the bottom of the paint pot and that is the pigment collecting at the bottom there this isn't a problem if you shake it enough that will go away but you can ease to help rectify that by getting hold of a ball bearing which is what I've got just here and all you do is drop it into the paint pot which just helps stir things up a little bit more there we go here right now that will help get rid of that and again you just keep on mixing it and eventually that white will go away but to be honest with you it's not really a big problem you don't you to worry about if it looks like this and you're ready to go for this straightaway as it is so what we're doing is starting to apply this to the power armor now a really important thing to think about is that when you put this on slapping time in loads is not a good idea because it tends to run and collect towards the bottom of the model so instead what you should do is apply it thinly and evenly and think of it almost like felt-tip pens okay so I'm going for a paintbrush that's not too big for this if you're doing a larger model you want to have a larger brush but this one is a regiment brush from the army painter really good size the kind of area that we're covering here and it's a good idea to get someone to the pallets who sort of see how it behaves as well you can water this paint down with water if you want to if you go for a certain amount though if you really doing a lot you'll want to use some of the contrast medium instead because after a while it will start to break down the formula of the paint but a little bit of water is fine however straight out the pot is just fine that's what I'm going for here and I'm just using the part to make sure that my brush isn't overloaded with paint but there is some on there with that done we can now start applying it to the model so pick a good starting point and what you want to do is go for one end of the model I usually find a foot as a good starting point here so I'm going to start down here what you do is pick that single panel and just start coloring it in like this working your way around all the way to the back there like that and notice that once I put some on to an area I'm not going back to it I'm just carrying on until I've completed that whole segment and once we've done so we'll see how it's settling so remember I said it was different from shape paints where you can really see the difference here because around the front of this foot I just get the side right there you can see how it settled down and gone evenly across the whole area like that now if I was using washers or shades what would happen is it would leave a lot more white showing through there and it would really run into the corners a lot more but this way it's just stained the whole surface giving me a really nice smooth finish to it so what you can then do is carry on doing this on a larger surfaces too for example this one here I'm going to start applying it all the way across here now it is important that once you start applying it that you don't come back to it because what happens is on that foot for example the paint now drying is settling like that and if I start moving it it effectively tears the surface and it'll give a really uneven finish to things but instead you see if I'm just carrying on moving away from it I get a much nicer more even finish to it so carry on like this picking one panel out at a time and this way you'll get a nice smooth finish to the paint the ultramarines blue is now completely dry and you can see in the textured areas it gives nice definition but on the larger flatter panels it does go a little bit patchy just because of how bright that undercoat of gray sea air is compared to the blue that we're using now and this isn't a problem because what you can do with contrast paints is apply two thin coats of it and that applying a second coat just helps even the color out a little bit more so that's what I'm gonna do now still using the same brush so this is still my regiment version the army painter and I'm going to be applying the ultramarine blue once again in the same method as before if you want dilute with a little bit of water you can do so it's not quite so strong but he depends on the color that you're using but all you do is follow the same method to apply it once more and you'll see whilst the color becomes a little bit stronger it does become much more even with that second coat applied you can see the colors darker but it is much more even especially on those smooth areas like that shoulder plate just there and with that done you could then move on to highlighting if you wanted to however with these guys because macragge blues signature color of the ultramarines what i want to do is very quickly apply a glaze of that into the our minister even it out and to bring it to that color and then I'm going to highlight it using cowgirl blue the first of all in the Krag blue what I'm going to do is go for my medium layer brush for this and two glazing this kind of thing it should be a very quick stage very easy to do what you do is just get a little bit of this paint and then dilute it with a bit more water than you normally would use so it's quite thin so a bit more there we go so there's quite thin quite runny like that then to get rid of the excess offices on some tissue read over over at the brush so it's not much on there and then what you do on the flat panels just apply a single even coat of this all across the flat area like this just to give that nice smooth finish to it and to bring it to that macragge bloom into now you see that glaze nicely establishes that mid tone for the armor and then we're ready to highlight it you could of course drybrush it I'm gonna go for an edge harlot cowgirl blue though following along all the sharp edges just to pick them out and help them stand out and with that the blue of this power armor