Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about making your steel look better and to do that we're going to start with some actual examples of real armor. When we're talking about steel armor you'll notice right away that there are lots of different ways that the light interacts with it. The highlights are in near white and things fall into deep shadows. Here we can see it in reality on a movie set in real ambient light. You can see those bright hot reflections but also those deep, deep dark, lightless shadows. The other thing you'll notice is that sometimes there's texture. Things can look a little rough so we're going to work all of that into our armor. I'm going to start by laying down a nice coat of just the Leihau metal color steel as always I trust the Leihau metal colors. I do this with an airbrush if you don't have an airbrush you can just apply it with a brush. No big deal. This is just getting down a solid base coat. Important part is to have a smooth base layer of the metals to work from. Once that's ready to go now it's time to take control of the light and that's the important part. A true metallic metal reflects everywhere so as you move the miniature around its reflection points are going to change. We need to take control of that light so we're going to use steel which is our normal tone we used silver for our white highlights and black just regular matte paint to create shadows. We want to control the light, control those reflections, not necessarily destroy them. That's what you see me mixing in some of the metal paint here. And you'll notice I'm just creating some areas that I think would be interesting shadows. Here I'm using an old space marine because it has a lot of interesting shapes on it that will allow us to demonstrate as well. Whatever the case you just need to create those areas where the light isn't reflecting by mixing in the matte black paint. Now it doesn't need to be perfect in this first application. You're just effectively sketching in shadows, placing areas where you want the light to be less impactful. After along the cylinder that is the legs I'm going to create bands of light and shadow as the light travels around the cylindrical object. When it's a globe it's going to be the lower part such as the backpack piece it's going to be the lower part of the globe that's cast in shadow. Okay. Now you'll notice when I turn them around there there's still light reflecting off black because the paint still wet. So we need to let it dry. Once it dries you can see we have a much better understanding of what's matte. You'll also notice that there are very hard lines in between the shiny reflective paint of the steel and the more matte influenced paint of our shadows. That's okay. We don't have to live with that forever. It's not a problem. But our next step is to get our highlights in there. For that we're going to use pure silver. And if you don't have the exact the lay-ho metal color silver any really really really really bright steel is going to work. What you're trying to show is those areas that when the light hits it it's going to reflect in pure white. Again contrast matters with true metal paints just like it does with non-metal paints. So I place those in there again roughly. There's very hard lines between the two and that's okay. Then I take a little 50-50 mix of this steel, my base tone and the silver. And you know what I'm just kind of tracing the edges. Just kind of fuzzing them out there. Working the paint together. Now I'm going to take that same paint and thin it way down into a glaze. Most metal paints don't make glaze as well. The lay-ho metal color is a notable exception. Don't worry we're going to cover other methods for doing this later if you're using other metal paints and you can't make a glaze. But the reason that I'm working that in as a glaze is to push some of that reflective, shiny metal pigment into those less reflective areas. What we need to do is blur that line in between what is reflective and what isn't. So that it's not a hard edge between reflective shiny metal paint and matte acrylic paint. But instead you get this fade of minor amounts of shine transitioning up into very bright metals. Alright, so I went ahead and painted the rest of the marine. Got him the highlights on there, but some of our transitions are still a little harsh. So now we're going to talk about the methods for smoothening them out. The first option is we can almost basically feather or kind of a dry brushing with the metal paint on a flat surface. What I did is I took some of that silver and I worked most of it off my brush. And then I'm just really roughly just kind of feathering it in very lightly, focusing on the edge lines in between the two, creating lots of little tiny lines, scratches, dots, and just a roughness to it. With most acrylic paints, that wouldn't look that great. But with metals, remember the metal helmet we looked at earlier. That roughness can be an advantage. The other thing we can do is we can just wet blend it out. Let's grab some silver wet paint, slap it on there. Then let's go straight into the steel, slap a bunch of that on there. Let's grab some of that black paint, slap that on there, and then let's work them all together. Wipe the brush, and then we just draw all three colors together. This is actually one of my favorite methods with metallic paints, because it's so easy with something like belayo metal colors, which stays wet, you can just work it together. Now edge highlights are so important. As you can see in real life here, there are bright edges reflecting in this metal armor. Look at how those edges on those leg grooves are caught. To sell the effective metal, we have to do the same thing. Which means dark lines in between the various plates and bright lines on the edges. The first thing I do is I just take my matte black and I'm just doing some black lining. Basically, tracing dark edges in between all of the expressed deep recesses of the armor. Space marine armor is great for this. They're riddled with it. But of course, you don't have to use external black paint. You could use ink, you could use oil washes, or a panel liners, or anything you want to use. The point is, at about this part in the process, black everything else out and get all those dark lines in there, it'll let you see the real reflections better. Went ahead and put some gold in there too. Just so we could get everything that wasn't steel, colored how it was, and see how our reflections are looking. Now that we've made the dark lines, we've got to make the bright edges. For that, we go straight into our silver and we just trace the edges of that again. Once again, this is a place where Vallejo metal color shines because it's so liquidy, it's like an ink. It's just incredibly easy to edge highlight things. But notice how I'm going to turn the miniature all around. Use the edge of the brush whenever possible, not the tip to just draw the sharp, defined edges everywhere where they exist. You have to sell the effect just like we do with non-metallic and bright edges, selling it with metal paints and silver edges is just as important. The next thing to consider with better true metals is reflections. Notice this armor is in a red room and you can see that color reflected in the armor. Now most of our armor doesn't sit in museum rooms with strange colored maw walls. Since instead, our colors that we most often use are something like brown and blue. Here I've got Cpian ink and blue ink, but again it doesn't matter. I start with a really really thin filter. Notice how absolutely thin that is. It's barely there. Ink is naturally transparent. It's great for adding filters to your true metals. It makes them pop, it makes them look like they're part of a world, like they're reflecting stuff around them. Even one simple application will add a little bit of color and because ink is transparent and slightly satin, it will make it so the line in between shiny metal paints and matte shadows gets blurred even more. So if you're having problems getting a smooth blend on the transition, this kind of a filter of transparent satin inks can be a great way to go. The key is that blue and brown are sort of the colors of nature we would most commonly expect. If you apply brown, it makes things look dirty, it makes them look old, and it makes like they're looking in an earthen war environment. Blue on the other hand is the sky, and when you apply blue, it effectively makes things look shinier, look new, or look futuristic. You can apply, again, I started a little thicker here, but you can apply it as a very thin filter and just get a slight blue sheen, or you can be a little heavier, something like a gray night's effect. You notice how the brown side looks older, and the blue side looks newer, fresher, cleaner. We can also take just a slight amount of that blue paint and actually mix it in. This isn't making a colored metallic, it's just adding a little bit of a tone of color into our metallics, and if you know the color you want to use, you can do this right from the beginning. Wet blending just like you saw me do on the shoulder pad before, but with the colored metallics as part of your steps or the color influenced metallics. But by adding these colors in, it makes the metal feel more realistic, like it's part of a world, like it's part of the environment. You can also make it, you can include both, you can have the brown on downward facing angles and the blue on upward facing angles to represent a traditional sort of sky earth. But there you go, that's better metallics. I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got any questions on these techniques, drop them down in the comments below. I always answer every comment that's asked. If you've got suggestions for future hobby cheating, hey drop those down there too. I'd love to see them. But as always, I very much appreciate you watching this one, and we'll see you next time.