Hello everybody and welcome to another PMP end of month review. Well, what is the PMP end of month review? Why that is when we get together and we look at all of these submissions into the end of month review event in the PMP that is the Painters Motivating Painters Facebook group. If you'd like to join us on your hobby journey and it doesn't matter if you're just starting out or a long time master, why we'd love to have you and you can find the link down below. So specifically what we do here is invite all of our artists who are submitting to put in one submission per month into the event and give a very short concise statement on what they would like some targeted feedback on. I'm going to go through these and respond to the feedback in the pictures. You're going to do that with me. So that's what we're going to do here. Now as a side note, I'm going to be very quick when I go through these. There are a lot every month. I can't sit here and wax poetic about these things for lots of minutes. Otherwise I will be here until next month. And a lot of these are honestly asking the same questions. So I will refer you back to previous answers sometimes because there's about, I'd say 70% of these questions are about non-metallic metal. So there's a lot of people asking the same type of question. That being said, we're going to go through, answer everybody and give some feedback. So with that being said, let's jump into it. So we start off with Apollo who's bringing us a space brain here and said basically he's looking for display quality feedback, specifically non-metallic, the free hand on the shoulder pad and if the base is successfully saturated. Sure. So let's take a look at it with those lights. So I think what I looked around at this at the non-metallic, I think the free hand works. It's actually rather nice. I think the base is fine. It's certainly not drawing anything away from the figure. It's maybe a bit large, but it's not bad. You have a little bit of floating feet syndrome. If you're going for display quality, you want to watch that. In other words, make sure there's not this kind of space and shadow under the feet. You want to fill that in. I think for the most part, the silver cells, I think the gold is where we've got some opportunities. It doesn't come up to a high enough highlight. A lot of your silver, you're coming up to a nice pure white reflection, but we're not really doing that as much with the gold, especially in some of the areas as I cycle around like this piece here, the piece on the halberd, that kind of thing. It also does feel like we're missing some of the deeper shadows in some of it, like on some of these leaves and in some pieces here. So I'd say a little more of your four, in other words, your deep shadow. As always, one, two, three, four, five is what I'll use when talking about your contrast, one being the highest highlight, five being the lowest shadow. For the most part, I think this is nice. It's really nice. I think your real next step beyond some reinforcement of the tones, especially in the gold, I think the steel cells better than the gold, but I think the real next step should be just smoothing it out. Some of the blends are a little rough. I can see some of the changes. So for example, wherever we're going into white here on the halberd, we have very hard lines. So I would work on just smoothing those out. As to things like the freehand and the skin, I actually think those sell very well. So good stuff. Okay. Next up, we've got Edison or Edson, who looking for feedback on the bust on color composition and placement of light, warmer highlights and colder shadows. Sure. So I think that the, I think in general, we need to still have some kind of highlights down in the torso area. It feels a little bit more like he's ashy rather than down here is in shadow. So look for the integration of more natural blues and stuff like that into the skin tone to desaturate it down and create a little more natural shadow. Now, as far as composition goes, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It does feel a little bit honestly like you could do integrate some more color. The skin itself on things like the arms and in the knuckles and places like that side of the face feels like we could have a little bit more of those cold shadows integrated in there. Pull some blues down into the cheeks, the side of the nose, the side of the face there, that kind of thing. Pop up some of the highlights and may have some warm areas down here in the belly where some light is sneaking through. We have a whole bunch of light on this arm, but we're not carrying any of it down to here. When it comes to the green, I feel like the green is a very strong, but maybe slightly overwhelming element. I like it. I like the transition. I think it's nice, but it needs to fade out a little more naturally. It kind of ends rather abruptly across the bust. I think it looked better if it had a little bit more of a slow fade where the green was a little more integrated into the skin. Especially on the horns, that's the big thing that jumps out of me. The horns, the teeth, the bones, they don't feel quite as natural or like they have the right amount of tonal variation, so more contrast in their more natural transitions I think are what's in order. Good stuff overall. I'm looking forward to seeing more. Next up, Jamie, looking for his dedicated practice piece. This was on the Abor and Arch region. Sure. I think when I looked this piece over, one of the interesting things is the red is really red of his tabard, and it is kind of distracting because you want to watch out having this is the only saturated thing on this entire piece, and it's very much drawing attention away from where we'd want the attention to be, which is up here on the face. This piece would be a lot stronger if this red was highly desaturated. By that, I mean mixed in some greens, more grays, more blacks, whatever. Getting it out of very deeply into the sort of red spectrum, I think it'd be a stronger piece. Beyond that, the other choice would be to integrate red in other places so we could make his ears much deeper red, have a lot more red around his lips or blood dripping from there. We could have a big red scar running across his face. Something that would create balance. You could have red at the end of his toes or his fingers or his claws could be extending into red. Either desaturate the one place or spread it out more. Beyond that, when I looked at the actual skin, I think it's nice. We have some decent variation there. I need to smooth it out a little. You notice it especially in the back where when we're transitioning through the volumes, it doesn't quite feel as naturally moving as it should. We kind of jump from, especially when you look at these muscle clusters here, from very high highlights down into deep shadows. We don't really run the transition in between. I'd say we also want some more natural tones in there. So working in a little bit more of like maybe a magenta hue into the skin would still make it feel cold and dead like a ghoul, but give it a little bit of still that life, that blood that we would expect on something that's basically still some kind of vampire creature and has blood floating around in it somewhere. So that's my overall thoughts. Hope that's helpful for me. A very cool piece. OK, next up. So Thomas brings us the Canon S and was looking for sort of feedback on the non-metallic and the OSL. So looking at this piece, I think we have, and you mentioned it in your text, but I think it's really important to mention here that the sort of choice of having the bright pink glow with a pink robe doesn't really work because it's just, it's hard to tell what's a glow. So I mean, one of the general rules is if you're going to do an OSL glow, it shouldn't be casting light onto something that's the exact same color as the light source. Because then it becomes very difficult to tell what the actual light source is and what's not. So beyond that, some of the OSL is the hard part that doesn't super work. And the reason that's the case is that it's all kind of the same thing. It's casting too much light for what else is going on here. What I mean by that is, OK, this leg is very brightly highlighted. Same with this side over here. Like these things out of the light are very brightly highlighted by some kind of seemingly cold, neutral light. Right? And yet this thing is still casting a horde of light as though she was in darkness. So if you had done the whole piece where this was the only light source and everything else was in deep shadow, this would be the right amount of glow. I think it also is tricky because you've got that robe. And I know you said it's your color scheme, so it is what it is, but it's something that prevents it from really selling. Honestly, if I were going to do OSL on a piece like this, I'd wheel it way back. Like make it so just the glow is about here in this area. You also want to lower the intensity on it a little bit. It's casting about an equivalent power light everywhere, like this pink is as intense as this pink is as intense as this pink as is intense as this pink and here. And it shouldn't be because a light gets weaker the farther it gets away from its source. The bright glow in the center works if that does sell, so I think that's nice. The actual non-metallic on the green, I think that works well. The gold, I agree with you doesn't work. And the reason is because you're integrating in a light source, which should be creating the glow on the gold, you're trying to color the gold without integrating a light source. You've told me where the light is on this gold. It's right here, but this isn't light. This is just pink. What it should be casting here is a reflective white line with a very subtle pink tone if we're going to cast the light all the way down here. And then this should be the shadow. These pinks should be setting the light because that is the light source. Non-metallic is about creating the light source and the shadows. This is the light, but it's not light here. Instead, the light's coming from sort of this opposite side when what we'd want is for this to be actually like a soft pink light on the gold and then going mostly in the shadow with a little bit of reflected lights down here that would be more neutral because they'd be reflecting off the ground itself. So that's my feedback for you there on the NMM. Hope that helps. It is a very cool piece. I really do like the color selection. I honestly think the OSL kind of detracts from it. This would be a stronger piece if you just kind of had the pink glowing crystal and maybe a tiny amount of glow around the ring and the top part. And the rest of her was just in the green and the sort of violet magenta that you had there. That's not me telling you not to stretch. It's just you've got to be really careful when you integrate an element like this because it can overwhelm the piece and I think that's kind of what it did here. But I do love the colors.  