I absolutely love how you break everything down for those of us who are new to to the medium! Thanks a bunch! 😁

I demand a demonstration video of you painting a figure/vehicle/? with these under-painting concepts! And by demand, I mean PLEASE? I thank you for all that you do for us.

I feel like I just attended an art class back in college. For the last two years I have been painting miniatures just for the enjoyment of painting. I really don't intend to play, giving life to the metal and plastic characters is just therapeutic for me. Gonna attempt under painting on Wulfrik the Wanderer after I finish the current mini. Thank you, I have subscribed and I don't subscribe to many people either :0)

You are the Bob Ross of miniature painting :)

I just painted 151 various minis for DnD in 35 days using the method of priming in black then white from above and relying heavily on Daler Rowney Acrylic Artist Inks. This technique works. Thanks, Atom!

Airbrush is Cheating! So is using Brushes! Fingerpainting is the real thing!

Way better tutorials than gw. Watched six in a row and loads of ideas!

I've been painting my own minis for over 25 years. I still learn new things from different people all the time. I just found your videos and look forward to seeing more of your technique.

I've been binging your videos all day today, and I have to say that I am so glad I came across your channel. I'm just now getting into WH40K with my girlfriend (I'm T'au, she is Necrons), and we have been kinda scared to just jump into building and painting our Start Collecting sets and have been testing color schemes and techniques on some Space Marine and Ork units we got from a friend. You give fantastic advice and have boosted my morale with jumping into this. Thank you for the wonderful content.

So, so helpful. So, so standard, easy language to understand for us non-art people. Thanks!

Thank you, for the tips. I've been painting for past ten years. and have been trying push myself to next level of Miniature Painting. This video has given me some good ideas of how to do this.

Sir, You are a God !!! These are seriously prof'l tips. Thanks so much for sharing ! Also, the wet pallet one...

Love watching your vids, but would be nice to see what your talking about like the comparisons between hot and cold on models in a split screen style Other than that love the videos

Superb tips there as always, many thanks. Just watching these makes me want to get my paint box out again.

i watched this video several times and showed it to a couple of friends who also paint. very good explanation. would give this video two thumbs up if i could.

I can confirm exactly what you said about Secret Weapon Washes being intended for glazing and coloring over shades or each other.

Wow, the old video and this mic has a real Bob Ross feel to it! I love it

Great video. I learn way more than just pre shading from this one video!

If you are like me you almost certainly will have spare figures from kits you bought. I use these for experimenting with colour schemes. So here is an exercise for inexperienced painters to get a feel about what Uncle Atom is saying. Get 3 figures in the same pose, (I have a bunch of DE for this). Then undercoat one in black, one in grey and one in white. Then paint all 3 figures with the same colour on top. Red is a really good colour for this exercise as it is really hard to get it to show at all on black and shines like a Christmas decoration on white. If you don't want to do it on figures just use some cardboard. There wont be the same shadow effect of a raised surface but you will still see the impact of each undercoat.

Exactly the video I needed to watch. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience.

Light from above, Azimuth priming, very good. Listen to this fellow, he knows his stuff :) Another good video.

This reminds me of a friend whose "hero" characters were always primed and undercoated in gunmetal or silver paint. It made the character sort of seem to glow, and really helped them stand out a bit more on the table. Also did it with a Necron army before painting normal colours over them, and they came out still looking mostly metallic even though there wasn't a single metallic paint used on the top layer of the model.

It makes sense that you preshade models to get correct and realistic lighting effects, after all that is a classic oil painting technique for portraits (start with full greyscale shading of people then topped with layers and glazed layers of thin translucent skin tones), it’s what gives oil paintings their beautiful depth and realism.

This reminded me of a course I took some years ago about the Flemish Old Masters techniques. The main reason was that back then colour pigments were very expensive (sme made from ground gemstones). So they first painted a monochrome picture using just Burnt Umber and White. (both cheap pigments) using about 5 or 6 different shades. The result was a realistic Sepia picture. They then applied the precious colours as glazes and washes over the top. For an example look for "The Girl with a Pearl Eari9ng" by Vermeer. The same applies here and you could paint a full 3d looking miniature using only black and grey o Brown and white and finish as you stated in the video.