is complete and you can see what a lovely smooth finish it's given to the armor and also you can see that basically what the contrast paint has done has taken the first two stages and put them together so the base coat and the shading and then we just laid in highlighted as normal this way we've got smooth finish with no brush marks on it and there's been much quicker - especially we help to avoid that a recess aiding stage on the power armor but the next I'm gonna do is show you another technique with this paint and now you can actually use it as a shading paint or a wash and it gives a nice smooth finish to it and works particularly well in there's a lots of texture and especially on metallic details as well that's where we got to use this for it now we're going to do is start painting some gold detail on this space we're in here to show you what we mean for it and I'm gonna be using the medium layer brush from sitting off of this I'm using retributive rahmatu base coat like this and what we want to do to begin with is just with true blocking all the details that we want to be gold so for this model I'm going to be looking at the shoulder pad trim and also this little detail we've got in the center of the chest just here as well and you could do the exact same thing using self if you wanted to but this example I'm just going to stick with the gold details I finished blocking in the gold and now I can move on to using the contrast paint to provide that definition and shading for it and remember earlier on when we were using the ultramarine blue house on it was a particular kind of contrast page actually there's stronger ones and there's weaker ones the ultramarine blue is a sort of a medium strength one and for this what we want to do is use the weaker one so it doesn't dominate the color that were painting it over too much especially with these metallics so there's two that are really good for this kind of thing first of all ghulam and flesh is fantastic for gold details and then basilican gray is fantastic for silver details we of course are going to be using government flesh here once we painted it on well then do an edge highlight on the gold for this I'm going to use Liberator gold but with a government fish all you got to do is paint over the details that we've now prepared taking advantage of the fact that the contrast paint is see-through and this works particularly well in areas and lots of texture so this paints got lots of areas really stick to remember the contrast paints rather than running all over the place into recesses and mostly off the tops of areas of detail tend to stick over the entire thing in taint the whole thing with color so further areas would texture like this on these rivets it's absolutely perfect and all you do is just paint it straight over like this and be like with the blue start painting on an area and then carry on from there I go back to it once you first painted it on you see it's settling really nicely already and giving a lovely bit of texture to that gold that contrast paint is now completely dry and you can see it just really shades it really really nicely and all we need to do now is apply highlights I'm using Liberator gold now just as a quick edge highlight and all the sharpest areas on the gold and there we are I can see the finish results in the gold the contrast paint just gives a really lovely smooth sense of shading on there it's really really nice so a great little technique to know now the next thing I look at is the really strong contrast paints because these are incredibly useful in fact saw them I consider to be almost toolbox colors I always have around just because they're so helpful first of all I like to use wild wood for this which is a really dark brown and also black Templar which is of course black and these colors are useful because they're so strong essentially whatever you paint them over they'll dominate it and turn it into that relevant color so for example if you just quickly wanted to paint the bulk on this space ring black black Templars a great way of doing it really quickly and really easily as a great little technique and using these paints called fine lining which they're particularly good at and fine lining is essentially painting dark colors into the recessed details in the miniature to help separate all the colors and make them pop more and in fact if you look at some older miniatures these are often had this technique done on them which is why they pop out so much now to do it it's that simple what you need to do is get hold of finer brush don't do this with black temple art for this using a detail brush on the army painter it's really important that you get one with a fine tip this what you need to do is just get so you chose in color let's get ideas dilute there's a little bit of water so it's not too strong straight up apart you can see just how strong that color is it's such a strong inky black thing there and then what we need to do is just go just a small amount let's load it up fine tip on the brush and what we want to do is take advantage of the property of the paint to allow it to run into recessed details where you want to separate them so for example the golden and the blue if I wanted to separate those a little bit more and make them stand out all I do is just let the brush just run it into the recesses and between the two like that and just gently run all the way down and there we go we get a strong black line separating them so it's kind of like inking in a comic book of the way and also it allows you to look for any of the tall mistakes for example where some that gold slipped over into that recess and by just painting this black over the top you just completely take that away and lean this up also you can use this to separate panels at the same color and make them stand out from each other a little bit more such as the knee plate