Teal and pink, magenta, love it. Okay. Next up, Juiced talking about being a new painter and basically had some questions on how to apply a shade and saying that he's getting some pooling and we can see it here down in these lower sections, right? So my best advice, sadly, the channel's not up anymore but Darren Latham used to do, if his videos have been reposted somewhere, I would highly recommend going and watching those, especially the Silver Skulls videos. I don't know if those got reposted somewhere or not. But either way, the key to working with a shade is imagine my finger is your brush and you're wanting to shade this my hand here. You don't put the shade on like this and stop, okay?  That's how you avoid the pooling, okay? It needs to be a quick, fast motion around that's constantly pulling the shade out over the whole figure and going back to where you were sopping up that pooling shade and then going around again and keeping it evenly dispersed. So I hope that advice helps. I know you're brand new to it so my best advice for you is work on thinning your paint a little bit as well and on your brush control, there are areas where like your blue is on your beard and in places where you don't want it to be. So I think where your real steps are here is just brush control, working with nice thin paints, learn how to wick the paint off your brush again, thin your paint and then take the wet paint, the wet thin paint, touch it to a paper towel and then go to your miniature. So I hope that helps. I look forward to seeing your journey continue. Tim Royce bringing us this wonderful robe trader. Wanted to know about how to improve his TMM, particularly the gold and how he can improve his tabletop character standard. Sure, so with the gold and I have videos on this, I would recommend you go and watch those. But much like you've done with the sword, which I think sells okay, the answer is we need to integrate a little more shades and a little more colors. So here on the eagle on his chest, I think you actually did a pretty nice job of it, but we need to create more highlights. Like I need more silverish tone here, here and along a line here, wrapping here on the edges here and up here. So we have a nice light line coming down here and then more the integration of like sepia inks or dark purple inks or even black. You can work that in very lightly in an ink form into here where we have darker shadows down here, under here, upcoming into this area. Basically those places where we'd be trapping shadows. So when working in with gold, you wanna look at sepia, purple or black or some combination of their in, very light, light, light on the black, by the way, as integrating those natural shadows. And so when you create that kind of light balance, I think that'll really help.  You know, you want kind of a high tabletop for your character standard. I feel like you're pretty much there. I think this looks very nice. It's got some good contrast. Eye is drawn to the face. So for a tabletop standard, I think you're pretty much where you'd wanna be. Kicking up that gold is gonna help. If you wanna do a little more touches, you could do things like integrate a little more texture into your work. So on things like his boots or his pants, you can have some minor scritches and scratches, slashes, hashes and dots. Those little kind of touches can really elevate a character and make it feel a little more lived in and in the world. So hope that helps. Cool stuff. All right, next up. John bringing basically, you know, this cool thing from Infinity. Just wanna know how he can up his game. Sure. So a couple of things jumped out of me, John, about this piece. The first thing is we need to control more the individual panels, the lighting. So a lot of the individual panels here don't have as much tonal variation, contrast of value as we might wanna see, especially with the blue. So bringing those into some deeper natural shadows where they especially down here, where it would be trapped under here on the inside of the arm, you know, somewhere here, up and under, that kind of thing. Pushing your contrast farther on the blue, I think would be a real good next step. I also noticed that in a couple of places, it's a little messy. So again, cleaning up of the paint, things like here. I noticed this is kind of a rough spot. Just stuff like that. You wanna make sure that's nice and clean. The other thing that jumps out of me is the shoulder pads and the gun, both of which are quite flat.    And then you're gonna come on the other side, you're gonna push against it. I have a video on this about, it's a cheat for edge highlighting. And so I would highly recommend you go watch that. If you're gonna pursue that kind of style on the gun, that heavily stylized kind of line style on the gun. Otherwise the answer would be do a little more on the gun and make it to have a little more actual value variation. The shoulder pads are big, they're green. They're a strange color. I don't know why those are green. Maybe that's the thing for the army, I'm not sure. But that color feels very out of place. Like it's the only section of olive. I can only see one section of it in both of your pictures. And it really doesn't mesh with the rest of it. It would have fit if you had made it the orange of the places you have a few dots of and like the here on the barrel. I think that would have worked. But I don't think the green cells, in addition, when you have a big flat space like this, small amount of free hand, something like that to break it up, to prevent one big flat samey space, I think is also something you wanna think about. But overall, cool piece. I certainly think it's executed well. I like your panel lining, your edge highlighting's looking good, so you're definitely on the right road. Okay, next up, we've got Carl's, who says first try with a model with non-metallic armor. And he's looking for this for his kill team. Basically, he's looking for feedback on the one or two things he thinks that I should, that he could focus on to improve for the next model. Especially the placing of reflections. Sure, so I mean, one of the things I'll say is, we're not really in non-metallic armor here, Carl's, because there's no real transition of the reflection. So, and you can see it here, right? Like a lot of this armor is still reading as very gray. So, Angel Guraldes recently did a really nice video on non-metallic armor. I'd highly recommend you go give that a look. He did it with a storm cast model, but it was like a female knight in cantor. And I think it will really be instructive for you as to how you wanna build that up. Because the problem here is we don't have, one, we don't have enough value contrast. So it doesn't go high enough into the one and it doesn't transition smoothly down into the five. The lights and shadows aren't really placed in a way that would read as natural light. The gloves are the same color as the armor you're trying to sell me on, even though this is made of leather and this is specifically made of metal. That kind of color contrast is tricky. So like you wanna make sure these elements that you're trying to call out as non-metallic are distinct from the other elements that are not metallic. The final thing I would say is we've got a lot of like chalkiness and thickness to the paint. So I think maybe we wanna look at some glazes, some more fine control. Like we've got a black line here that's too big. I think cleanliness with the paint is gonna be my number one thing for you. Really separating the elements out into their individual spaces in a clean, sharp way would be the number one thing I tell you to work on, okay? So like up here, like when you look at this element, a lot of these just kind of fade together. There's no nice dark separation here to here. Like these elements are all very together, right? I don't see the separation between this band and the backpack itself, right? Between the metal casing here and the tube, between the tube and this piece of her armor. All these elements need to be clearly defined with a nice dark to light to dark transition. So I like I said, go watch that video and my best advice for you would be work on adding more value contrast and working on the smoothness and cleanliness of your transitions