One of the best and most informative videos for hobbyist painting. Thanks mate!

Thanks for your contribution to us painters. Really appreciate it.

I have just started painting miniatures and would love it if you did a video on some basics, simply putting down thin layers. I can't seam to do it without leaving obvious brush mark's. My friends taught me how to dry brush, however now that I am starting in the hobby I am starting to look at glazes and more of a wet brush. I enjoy your attitude towards the hobby, keep the video's coming.

Great job as per usual, I'd like to suggest folks to refer to the blood rage box set tutorials (search blood rage painting guide) on KZfaq. The painter does a very good job of showing step by step how you take a model and shade and highlight the models, then use thin paints to expose quick gradients...

So wait you are talking about contrast paints but how they work and prior to 2019 ... And this is why I am subbed because you understand colour theory more than the GW chemists.

Your tips are very informative, heres to my first attempt at miniature painting since I was a kid going well!

Preshading or zenithal highlighting is a great way to cut down painting time. The difference between a rattle can and an airbrush is pretty much night and day though. Once a person gets the hang of it, they can crank out a finished fig in a little over an hour!

Thanks for the tips. I stumbled onto the first type of underpainting for lighter flesh tones and (to a limited degree) metallics in my early painting days, but without any understanding of the underlying theory. I'd never thought of using grey to underpaint white though, and I'm definitely going to try it the next time I paint white.

I discovered your channel last week when I was looking for videos to put on while painting my new Emperor's Children Kill Team. Since then I have been binging on your back catalogue. :) I was thinking which video to comment on to tell you that I am really enjoying your channel and thought to post on this one since for the first time in the 20+ years (with long breaks during that time) that I have been painting minis, I am finally understanding the under layers of paint and getting great effects from it. Sure, it takes 3 different shades of gold over Army Painter Plate Mail to get something to "look gold" but that is the effort I need to put in and the different shades I need to buy to get the effect I am finally happy with. The much younger, frugal me didn't understand that idea very well.

thank you for these videos i have been painting models for a few years and your videos have shown me the way to becoming a little bit better.

I like your idea of airbrushing over a black primer with a light color. I will try that on my next model. Thanks!

Another method I have been using for pre-shading is to prime the figure black, then dry-brush white. Use a small amount of paint in the brush and you can usually get all the proper highlights set with two or three passes with the white.

To paint white on black, I like to put a coat of silver over the black. I find silver is opaque and covers completely with a thin layer. White on silver comes out as a nice bright white.

Trying to get into the hobby, I always thought washes/shades are the last thing to do! Thanks for the insight!

I just got my first Warhammer 40k model (Chaos Terminator Lord). I've mostly been doing 1-3 piece models but not this one is much more complex, probably around 15 pieces. I'm having trouble deciding if I should put it all together then prime and paint or do it in sections. From the video it looks like you put it all together, base and all, and prime it and paint it. Love the channel, learned so much from you.

Just catching up on some of your old videos. I think the term you are looking for might be zenithal highlighting (Instead of pre-shading). Where you base all in black, then 45 degree in gray, then white from the top. Then paint thinly over those bases so the highlights and shadows can still show through. Sort of quick and dirty highlighting.

My daemons of Nurgle are primed white because the base colour I use is 6 layers of shade put over one another (2x camo, 2x green, 2x yellow). This I can only do if I use white primer, I tried with Death Guard Green primer but it's just not the same. So I depend on the base color for my entire colour scheme to work. Great video that most certainly clarifies how to properly use base layers!

This is something ive wondered about for a long time. thank you so much for explaining it.

Just started painting... I was struggling so much with black primer! painting leather over it never worked. Going to try this. Thank you!