just here it's very easy to run this black into that recess there like that so this is like an optional extra stage when you're doing detail such as power armor but you can see the difference it makes is really nice just helping those colors stand out a little bit more and there we are without finelining applied you can see just help separate all those colors and in fact by following those techniques it's possible to get a really nice paint space ring by just doing it just like that but of course that's not the limit as to what contrast paint can do because now what we're gonna do is look at how you can use the free-flowing nature of it to get some really cool blended effects on things by actually mixing the paint on the miniature itself to do this what I've got as a plague marine which I've under coated using the Rathbone spray color in here here's what we're gonna do is do some cool effects on the skin that we've got just down here and do this I'm going to be using a few different panes first of all I've got some ghullam and flesh and also some bloopers pink and you can introduce as many other colors to this as you like but what you do is start out with a medium layer brushes a good size for this sort of thing and we're gonna do is start out by painting in an area just like we were doing with the blue earlier on the intersection starting to fill it in so I'm going to do that at the top or this kind of like tentacle we've got just here and I'm just gonna start around about there letting the paint flow into all that detail and to give our definition and color including this little tentacle that we've got just over here and the idea here is that we just want to get some on and whilst it's still wet we're going to introduce another color to it and allow the two colors to mix across the middle so I want to bring it down to around about there there we go and now it's time to wash the brush to get a little bit of loopers pink and I just want a small amount of this which I'm going to dial it with a bit of water because this is one of the stronger ones there we go and then I can start introducing this towards the bottom like this and because I paint it they're still wet if I go back and forth across the middle it starts to mix the two which helps one fade into the other there like that you see so by doing this it's possible to get some really creepy horrible effects that works particularly well for Nergal things you find the cause a little bit too strong is possible to just quickly jump back to the other one and to apply some of that above it like that to tone it down and you can see can go back and forth like this so long as the paint still kept wet and that way you can get some great results the contrast paint is dry and here you can see the completed effect and to really finish it off what I'm going to do is highlight all this with Kislev flesh over both colors at the same time just to help really tie those colors together now at the same time I'm going to be base coating this pipe that we've got just here because next we're going to show you another effect but to do so we need to make sure the area's base coated with a color first of all I'll do on this pipe so just going to make sure all this is blocked in ready for that and there we are the highlights been applied and you can see the completed effect on that horrible creepy claw it's really simple to do but it looks great and also we can now move on to that pipe because sometimes you're going to want to do is a blending effect but not from one color to the other using to contrast paints instead something where you actually blend in the color into the one that's actually beneath it so in this case what you can use is contrast medium instead which is the same as a regular contrast paint except it's got no actual color in it which means you can use it the same manner so we're gonna do that now using Megos purple on the tentacle thing I've gone about pipe on the face and for this I'm using a medium layer brush what we'll do is apply this just as we did before starting out with some of them a cos purple and just gonna pick one side to apply this on I'm going to start up here to all the top of the pipe and just apply this over some of it there like that and then whilst it's still wet I'm gonna quickly wash my brush off well then get some contrast medium there we go and then to start applying this on the other side around the two colors to mix in the middle and you can see what happens is I get a very very diluted version further down the pipe and it gets much stronger towards the top giving a lovely blended effect going from one color to the other and this of course is a very simplistic example of showing how this can be done but you can do it on lots and lots of more models and much more complex ways for example on claws on miniatures you can have the color getting stronger towards the end of the claws and then lighter towards the center of the body and with the paint dry here you can see the completed blended effect super easy to do and it looks great as well and should you want the color to be a little bit stronger you can always apply a second coat and have put it on in the same way and there we are you can see that contrast paints are a fantastically useful tool and something worthy of having in your collection we really hope you enjoyed this video and we'll see you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy

Views: 415,258

Keywords: Duncan Rhodes, Duncan Rhodes Painting Academy, Miniature Painting, Wargaming

Id: JJGqInWb2yo

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Two thin coats using contrast? Duncan you absolute mad lad.

[u/Gibblibits]

This guys taught me how to paint like half of my models, the least I can do is subscribe.

[u/woodyay]

Because it goes against the narrative that people are trying to push of Duncan leaving GW over contrast paints.