and separating your paint elements. So hope that helps, Carl's. Okay, next up, we've got Jack. Your most time and effort he's put into a mini and looking for some just feedback on on what he needs to work on. Mentioned that he used Darren's cloth stippling technique. Sure, so a couple of things jumped out of me when I looked at this guy. I'll say that at this scale and with the photos, I can't really tell in the cloth stippling. So I'm, I can't give you feedback on that. Like it's too small, but take a more zoomed in photo, right? But one of the elements that sort of jumped out to me is a little more separation of the color composition would be helpful here. So what I mean by that is I like the red, orange leathers. I think that works well, but so much of this guy is steel and then his face is the same gray and then his beard is the same gray. A lot of him is just, and the bones are the same gray. Like a lot of these elements are just fading into the same colors. I think separating these elements in a stronger way compositionally would have helped the piece really stand out. So if you had had, you know, the face be a bright, more pale flesh tone, if the beard had been more of a brown or something like that to stand apart, those kinds of things. The other thing that jumps out to me is watch out for stuff like this. Like you made this, this, his big spear have this sort of heat effect, which is fine, whatever he's got a magical spear. I don't, that's cool. But the problem is, is that if you relax your eyes and look at this piece, your eye goes right here and only right here. Because this is the brightest, most clear, distinct piece on the, or sorry, distinct color. It's got the most luminosity of the entire piece. And so what we want this to be the focal point, right? Not this. So when you're gonna do a technique like this, you kind of wanna make sure it's balanced somewhere else. And I know we've got a little bit of heat on the hammer, but it's really not enough for this. So like drawing it back down here by having some kind of these same colors and maybe this shoulder pad, or on this gut plate, or both, right? So that way we get a nice color triangle would really help to balance that out. The other option would be kind of to have this be a much reduced effect, like have the center pane here be almost a flat black and just have run a kind of orange to yellow along the edges to show that like the cutting edge is heated and hot and magic. That would reduce the overall intensity of the thing and probably help from its distracting nature. So hope that helps check. And overall cool piece, hope to see more from you. Okay, next up, Andy, Sores Old Blood on Carnosaur, looking for feedback on color choice, composition and base work. Yeah, I think all of those are good. I mean, that's my simple feedback for you. Those are all good. The base work is great. I think it looks really nice. Good integration of those pieces from Gamer's Grass and the various things. I like that looks like a nice fun jungle. I like the different colors of plants and I like the red stonework. I think that sells. The colors here are relatively well balanced. It would help if we had a little more blue maybe on this guy somewhere. We've worked in a little bit of purple, but we don't really have much in the way of the blue that's on the alpha up here. That's probably the only thing that's slightly out of balance. Like if this blue was reflected on his center ridge here, I'd be much more into it because that'd be a nice place to hide like that purple, blue transition here. Or maybe flipping him around. It could be like some stripes down his face. It could be his claws go into the purple, blue transition. That could work like these claws could all have that same purple, blue transition. Just something like that to add a little bit of those tones in. I think though the work on the flesh I really love, I love the soft purples and stuff in there. I think the yellow tones, that all sells the red stripes. Yep, that's great. So overall I think we've got a little bit of an overwhelming element on the guy on top, but it's a pretty minor thing. The striations on the bones look good. Yeah, I think, great work. It's a good alpha on Carnosaur. I like him. Okay, next up, King who says first attempt at NMM, feedback on that. Sure, so one of the challenges we have here with the NMM you're doing is that we don't have any secondary lights. So it's, what's preventing it from selling is, I can sum it up completely in this picture. Let's look at the leg. So light is coming in. It's hit this. This is our primary reflection. This is a cylinder shape, right? And so light is hit here and then it fades out and fades out. But here it's just shadow, but that's not how light works, right? Lights gonna come in, hit this, but then it keeps going. It's gonna hit this ground, bounce back up and create a softer reflection here. So one of the tricks to selling with NMM is that you need multiple reflection transitions. And ideally what it should be doing is going like three, two, one, two, three, four, five, four, three, four, right? And then maybe like a five again on the backside. And yes, that's a lot of transitions for a singular leg area. That's why non-metallic takes a long time and really has a high skill floor or a cell, right? So, I think your placement on your primary light sources I think are good. You may, you're gonna wanna work on your blending and smoothing those transitions out, but that's just something that comes with time. Where we're lacking is in the secondary reflections. Again, you can see it here on the cylinder shape of the arm, right? We've got our primary, but we don't have any secondary down here. If you go check out Darren Latham's article that he wrote, it's on his Raza mini painting. If you just search for Darren Latham NMM blog, you'll find the article. He talks about the nature of these primary and secondary reflections in there and you'll see them in play and you'll really get a good sense of exactly what that means. So yeah, that would be my primary advice for you. Hope that helps. Okay, next up, Joseph bringing out this very fun bust. Absolutely love this. Basically just looking for some general feedback and he did call out a couple issues he had there that he already caught. And so, you know, kind of what's he looking for? Yeah, so this is really nice. I think this is a great job. I freaking love the loot. I think that looks fantastic. I love the kitty cat. This is such a fun bust. I think the eye was worth the repaint. I like the horn transition color change. I think that works. So lot, a lot, a lot to love on this bust. I do like the underlight. I think this sells. You're right. There should be more on the loot, so agreed. I like, I would also say probably a little more glow here on the catch of the face. Like bring this light just a little bit more down just to create some visual interest. Even if it might not be completely right, just a little bit of it there to sell because skin has a sheen to it. And so naturally catches light, as you can see very well right here on my big bald head. The other thing I would say is you want to soften some of these transitions out a little bit. There's a nice bright light. Softening here especially on the green I think would be helpful. It sells a little better here and here but this place up here it's a little harsh. Especially because we're a little farther away from the source and on an opposing color which would naturally mute the light. That is to say green is the naturally contrasting color to red. So this should not be reflecting as brightly on the green as it is on the white. This is a bright white cloth which is gonna naturally reflect a pretty true version of the light. This is a green, a complimentary color. Technically true green doesn't reflect red at all. So if we had like a perfect green cloth and shined a perfect red light at it, it would show nothing. Okay, nothing would show because it doesn't reflect red. That's why it's green. But obviously the world is not full of perfect colors and perfect sort of tones and wavelengths. It's messy. And so you would still get some red reflection. It just needs to be much more muted. The only other thing that jumps out at me is I think on the skin itself once we get out of the cast light, which I do love, I do feel like we could have a little bit more color worked in there as well. Just a little more visual interest on the rest of the skin. And I think this is something you called on your comments tonight. I think you were right to notice it. Especially when you look at like her neck, sides of her cheek, up here on the side of her face, you know, in this area here, on the side of her arm under here, you know, these are places where you tend to see a lot of color and variation. And so working in some soft, maybe some soft red tones there, not like red, like your magenta cast light, just a little more naturalistic tones to make it feel like the blood and stuff like that, I think would be very helpful. So that's kind of what jumps out at me. Hope that helps. Very, very cool bust. Okay, next up, Scott's talking about non-metallic metal yet again. So here we go. Okay, so your biggest problem challenge with your Scott with your NMM is that we don't have enough contrast, enough value contrast. So we're running down into deep enough shadows on these cylinder shapes. See the thing I just previously said two minutes ago about you need primary and secondary reflections. So that's number one. But the next thing is these don't come up high enough. The steel is where I really notice it. The gold needs to come up just a little