Adam ... relatively new painter here (2 yrs). I have never done the underpainting technique, but just read about it online and then found this video. I am very intrigued. I happen to have some black primed figures that I haven't started painting my traditional way (building up layers of paint, washing, highlighting, etc.) that will make excellent candidates to try this out. If I go with glazes for color (which is what you called a wash, I think), I think I'll get very similar results to what you're talking about in the video. Fortunately I have an airbrush so this won't be hard to try. Thanks! BTW, maybe an excellent tutorial for Sam as part of your pro painting series. I'd love to see a step by step here. :)

Thank you thank you thank you!!! I normally paint using the first technique you mention, but I decided to try the shading on my Shadow Captain Korvydae model and I honestly think it's one of the best I've done.

"I am priming in black, almost always" Glad to see that it is just not me then!

I find with any metallic, if you undercoat with silver first, it gives you a very bright and very metallic finish

there are things such as cool toned red, or warm toned green. Depends on how much blue or yellow pigment is in said colour. Makeup teaches a lot about warm, cool and neutral tones in colour. colour is fun.

I usually start with a white undercoat, proceed to a heavy wash followed by a heavy drybrush. After that I'll proceed adding extremely thinned down colors (underpaint, highlight and white)...It's pretty efficient and my minis tend to look better than those of the people I play against.

This is enlightening! Gonna have to think a bit more before I start painting my necrons purple over their black base.

Only discovered this video today. Wonderful insight which I didn't know. Love your channel!

I find that most of GWs base coat paints go rather well onto most other colors with maybe two layers. But for their layer paints then you definitely need an undercoat of something else to get the right shade.

Thank you very much, this is just what I was needing.

You just improved my painting ten fold

In general i agree but i think gold is one of the exceptions i always do. Gold over brown does always look bad. Even worse, is gold over light colors, no matter how warm they are. I think for golden colors it is more important how to apply highlighting and shading. E.g.: GW Fleshshade has more of an orange tint. If you paint it over your gold, it will realy shine. While painting a agrax earthshade over it would make it look more of an aged dirty gold. Both looks well in general, but fleshshade would look more heroic. For both it is important to paint gold over a very dark color. I experienced there is a very large quality variation in golden colors. So if you have problems painting gold, it might be a bad quality color. GW golden colors are especially low quality in comparison to other products. But i love their shades! Some golds are very very thick, and if you thin them down, you can barely get in on the surface. There are only a few high quality gold colors with both thin medium and still high pigmentation. I think gold in general is just a bad picked example, it is very special on its own.

I'm going to try this for sure. Particularly now that the GW white primer is more of a light grey.

Great video. I am just about to star using airbrush and this was quite eye-opening. thanks!

Hi. I've recently tried using warm/cool light/dark colours at the pre-shading stage rather than straight up black and white. I've found a chocolate brown base and burnt orange zenithal highlights underneath lead or pewter drybrush finished with silver edging can make for quite a convincing rusted steel.

The content that you put up in your videos are amazing! I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates the personal input before you even present the subject you want to show. Great great great! +++

Solid explanation of techniques more people should know about.

You are professional, thanks for teaching me... So helpful... Your fan .. Upstate New york

This is going to be a game changer for my painting! Thanks! Have you ever tried pre-shading a black model (ie. Blood Angels Death Company)? How about shading/highlighting with colors other than black or white before laying down a basecoat or wash?

you should do an update of this video and expand on these ideas and what youve learned about them

I dont even play warhammer but I like your voice, it's relaxing.

Helped me very much with my men of numenor with the gold on black

You're right about the washes -- also thank you for the bump :)

Very cool and informative! I'd not gotten that far along into thinking about these sorts of things and you already cleared up a great deal :D

Another thing to take into account for undershading is that it works best with bright colors, darker colors will tend to overpower the darker colors. Dont know the technical term for it, but if the end color has is very very dark, the light areas will end up closer to the darker undershaded areas thus losing the effect.

This is actually hilarious. I watched a lot of videos you talking about mini tabletop paining, but actually never seen you actually paint.

good explenation :)

I like the way gold looks if you paint it over black. For my black legion guys I prime them black and use Balthasar gold directly onto the black then I wash it with nuln oil. I'm still kind of a beginner painter but I really like it

Very informative. Thanks for making this useful video.

