Hobby Cheating 92 - How To Paint Black Hair

Hello, everybody and welcome to another hobby, cheating, video and today we're going to talk about black hair, doing black hair. I'Ve purposely saved this one for last, because it's the one I hate the most I've talked about blonde hair and I've talked about red hair and I suppose I guess I didn't truly saver for last Brown. It'S sort of the easiest color hair, but black hair black hair is tricky because painting black is one of the toughest colors to paint, because if you over highlight it looks false. If you under highlight it looks flat, it's very hard to accurately capture the light on black black also has very different highlights, depending on what exactly you're doing. Black metal reflects different black cloth and black leather than black satin and so on and so forth. But today we're going to talk about hair and one of the keys to doing black hair is that you have to have. It has to be extremely reflective in an extremely short amount of space. What I mean by that is: go look at the cover of like a box of Revlon. If you ever want to know how to paint hair, go look at the cover of boxes of hair dye. That is my advice to you, because you'll see that they have. They use computers, obviously to perfectly sculpt to the images, and so what you get is these wonderful crowns of light and every highlight and such as picked out so we're going to go through it today. Now, there's a couple different methods to getting highlights onto black hair. I'M going to walk through one of them that I prefer today I'll talk about some alternatives as we move through it on my palette here, I've got a bunch of different colors because I painted her. But specifically, what we're going to be using is a very dark. Blue, we have a black, we have a black gray, we have some lights and some near Gray's those kinds of things. So that's we're going to play with basically some White's, some Gray's and some blues. It helps to have some color in here, because hair has a natural Sheen if there are oils in it, and so it's going to reflect the other thing I'll say about black hair is never start with jet-black. One of the first things I see people do wrong. Is they start with jet-black? What you want is a dark gray black. So in this case, what we've used is fantasy games, scale, 75, Negro gray, okay. So this is a really great color. It'S a mere black, but not actually black, and so what it gives us is just a little bit of hint of a lighter color in there. Now, I'm working under extreme lighting conditions. Here I've tried to balance this out because I need to really see what I'm doing. But what we're going to do is we're going to start out and we're going to get a little of this sort of near grey on our brush and we want to decent enough flow to it. So I've got a color kind of like that on my brush. This is going to be very stark. What we're going to do is we're going to wipe it over here on my favorite towel test it on the back of the thumb we want it to flow, but we don't want it to run, there's a difference. So I'm wiping most of the paint off and then with my brush sideways. If the hair has texture with my brush sideways, what I'm going to do is just try to grab that texture, I'm being very light with this. We actually got a little too much off. You have to have very like the flow, for this is exact when you're doing the side of the brush. Okay, okay, because you don't want it to run down in between you - want to just we're just trying to there. We go we're just trying to hit those highlights, so we've got to just lightly touch the hair, catch, the strands, etc. Okay, we don't want to go farther than that. We don't want to catch anything else. We don't want to get it down in the deeper parts of the hair, we're just lightly caressing it we're going to keep the paint wet and flowing, but we're not going to, but we're not going to let it run. So that's why we're wiping out getting the excess liquid out? Okay, so we're just going to go around the crown very carefully with the side of the brush and create these highlights? What'S what we're going to do we're going to just follow the crown of the head around and then we're also going to just hit some space here in the front kind of build that in reinforce it a little stronger right up here on the edge where the Hair would go be thinner and then finally you're going to look for other places where the where the hair would be exposed upward. So you can see she has a little tilt in her hair right here. So we're going to just try to catch that. You want to turn the model around, so you got some nice angles now. I'Ve gone fairly stark with this purposely. This is not where we're stopping we're, just starting with a rather stark transition, because I want to be able to chart up to sort of block. In my colors and see where things need to be okay, so now you can see, I've got that little crown of light around the edge of her head. The next thing we're going to do is I'm going to take some of my dark blue and I'm going to mix it in here with that gray again, I want it to flow, but not run. Okay, then you notice how somehow much thinner. That is. It'S all. That'S not quite a glaze, but it's pretty darn close okay. Now I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the middle and I'm going to cover the edge of what I just did same technique by the way, if you don't like blue, if you don't want any kind of blue Sheen and their blue is nice Because your ear hair tends to be reflect the sky and we're going to be very subtle with this. But if you don't want to do blue, just replace this step with a darker gray, because what we're doing here