bit, but the steel is where it really jumps out. None of the steel is reflecting bright enough. We need to get up a little bit more into a bright. Ivory color or a glacier blue and then with some very light white light catches. So having a little bit more reflection right now we kind of stopped at a two and we never really got to our one on our reflections. That's the number one thing that jumps out at me. So you've got your five, four, three, two and then we stopped. So I would look at placing your one higher highlights and then actually looking into some light catches which means like some pure white dot lights like here and maybe here and maybe here, maybe here. Again, I mentioned that Angel Gural does video about non-metallic metal earlier on armor. He talks about placing the dot lights, the Darren Latham's blog that I mentioned a minute ago also talks about placing the dot lights. Both of those are great resources for understanding like those light reflections, those light catches that really sell the non-metallic effect. Okay, next up Lorenzo. This is Ogride from his Warcry set. Basically a critique on what you can do better. Sure. So two things, one, make sure you take better pictures like put the mini in front of something, get even lighting on it and take a picture of it. It doesn't need to be in a light box. You can do it with your cell phone camera. Open any gaming book you have like your Warcry book or something or any Warhammer book.  Open it up like that, set the miniature inside, get some diffuse light, take a picture. That's number one thing because it's very hard to evaluate if I don't have good photos, okay? And like all of these are over sort of saturated light photos or too far away and so on and so forth. Now, what I'll say from looking at this picture is the first thing with the base, I think we need some attention there but maybe you're still working on that because it looks like he's kind of blue tacked to it. So we'll skip that for the moment and I'll assume you're still in progress. My main item for you is going to be just working on tonal variation. Your next step should be on making sure things are clean and have the right amount of variation. For example, the cloth, the skin, these kinds of things look pretty flat still. We need to push those volumes up and I need to see more transition on the skin, on the musculature, that kind of thing. So we can actually see those transitions, those light catches on that skin. Working in additional tones, especially in the low parts of the skin would also be helpful. So bringing in some shadow tones, you have a very orange skin tone. So you can work in some deep, deep dark brown rust colors. You can bring some purples in, which is a nice compliment to an orange skin tone. You can bring in a dark magenta in the low tones and that actually works really well for orange. You can bring in some subtle blue tones but any of those things will work. It's just a question of the sort of interpretation you want but a little bit more contrast, value contrast specifically is what you want to aim at here Lorenzo. Continue to push that and I think that's where your next steps lie. So hope that helps. Okay, next up, Skodster with a custom diorama. The mini is 70 millimeters and the diorama is 140 millimeters tall. So this is a real big diorama. Super neat scratch built diorama. It's cool underwater scene. I think it's, you know, I love all these little details and all these little things you have floating around here, you know, the clownfish and stuff like that. Looking at it, one of the things that jumps out to me is the scene itself doesn't actually, I like all the floating elements but the actual groundwork doesn't specifically feel underwater. It's lacking a little bit of the tones, the greens and the blues that we would associate with a sort of underwater ocean scene. I understand that's kind of a naturalistic muddy tone but this more looks like I picked it up out of the water completely. Looking through the water, there should be turquoise's and deep blues and stuff like that that are in here and captured in the dirt that would make it sell as more of an underwater experience. That being said on the big mini itself, the centerpiece of it, I think it's good. It's so large though, it needs to vary a little more. Like this is a pretty big piece and yet a lot of him underwater creatures have a huge amount of variation and I like the pink to green transition you're doing but when it comes to like all this little floating pieces and doodads and hooba-jubes he's got off of him, I feel as though those could do some more interesting color transitions. Right now they feel very flat. They all just feel like they're kind of in that red tone and we didn't know what to do with them. So the main body, the carapace looks really nice but the individual elements especially at this scale need to be more picked out. So like this fin, all these little lines need to have something interesting going on with them. All of these little doodads need to be transitioning out. Have some interesting colors. If it's an underwater scene and it's these bright, vibrant underwater creatures we want to take advantage of that and really make sure that we're showing a full spectrum of interesting colors there, okay? So hope that helps. Overall it's a very, very cool idea, a really neat diorama. So I dig it. Okay, next up, Steven with his first submission coming back to painting. They basically started dedicated practice to work on glazing and blending particularly with the skin and you're looking for feedback on that as well as anything that stands out. Sure, so overall it's certainly a very gross piece as the great unclean ones always are. What I'll say is that we're still not separating out enough of the elements in the actual skin. So I like the yellow and the torn muscle and all that kind of stuff looks nice. We need to go farther with the skin itself though. The actual skin, also I would avoid making this ranch the same green as the skin because then it just looks like it's just part of him. Make sure you separate elements like this cleanly. Now, but the skin itself, it needs much more highlights and much more low lights. Like overall we don't have enough contrast on the skin. He's just still largely green. So we need to bring the highlights up on the muscle structure like on the top of him, on the top of these folds, on the top of his legs. We need to take those way up, right? So we have some more highlights in natural cast light and we need to take the shadows and the opposite side way down. And that's where we can bring in some more natural colors like bring in those heavy purples and reds to show not only the bruising, but also the sickness in the shadow. I think all of those things will really help overall with creating that more variation. So you're on a good road here for sure. Welcome back to the hobby. I'm glad that it's great that you're back. I think you're doing really good work. So I think where you wanna push yourself is just push on that contrast. More tonal variation, more value contrast. Okay, next up, Michelle with the most recent bust that he submitted, looking for feedback on the pilot's face and the goggles. Yeah, I think the goggles really work. I think those are cool. I love the painted effect of the reflection of the horizon with the sun. I'm buying that, I'm a buyer on that. I think that works well. Now, as to the skin on the face, we transition into the pink of the lips a little bit abruptly, a little more pull that out. Like I know you went into the blue-purple, pull a little bit more of that pink down. I also would love to see some of that in the nose and in the cheeks as well. It doesn't feel like we have enough of that represented there. To that same degree, this and this are super eye grabbing and this is super not, okay? So bringing these more up into some naturalistic highlights and the integration of some of these same magenta and pink tones into like the nose, into the under cheek, I think would actually really help. You could also push the yellow especially on this line across his nose and under his cheekbones, push that up a little higher as well. And I think that would really help balance the whole thing out. Overall, this is a great piece. I really love the sunglasses reflections. I think that is, as I said, I'm a buyer on that. I dig it, I think it looks great. So that's A plus work right there. All right, next up, Chris. Feedback looking, he's about a year into the hobby and only about 12 minis in, so that's fine. What can he do to improve his current medals? Sure, so I think for 12 minis in, you're doing a heck of a job, that's for sure. What actually jumps out of me is in the medals, it's actually the skin. The skin still looks a little flat, especially on a bust of this size. Like she's a pretty big mini. So I would look at, again, glazing some more interesting colors and tones in the skins, reds, purples, looking at higher highlights, popping out those sheens, getting some sweat. Lots of people have painted some versions of this and I know many of them have done some really great stuff with their skin, so I would look at the other versions there. Now, as to the medals on the scale like this, I think what we, it looks pretty good. There's not a huge amount of metal on this girl, honestly, but I think from what I can see, what we need to do is just, as I mentioned earlier, take a little more control of the light. So where we've got the medals here and here and here, some more careful glazed applications of darker inks to create more naturalistic shadows, and then maybe a couple, like maybe a