Your pre-shading technique sounds interesting for what you're painting. Primer colors are usually used dependant on top coat color. I think your finding the need for some of this due to the scale of the project, and the fact you're priming it all one color. You could simply prime based on top coat color even at the miniture scale, you'd just have to be more precise. Very precise in fact. The translucency of the paint I'm sure will help get realistic skin tones. Translucent paint is preferred for skin no matter what your painting. Layering a must. Even in CG this technique is used. Interesting take on painting miniture figures. Thanks for sharing. cheers...

Really glad I found your channel, you got some great ideas I haven't really explored before that I now hope to try out soon.

First video I've seen by you and I'm brand new to miniatures but that was a solid and in-depth video. (I subscribed) Thanks!

"A primer on priming miniatures" by Corvus Miniatures [Published on 3 Oct 2012] has a good tutorial for using rattle cans for pre-shading if people need a little more explanation.

Thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Nice video. Really made me understand basic build up colouring

Atom, i think it is just called 'tinting' Old black and white film used to tint the film it self with color , so can give impression of hot dessert or midnight. Even in games workshop illust using this technic..... i know its been 3 years but.

Really amazing info. Thanks for that. Subscribed

Good explanation, there are good advises in that video to improve the painting. Merry Christmas!

Great points! I'd love to see visual examples of each technique discussed. Of course I know that adds hours to your production, but just saying I was eager to see examples of the techniques and situations as you described them,.

Not a speed painting technique but very good to know for my character models.

If only I had known this sooner.. Ulthuan Gray (GW*) on Celestra gray (base) takes ages as well and it's near impossible to get it right. Good video :)

Great vid Atom! Your Av video level is fantastic man. Merry Christmas!

Michael R = Good shit!Anyone who says airbrushing is cheating has obviously never touched a dual action airbrush...that shit takes skill. Im sticking with my cheater brushes...cuz I have fat fingers too.

I found these tips very useful, thanks!

"Preshading" reminds me of ambient occlusion in 3d modeling

Are you talking about zenithal priming? Yeah that helps a lot with giving your miniatures a little extra.

Love the videos! I am trying your gold underpainting technique, but would you still use the sephia wash on something as small as the shoulder pad trim of a Plague Marine? It seems like a really small area for a wash. Any advice?

One question to the pre-shading: Would it perhaps even yield a smoother grayscale if one doesn‘t wait for the black spray to dry before spraying with the white? Would it nicely wet-blend?

That Nurgle demon prince at 7:53 is awesome.

one possible physics description of your 1st technique may be "blackbody radiation". i'm not a physics expert, but i believe the many layers will absorb and re-emit their own colour, and so the more layers you use, the "brighter" the top layer will appear. feel free to debunk this if I've got the wrong theory.

Great tips, thanks for the video.

I'm starting to paint an empire army for warhammer fantasy. If the uniforms are white and red should I just prime with white instead of black? Or should I just prime black and put a grey on the areas I want to eventually be white?

I'm painting an Orc Blood Bowl Team with a predominately white paint scheme. The highlights will be a blueish blacks and silvers. I want the white to pop against the green skin. I was thinking about underpainting with a chocolate brown, washing it with orange, and then layering up to the white, so that the white clothing has and undertone in a complimentary color to the green skin. Am i going down the right path, or should I underpaint in blue to match the cool tones of the model?

Wow, found your channel while looking for a how to make a wet palette. You have a lot of great advice here, I've subbed. Really liked this underpainting video. You mention you use an airbrush. Do you have any videos on how to use or better yet what to look for when buying/getting into airbrushing? I've never used one, but I'm interested in maybe starting.

Approximately how many time should I make a pass around the miniature for pre-shading? I based black and at 12" away, at 30 degress like you suggested, went around the mini two times, very light coats. Does it need to be really white to work or is it okay to be a little transparent?

Love the video. I alwase paint my orks whight and just use gw camo shade wash for the skin. If they need it i also dry brush niblet green with a nother shade of earth shade

Very good tip thanks