effectively is just kind of blending it in. But having a nice blue Sheen makes it look nice. So we're going from the edges of the previous lines that we did and sort of using the blue to bridge the gap in between the bright gray and the black and we're going to do it on both sides. We'Re going to go up to the crown as well here to the very start, I should say up to the part: sorry, okay, again we're being very light with our touch, we're just moving in there. Okay! So now you can see, we've got a slight blue tint to it makes it look a little more reflective, alright next step, we're going to take some of that gray, but this time we're going to bring in some white and we're going to get some nice bright White in there so we're going real bright, okay and I'm going to find the central line of what I did before and I'm just going to lightly touch that space. I'M going to lightly touch the edges. You see I'm saying so, I'm just trying to pick the points of the most reflection out, really catch, that exact line where, where the the light would catch and the Sheen would be reflected very small little section. So now you can see, we've got this bright white little line around here by the way, if you don't have if the hair doesn't have texture if you're dealing with like flat texture, because some hair is like that where like on this, the strands are modelled. But if you have flat hair then you just need to do this with the tip of your brush. You go and you make these hashes okay. So now we've got a nice Sheen being built up and it's starting to look like the right reflection, but it's still too stark. Okay. So what we're going to do here now is we're going to go into a jet-black. This is a pure black paint and we're going to get a fairly runny version of it here. We want it to flow, so we're going to you know, use a little flow Aid, something like that. We don't want it to wash what we want it to run and we're using as you'll notice, I'm using a pretty sharp brush for all this. Now. What I'm going to do is from the top of the head down still too much paint in there. Oh yeah. Okay from the top of the head down, I'm going to get in between where I just did, and I'm going to trace some lines, I'm not covering any of the previous work, I'm just laying some pure jet-black in there. This is a very careful step. You have to balance your wrist against each other. You notice my wrists are locked. The only thing I'm moving is my fingertips. Very sharp brush, very accurate strokes. You just want little touches if you had any paint flow like I did here down the space. You don't want. This is also your chance to correct that like here, I got a little too strong with the brush, because I was at a weird angle on camera right there you can see that white spot. We can break that up by drawing a black line. Right to the middle of it to recorrect it, we can also reinforce shadows down here, a little bit where it's. This hair is really tucked in beneath the sword. We can kind of get that black. I apologize your swords kind of in the way of some of the camera there's some time. We'Re also going to find wherever the part of the hair is like for her it's right here, and we want to trace a little black line right there to really reinforce that part. Okay, alright! So now you can see the difference. Those black lines made right. Okay, so next step - and this can the next step could be your final step depending on how far you want to take something. What we're going to do is we're gon na go back to our original black gray and I'm going to make it a very thin glaze see how thin that is something like that. That might be a little too thin, but something close to that. We'Re going to test it there we go now. What we're going to do is we're just going to cover everything we just did very lightly and we want to build this up. Sorry, we want to build this up, so we're going to just go over everything. Make sure the paint touches everything and what we're trying to do is use this glaze to bring that Sheen back into order and smooth it all out. This will also knock some of the blue out, because you really don't want the hair to reflect blue okay. It'S black hair. It should be black, not blue, but you know you're, you you could just like a hint of blue does capture that pretty accurately. But again you don't want it to be like stark, starkly blue unless you're trying to paint like a sci-fi girl or something or die if you're trying to make like a cyberpunk character. So you let that dry and you see how the reflection looks. Is it right? It is still too blue, etc. If it is, you can just go in and rebuild some of that you can kind of smooth out some of the edges more cover, some of the spaces more basically you're, just working with it kind of pushing it around making sure you like what it is now, If you want, you can stop there and you can see. We'Ve got some fairly nice reflections, but if you like something once guess what the trick is to do it more times and doing this multiple times, but covering slightly different things, each time, it's how you get the natural striations of hair, one of the challenges with hair, As with anything like fur, or anything like that, is it's composed of lots and lots of little tiny strands right, like hair, isn't actually a uniform things, thousands of tiny little follicles or whatever or strands - I guess the follicles the base of the hair. But it's thousands. These little tiny hairs, and because of that it can be very hard to accurately represent the complexity of the thing on a miniature by adding some visual confusion by touching the miniature and repeating the same step. Multiple times, purposely