stipple, since these are meant to be rough, of some higher highlights, especially on some of the edge elements and where there would be light catches. When you're looking for, when you have a rough sort of metal, one of the things you can do is just kind of stipple in a little bit of that bright silver light catches, and then you kind of, it creates a more rough look to it where there's still metal that's catching a bright light, but it's not overwhelming. So that's probably what I would recommend for you there, Chris. Overall, I think this is a great job. I mean, for 12 minis then, you are straight killing it. So keep up the good work. I can't see what you look like at 100 minis. I think it's going to be fantastic. Okay, so next up. Miklos with his first submission started painting about three months ago and talks about how what he has struggled with in the past was creating the contrast. So let's take a look at it. And we can look at the black and white, and I think you're going to see here where we have the contrast and where we don't. So going back to this image, I think the skin is where we've got a lot, the opportunity to improve the contrast. The weapons obviously have a good amount on them as you look here. When I look at the weapons and they're sort of non-metallic. By the way, avoid this kind of thing where you're going horizontally across the blade. You want light against shadow. So if this side's light, this side should be shadow. If this is shadow, this should be light. Don't run it straight across like that. We can see those reflections. But with the skin, we have a real chance to bring up some higher highlights, especially here on their faces, on their heads, on the tops of their arms, and really define the volumes of them a little more sharply. That's where I think you've got your next growth opportunity in contrast. The other element of contrast that jumps out to me is the hair. All the hair is just gray. It's just all gray, right? Because it's mostly the same color. We have a little bit of the natural light that's hitting. But going in and pulling out individual strands and creating light lines in the hair, I have multiple videos on hair. Any of them, go watch any of them and I'll talk about this. Or just go look at a bottle of like Pantene Pro-V hair dye. You can Google that image on the internet and you'll see how they create the halos of light that happen where it goes like a light and then into the naturalistic color and deep shadow and then out and then to another light line and so on and so forth. So I think that's your opportunity for a little more contrast there in the hair. But I do think this is looking good. Good composition. It's very exciting. I like your color choices. So I think for, again, for three months in, I think you're doing a fantastic job. So keep up the good work. Okay, next up, we've got Bertrand. This is Latest Mini. First time using pigments of base looking for any advice to improve.  With the pigments, I think it works just fine. Overall, I think your opportunities for improvement here are maybe a little bit more, I can't really tell. So maybe a little bit more texturing on something like the cloak. It's hard for me to tell at the scale because I can't really zoom in enough to see. And then maybe a little bit more interesting color and variation on the skin. That's the other thing that jumps out at me. The only other item is maybe the metals. You know, glazing in some darker shadows, taking a little better control of the light, especially on a weapon or the shield, the pieces like that, I think it'd be interesting. But overall, I think this is a nice piece. If you were just kind of going for, you know, a fun piece and something to explore, I think this is nice. It's very desaturated, looks very grounded, you know, very sort of inquisition 28 kind of feeling to it. So that works. If it was me, I would say a little bit more of like, especially because this thing looks, it doesn't look like it's a happy creature. So a little bit more of the unnatural colors like purples worked into the skin, especially where it's in shadow or connected to other things I think will really sell. That would be my feedback. Okay, next up, Greg. Basically he's looking for advice on contrast and the light with these guys. Sure. So I mean, I think you can't sweat it too much with these kind of figures. Overall, I think you did a really good job with them. You know, it's hard to have, unless you're going for some kind of extreme lighting source, I don't, you know, there's not much you can do to set an exact one o'clock light or a two o'clock light or something like that.  And that's probably true, but I don't know that it really matters. I think for the most part, it still sells to me. The weapons feel stood aside from it. The coloration on them feels pretty good. My one challenge with the weapons is if they're meant to be, you know, a sort of non-metallic steel is that they don't come up enough into the light. So again, we have a challenge where we have like a five, four, three, two, and then we stop. We need to go a little bit higher highlighting on that. If we're going into not, if non-metallic and that kind of high highlighting is your goal to have that be like a steel. I think the yellow sells well, it's interesting cold yellow for it with a warm, like cold yellow highlight with a warm shadow. I think that all works. One of the things you could do is push a little bit more of, take a little bit of like a darker rust color, mix in a little bit of blue and glaze some of that into some places. And that can help actually by deepening the shadows in some places. So for example, let's take this guy, Mr. Two-Handed Axe. He could have a little bit deeper shadow on this side and this side. So you can pick like one side of the figure and push the shadows a little bit more with just a few soft subtle glazes like that. And that can help sell that directional lighting. So that might be another option for you. But overall, I think these guys look really great. Love the texture on the cloth. I think that the armor, scritches and scratches all sell. Yeah, I mean, I think the rustic pick looks nice. So I think overall these guys are really wonderful. So good job. Okay, next up, Jacob. Bringing us three of his gangers here. Basically what he's looking for some feedback on is the color composition, the use of warm and cold and how to get his orange to be more vibrant. Sure. So what I'll say to you is I think the orange is fine. I just released a video on exploring colors orange. So go watch that and that'll really give you a much deeper feedback on how to get a bright orange. But I think that mostly sells. I think the orange and blue works fine together here. Actually, none of their uniforms or things like that jumps out at me as the challenge. I think your main element I would tell you to work on, Jacob, is not with your compositional stuff. It's actually largely with contrast. So things like the skin and the elements like that feel pretty flat. So working more contrast and naturalistic tones into things like the skin and the black vest, those feel like the areas where we want to push the most possible improvement. But overall, I think these guys look like, you know, those sort of conscripted convicts, I think that sells. And hopefully that video on orange will help you get a little bit of your keys to getting a brighter orange. So I hope that helps. Okay. Next up, Ivan first attempted a bust and he said the main issue is replacing highlights on this type of hair and skin and how to naturally blend the shadows and which colors to use. Okay, sure. So what I'll say with, you know, this bust is the key with busts and I've said it many times is you gotta do more. You do more, more, more. It's not, bust painting isn't just scaling up your 28 millimeter miniature. So for example here, what actually jumps out at me isn't the lighting and stuff like that. It's that the skin feels too flat and the dress feels too much like red with a wash applied or something like that and the hair doesn't feel naturalistic. And so each of these elements needs more. What I mean is when we're scaled up to her and she's a very big bust, right? What we need to see is the red needs a lot more detail, more highlights, more texture, more tones, subtly brought into it. We can't just use this kind of like, you know, washed technique here and have that catch. I mean, I'm not saying you actually use to wash but that's how it's reading, right? I also need a straight on view would really help with this. What you need is, you know, for these areas of light to be really well pronounced and then for the areas of shadow to be similarly pronounced. You've also gotten some satin finish on your red because you used a red. Avoid that like the devil with bust painting because you wanna be in complete control of the light. Now, as to, you know, the skin, again, when you're placing the lights, so on something like her where you've, I agree you kind of don't have a singular lighting scheme. So what you wanna do is you wanna pick a direction. The easiest way to do this is literally take the bust, it's in a big enough figure, take the bust, take your phone, take your cell phone or something which has a light you can turn on or, you know, use your desk lamp or something and put the light there or like put it next to your desk lamp and take a picture of it with your phone or put the light onto it from your phone, like hold the figure, turn your bright light on and then take a picture of it directly or something like that, you know, get a bright light onto it some way and then take a couple of pictures of it with your phone around the thing and that is how you'll, that's how you'll sort of understand where to set your lighting. But when it comes to things like the skin, again, when we get to this scale, we need to work in a lot of more tonality. So we need more transition into the highlights, we need subtle variations of both hue and value. So into things like the red, you know, her face is not near expressive enough, right? Like when you look at my face, you can see like the dark shadows here, the colors that are here, the red that's under here, the purple that's under here for me being tired, the purple and blue that's up here from the top of my eye, this being brighter because more light is hitting it, the light that's on my cheeks coming down into these shadows, into the red, the veins, right? What's happening here with the shadow on my nose? Like all of that can be captured in this scale and so that's what you wanna be working in, right? That's your goal with busts. You go until you think you can't do anymore and then you do twice as much as that, okay? So I hope that helps. I know I threw a lot at you there. My best advice is hopefully that, you know, set a singular lighting and then build your value and your hue structure around that. So pick that direction and work in a lot more. The real way to learn on this is just go to somewhere like putty and paint and just start looking at busts and don't look at them, see them, right? Pick a bust you really like. I mean, this bust itself probably has 10 versions of it on putty and paint. So pick one of those versions that has like a silver or gold rating or something, somebody that's, you know, a great artist is done and bring it up on your screen and stare at it for 20 minutes. Don't look at your phone, don't look anywhere else. Stare at that singular image for 20 minutes. Force yourself to see all of the detail, all the color, all the nuance, right? And that will be the most instructive thing you can do. So I hope that helps. Okay, next up, Abel, again, first bust. A lot of first busts this month. And we're gonna see a lot of the same things I'm gonna, I just said is gonna apply here as well. So again, this is kind of, your lighting by the way is kind of overblown. So, you know, watch on that. But again, the hair is just flat. Like you did the hair, like you'd do the hair on a 28 millimeter miniature where everything that's down is dark and everything that's up is light and it's all evenly lit all around it. But that's not what we're doing when we're on a lighting scheme at this scale, right? We need to create much more light to dark transition.  Or go find a very heavily bearded guy with long hair out in nature and take a picture of him in the sun with his permission. But we need to create those lights and shadows, those natural extensions through the hair, right? Where it's not all monotone, okay? So like around the top of the ring of his head, there should be light and there should be darker here. When you come down here, there should be into more shadow. Like this area should have more shadow in. The tops of the beard tufts should be catching bright light and then coming down into deep shadows. So, you know, light catches up here going down into darker ones. All that sort of thing is what stands out to me. Same thing with the face itself. When you've got a little amount of skin like you often have on dwarf busts, you wanna really make sure you work in those creases, those crevices, those red tones, really bring out the nose and the age and the wear and the cracks, you know, really pop those things up, right? So I think that's kind of what I would tell you you wanna work on there. This picture's a little less overblown, so that's good. I see a little more of the red tone here, but again, what we wanna do is work it. I like this. I like the coloration on this side. That's nice. Well, like picking out a little bit more here with making sure these creases have some nice red to bright. Actually, what we need is a little more, little more two, a little more one, bringing up the highlights here on this part of the face, making that a little brighter, I think will really help. Okay? So this is probably the truest image I think you've got. And what I would say here is all my previous comments still apply, like with the lighting structure. It's just here I can actually see better with the hues. So good pictures mean the world, especially with something like this. So yeah, that's what I'll say. Hope that helps, Abel. Okay. Next up, Devin. All right, first attempt at any kind of NMM. And so, you know, any talking about mixing NMM and TMM and getting enough contrast in. Okay, and then the base. Yeah, I mean, on the base, I think it's fine. I'm not sure about the little yellow clumpy things, little egg sacks or whatever they are. They're kind of a weird color. And again, you have elements of yellow on a figure that doesn't have any yellow in it. So it's really drawing all the attention away. Like, it's hard for me to look away from the base. Also, all your stone is just kind of gray. And as you know, that's a big no-no. We don't just do gray stone. Stone needs to have color in it. Red screens, purples, browns, everything in there. So I think that's kind of the challenging element. Now, as to the non-metallic, like this blue effect on the X, it's not really selling for me. It's not reading as non-metallic because we're not really, again, creating those reflection points and secondary reflections and stuff like that. It kind of looks like a magical X, but it doesn't look like a non-metallic X. Now, as to mixing like TMM armor with a non-metallic X, no, I don't think that's a problem, but you've got to do something with that true metallic armor. You can't have like super heavy contrast on the non-metallic X and then just paint this steel. Like, that doesn't work, right? So we've got to come in here and do the same thing. So go and watch my videos on, you know, adding non-metallic shading to true metallic metal. And we've got to do that to this metal, okay? To the steel. Then it's perfectly fine because both pieces will feel like they have the same amount of light control and you can mix them. As to the X and with the blue, what we need here is we need more of an actual like sort of lighting structure you can read. Now that X is in a really bad position, but effectively we need a lot of like, we need to pick an area and create light to dark transitions that are running across the X. So like this should be, if this is light, that's fine, then this is dark. But if this is dark, then this piece on the bottom here is light. And we should, you know, like this kind of thing needs to be going on in a more smooth, natural way. So it's a tough piece to try it on. My advice would be pick some, you know, sort of more sensible weapon structures like some swords practice there and you'll get a much better handle on how you want to structure the lighting on the X. But you're, again, where we're missing here is you're treating the light like it's got one thing and it stops, light reflects and non-metallic effects need to capture light against dark, dark against light. Okay. So hope that helps. Okay. Next up, Peter basically looking for feedback on the diorama and, you know, kind of how would you improve it? And he wants it to be shadowy and, you know, that kind of thing. So I do think the base is too boring. I understand you want it to be a shadowy kind of space, that's fine. It needs color. That just, you can be shadowy and still have color. Use highly desaturated blues and highly desaturated purples and stuff like that. And work those tones in very light grays that fade into blues and purples or vertigrees or stuff like that. You don't like, I understand you're saying you want it to be neutral, but that's fine. You can use desaturated tones that still create visual interest because right now they're just standing on gray rock. The other thing I'll say is that base is way too big. Like I think it feels like they're on a brick or something. Way too big. That needs to be shrunken way down. These guys should be much closer. Like about half of the space between them needs to be cut out, okay? And this whole base needs to be shrunk down accordingly. You always want to be using, when you're doing any kind of dual diorama, anything like that, you want to use the minimal amount of space possible, period. Like, because that's just, this is just blank, nothing. That's here that's created, okay? Now, as to the color composition, when you're doing a dual piece like this, it's fine. You could certainly have highly contrasting figures where one looks much different than the other. In fact, that can help sell a dual. So I don't really see any problem with like, one guy being the sort of bright red, blood angel character and bellicore being the other dude. Where we actually have a challenge is intonal variation on the piece in general. One thing you can do is have minor elements of this. So like having minor elements of red on bellicore and then having minor elements of purple on the blood angel. So shade the red with purple and have maybe a few spots of red in like his chest rune or his eyes and stuff like that being in red on bellicore.  