not covering the exact same thing. Every time is a great way to create that visual layering that confuses the eye. Basically, what you're aiming for is the I can't tell the difference between you know: it's sort of hits sensory overload and once that happens, you're in the clear because they're the viewers, I doesn't distinguish anymore. What is it just said? It fills in the gaps and makes it feel like reality to the viewer. That'S the key! So it's not that I've actually painted a thousand individual hairs. Your brain just covers the difference, so I'm just going through this a second time you saw, I went back in there with a bright sheen. Now I'm coming in with my blue-black and I'm going to just kind of trace the edge a little bit here, but again not worrying about. If I got the exact same space, just creating some visual variation, that one was a little strong. So I just kind of go over it right and hit all those spaces go into my pure black, and maybe this time I look and see well, there's kind of a recess in her hair right here. I want to make sure that's really pronounced, create that depth. So I'm going to trace in a few careful black lines here by the way running the black lines. Next, to the light, is one of the keys like having a very that's. Why we didn't start on pure black, having the stark black lines be added in later. Is one of the real secrets because it then creates deeper shadows than the black hair? That'S actually on top, it would be reflecting lots of light, and so would actually look. You know fairly gray, to the eye and by having the very dark stripes running next to the very light stripes. It creates that contrast that makes the hair have depth. That'S the other thing you're trying to achieve with this is you're trying to capture you know. Hair has a lot of depth to it. There are layers to your hair if you've ever, if you've ever heard of somebody getting their hair layer to whatever right that kind of thing. Okay, alright! So now I take some of my white a little too runny there. You have to be really really in control of your paint consistency here, you always want it to flow, but never run so always always always be testing on the back of your thumb before you ever put paint to miniature okay, because if paint starts running and gets Down in the creases you've, undone all your work like you need to respect the strand, respect the strand all right and what we're trying to do is keep a tiny, tiny section, a very almost white that blends smoothly out into the dark gray and the black, and Why we're using a little bit of the blue, but by the way you could also use a lot of other colors. If you've got an OS L element, you can use an OS L element to smooth it out, but the reason you want to do that is because you need to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of space. We need to go from pretty stark white down to black, so the way we do, that is by glazing right, where you were purposely putting the brighter color over more space than we would necessarily want and then using glazes to kind of control. It smooth the edges and create very natural blends okay, so this is just me repeating the same thing, a second time to really control that get those shadows in there. Okay, so there you go, we've got a nice little haircut. It looks a little more blue. A little more bright I'll have a photo at the end. What I'm going to do is sit here and what you just saw me do twice: off-camera I'm going to do this, probably two more times at least make sure I've got the exact right spacing all the way around. The crown of the head make sure the tip of the hair here is nice and reflective at the very point and then just basically work my highlight and then glaze it down and then work my highlight and then glaze it down and build in some more deep Shadows each time not worrying about covering the exact same space. In fact, I'm purposely covering different amounts of space, because I want to create that tonal variation that leads to the visual confusion that makes you think, hey I'm looking at thousands of little hairs. So there you go, that's how you do black hair. Like I said, if you don't want to use the blue, you could also use brown black hair off and drifts into sort of Auburn colors. So you can use dark Browns. You can use dark purples. You know, even depending on the other elements around the miniature you could use reds or greens or stuff like that, as long as they're, very muted and dark, they will look natural as long as they fit with the environment. You know don't go, don't throw red on there if it's the only red miniature, but if the person standing on sort of a lava base and it's a fire scene yeah, you could use a little D, saturated deep, like whole red to bridge the gap between your White and your black, and it will make the miniature feel like it - lives in that environment with a very minimal. It'S almost an OSL effect, but what it really does is just kind of capture the ambiance of the light that's bouncing around in the air in the sheen of the hair. Okay. So there you go that's black hair. It is both startlingly simple and incredibly time-consuming and complicated all at the same time. Hence why we waited so long to do this video, but I do hope it was helpful, like I said, I'll have a photo at the end. All I'm going to do is repeat what you just saw me do a couple more times give it a like if you liked it, if you found it helpful, subscribe for more hobby cheating in the future, share it with somebody. If you feel like it would be helpful to them, that is always the nicest thing you can do and very deeply appreciate it and, as always, we'll see you next time,