But your real challenge is really in contrast. Again, we need more contrast in the skin, in the tonal variation on the bellicore model as well as in the armor, especially of the blood angel. And that would actually be my big challenge for you if I was gonna set one thing out for you is to just keep increasing that value contrast and push that way up. So hope that helps, very cool idea. So I dig it, Peter. All right, next up, Carl. So thoughts on adding non-metallic to the arsenal. So yep, here we go again. Okay, so non-metallic gold. Yes, the issue is we don't have non-metallic gold here. So we can break this down. Okay, why isn't this selling? Well, it's not selling because, I don't mind the hair and the face or whatever, that's all fine. We don't have non-metallic because, so let's just take one element of this, okay? Let's take this horn. This doesn't look like non-metallic because it's not actually doing a transition in like non-metallic would do. So it's not going far enough from one through five in the contrast and it's not doing it in a sensible way that I can interpret the light. How this should be catching is like this, there should be a bright light line here and here. They should be going to white and then it should fade out to like one, two, and then three and then it should be going from the one, two, three, four and then one, two, three, four, five and then a small reflected light here at the edge where the light would be coming down and bouncing back up into that shadow. Same thing here. So you wanna create that transition and like don't think of it like a horn where it's just this one line going down. It needs to be this sensible light pattern on the structure, okay? Same thing here with this, like it doesn't look like non-metallic because it just goes into black. No part of this ring ever goes into black, right? Where it just stops. Like you can see where it's bouncing reflection lights around that there's still colors underneath it, right? It's still catching it and most importantly, there's still an edge highlight on the whole thing, right? So in the same way here with the things like these claws and stuff like that, we wanna make sure that when we're trying to do like or these kinds of pieces that they have a really nice defined edge light, okay? So that would be my chief feedback for you on the non-metallic. Those are tough shapes. I mean, admittedly this guy is not the easiest shapes to do non-metallic on, but creating those like these sort of cascading planes of light across on a shape like that is what you'd wanna do on something that unusual. So I hope that helps. Okay, next up, Jason with his deathcore writer. Appreciate any feedback on color choices and also on the main technical aspects. Sure, so with these guys, color choice-wise, I think it's fine. I don't have any problem with that. Where we actually have the most improvement is something I've mentioned many times, we need more tonal variation. So the horse, the jacket, the helmet, the armor, all of these things need to vary a lot more. They just don't have the like the horse itself does not have the variation we would want. The volumes of the horses muscles aren't picked out. The green of the jacket doesn't have enough variation going down into deeper shadows and coming up into high highlights. One thing also I would say with stuff like deathcore that works really well is weathering, texturing, slashes, hashes and dots, those kinds of things making the jacket look old, look dusty, look scratched, look worn, those kinds of things can really help sell. When you've got the gas mask that the horse wears, having chips and scratches and stuff like that around the edges, having texturing and stippling on things like the cloth parts of it, those kinds of things can really, really help sell the overall effect. So that would be my main piece of feedback for you. Very cool model. Not sure about the singular flower growing in the desert base, but it's a cool statement. So I'm okay with it. He happened upon a singular flower. It's kind of a nice little emotional beat. So I don't mind that at all. I think that's nice that this deathcore soldier finds one little piece of beauty in nature. So I give that an A plus. Okay, next up. Ace, just looking for feedback on the weathering and contrasts on the overall piece. Sure, as well as some mention on the freehand. Yeah, so looking at it. So again, we have a very like direct light here. Careful of that. We don't want that. We want the light to be nice and diffuse around the piece. Like it's very hard for me to look at this. I don't have any image that just shows me a nice, clean, straight on, like that's not over heavily shadowed. So it's very hard for me to talk to you about contrast when it's over exposed and over shadowed, right? Now, as to what I can talk about is things like the weathering and the dust and the pigment. I think that all works fine. I think the couple elements of freehand that I spotted on here, minimal as they are, I think look pretty good. So I think that's fine work. Like the symbol here, the ultramarine symbol on there, on the shoulder, those kinds of elements. Yeah, I think those are good. The little slashes and dots and ashes and stuff that are around on the armor, I think that looks good. I think that all sells. My guess is we don't have enough contrast in the blue yet. It's tough for me to really read with the lighting in this, but my general feeling is we need to push the lighting on the overall and the contrast on the blue a little bit farther. So that would be my main piece of feedback, but hope that helps. Okay, next up. So here we've got Chad bringing us a big skitter strand spider. And so what he's done well and what he should change wants to mention on the phasing in effect and pushing the basing. Sure, so I like the little goblin.  Okay, let's talk about the phasing effect. So you gotta be really careful with this phasing in effect. My honest answer is I don't think it works. And that's because there's no visual signifier anywhere else that that's what's going on. Like I get it, but nothing's happening on the ground. This branch is still off beyond that. The real world is here and nothing in the real world has been disturbed by this guy phasing in. Like nothing's changed here. That's always a tough thing, right? So I think you'd be better with a fig like this. Like it's a neat try. It's a good swing of the thing. It's on his butt, so I don't think it matters that much, but I think you'd honestly be better off without it. That's the honest answer. Okay, now as to the big model and kind of painting on it. So first I wanna talk about the base and the basing structure. It's a lot of mud and then just like little elements scattered around, right? Which we need to, it feels a bit more like just kind of some general refuse. You want some more connective tissue of this. And that could be plants or vines or things that are stretching it out together. The other thing I'll say is on a base of this size, you wanna avoid just having mostly mud. Like you've got a lot of little elements, but you've still largely got a singular element of brown mud. So we need to break that up more in texture, in so height changes, texture changes, color changes, having reds and brown or other color browns, greens, puddles, all that kind of stuff is gonna help break it up, right? Now, as to the color and the composition, it's very bright and very eye-catching. You know, the green, the purple and the sort of red orange honestly do work. And I think they're relatively balanced with the exception that these two horns are mysteriously like a different color than what these are. And I'm not sure why. These three, if these three were the same color as this stuff down here, it would actually be very nicely in balance. I would have done the same thing with like arrow of these spikes as well, just to really sell the whole centerline image of that being compositionally balanced. As to what to do with big models, the key is you gotta work in a lot more stuff. So I do like the little bits of texture and color you've brought out there. I think you can go farther with that. So look at natural spiders, like big creepy natural spiders, Google some images. You're painting a spider, so you can probably handle it. And Google those images out and find some pictures of spiders and look at their natural patterning and that's what you wanna try to replicate there. Ultimately, we don't have enough tonal variation and enough value contrast on this guy, on things like his arms and up under these leg plates and the separation of elements here. So that's the last thing I would tell you to push, but hopefully that'll help, Chad. It's a cool piece. I like that you took a big swing on it. I hope to see more stuff from you in the future. Okay, next up, Guy. He's a little thing there. Go away this thing. What is this? All right. Anyways, Guy has some questions about black almost metal armor and non-metallic gold. So sure. Okay, so the black armor, I think, for the most part, works. It's not actually like it. I think for the most part, you've got the right amount of contrast in it. I think the cloak works. I like its tone and its color. The gold does need some help. As we've seen many times, we're not running the highlight high enough up on the gold. So here we're kind of going five, four, three, and we don't actually have a good two and one on the gold. So I feel like we need a little bit more, and you can really see it when I go here, right, where this black armor that's meant to be actually kind of muted has similar highlight colors, if not brighter than anything on the gold. Like look how bright this is compared to how bright this is, right? That's where we run into a problem. If our black muted, not really supposed to be bright and shiny armor is actually brighter than the gold, which is meant to be gold, that tells us we need to bring the contrast up higher on there, okay? I think the face looks really nice. If you're gonna do the lightning sort effect, make sure you trace those lines really, really, really, really hyper thin. They need to be a little thinner than that. But overall, I think this guy's cool. I like your color choices. I do really like the cape and the sort of transitions you achieve there. I think things like the gun and stuff like that are selling for me, that's working. So there's a lot of strength here on this piece. I think with your main elements are pushing up that contrast on the gold and a little bit of cleanup here and there on just some other elements like the black armor. Some of the color variants look right, but some of the transitions aren't as smooth as they could be, so we'd wanna balance those out. But I hope that helps. All right, so let's keep going. Okay, so next up, Poncho again with his first submission. Says he's mostly an army painter and looking to step up. And he's thinking, you know, local store competition level, sure. So this is a really nice, fun guy. Obviously, everybody loves this, the zinch guitar player here. And, or sorry, slinnish guitar player here, apologize. And I think this came out really nice. When I'm looking at it, the things that jump out at me are just, we need a little more variation in some spaces. So just a couple of things that I caught. First off, you've got stuff like the gold here came down into the blue. So anytime you're painting for competition, you wanna make sure it's very clean. The gold itself needs a little more work. It feels like it's just kind of gold and then maybe we washed it and re-layered it. So I'd look into how to highlight the gold in a more non-metallic style. I've got several videos on it, but getting more shades and more highlights into the gold, I think would really be the biggest thing. It's the flattest part of the mini. I like the color spread. It's obviously a riot of colors and I think that works just fine. Not sure about the base, to be honest. This bright yellow down here is still brighter than anything up on the figure. I avoid putting your brightest element down on the base just as a general rule. The other thing that jumped out at me is the hair tussle. You used kind of the colors of fire, but it's not highlighted like fire. It's kind of going the opposite direction. If you're gonna do that, like obviously it's not meant to be fire. It's meant to be a big tussle of hair or something.  Just so this doesn't feel like it's supposed to be fire or anything like that that's highlighted incorrectly. It feels more like natural hair. So more contrast of value on the hair would be really helpful. But overall, super cool piece. I do love the face mask makeup. I think that really sells. I think that looks tremendous. So that's fantastic. Okay, next up. Mark Tan, first attempt at non-metallic gold. Says he doesn't think it's saturated enough yellow. Sure, so I think it doesn't have enough value contrast in general. So much as I've said many times, I actually think you've got plenty of yellow. It's not the yellow that's the issue here. It's actually that we don't have enough other colors. It's a little too yellow as a matter of fact. So the easiest place to talk about it is right here on this belt piece that's kind of in dead center. So it, like we need a white light catch up here in the corner that's more clear where the light would hit on the edge of the thing and reflect, okay. This on the bottom side needs to come to a higher highlight. This right here should be deeper in shadow. Like when you're doing non-metallic, each little element and how it reflects light has to be properly captured to sell the illusion. The same thing with the Aegis on the leg plate here. It doesn't have enough of value contrast in general. It needs more four and into five and it needs more one into two. Overall, we have way too much three, way too much mid-tone across the whole space. The other thing I would say just as a note is you were doing the light catches on the sword. Don't do these little scratch lines because the angles of these aren't, in general, you probably want to avoid them. There are some ways to do little scratch light lines on swords, but these are, I think you're going for like reflection lines, but the problem is they don't match with your reflections. So if they're meant to be damaged, then they need a matching dark line to show the depth of the scratch. If they're meant to be reflection lines, then they need to be in line with the rest of how your brush strokes and their reflections have gone. You've shown me very horizontal reflection patterns. Like in other words, the light is coming in and reflecting and creating something like this, okay? But then your light angles go like that, which makes it feel incorrect. So those are the things that jump out at me to that. I hope that helps, but very cool Primaris Marine. Overall, he looks really nice. Okay, next up, we've got George who says he's totally new to painting. This is his third project, trying to stick to a traditional color scheme, but would love any suggestions on how to improve. Sure, well, I'll tell you right now, George, the number one way would be paint a lot more mini. So your third project, we've got a long way to go, but I can give you some good tips. So the first thing would be, don't take your pictures outdoors in extreme natural sunlight like this, where it's creating all these shadows and these overblown highlights, as I've said many times, like Games Workshop has a tutorial on their webpage on how to take miniature photos. Just follow that, you can do it with your cell phone and any lights you have at home, it's really easy. I mean, where I see areas for improvement here are largely in the separation of elements that I've talked about before. So paint cleanliness, having dark lines, separating everything and increasing the value contrast of things like the armor and the metal and stuff like that. Again, I've got lots of videos on both upping the contrast as well as how to, you know, black line or separate things with power armor, it's very important often to have black lines and where to go back and do that as a stage where you're actually separating the elements. One final note for you, always black rim the edge of your bases. Don't leave the edge of your bases here the same color as this. These models would look a lot better if you just took the rim of the base. This is what I mean by that, this piece right here and painted that black. Your base rims can be any color as long as they're black but I do never, never, never make them the same color as what's on top. This is in the universe of your miniature. This is not. When these two things are the same color it creates a weird dissonance in our minds. So hopefully that helps George, but you know, good luck, this is great. You're starting out doing Nurgle. Nurgle is a great place to start, it's fun. There's a lot you can do with it. You can be messy and it can be exciting.  Okay, next up, Alberto, one quick question. Like to know how to increase the contrast of the figure with what colors and where, sure. So the number one place is, first of all we've got a potential option for contrast of hue. What I mean by that is a lot of this figure is basically the same color. So most of this figure is orange or yellow. The cloth is orange yellow, the skin is orange yellow, the gold is orange yellow. So everything is in the same color spectrum. So the first place I would actually recommend more contrast is in your composition, contrast of hue. So having the cloth stand out in a more striking color than the neutral tone you've picked here would actually be a good place to start. On this color scheme, you could use something like purple and it would fit very well. The second thing that you could do to increase contrast is just a value. So the skin needs more value contrast, working the inclusion of reds and purples and things like that. If you go watch any of the recent skin videos I've done, how to paint pale skin, if you go watch the, a different way to use your airbrush video, if you go watch the ruddy skin with a dwarf, you'll see how I integrate colors and into the volumes of the mini to better shape that out. So that would be my recommendation for you there. Look into those kinds of elements and you should, and that will help improve your contrast. The skin in value and the cloth in hue, I think are your main areas of contrast you wanna focus on, okay? Hope that helps. Okay, next up, Jamie bringing us this big sweet guy here. And he has a couple of questions, whether the attention is drawn to the face, whether the base is snowy and what I would do to push this model up to next level. So it's tough, because this guy has a very tiny face and a lot of other elements. I think that you probably, the face is, you pushed it into the yellow, a couple of little light catches on the edge of the skull where it's very pointy, pushing that into a yellow, white or an ice yellow would probably help a little more. It's, its face is definitely fighting for attention with a lot of other things. That being said, it does stand out. So I think that's successful. You know, when I look at an image like this, like where it's close up, it's definitely something that stands out. What I noticed mainly as far as, oh, does the tundra work, the simple answer there is yes, I think that's a perfectly fine snowy tundra. I think I have no issue with that, it sells on it. You've got a nice, you've got a nice mix of the actual piled snow and powdery snow.  I think that all sells, that's an A for me. That's a thumbs up. Yeah, that definitely works. Same with, by the way, the little things that I like are the armor, the rusting on the armor looks really nice. The weathering. I also quite like the, excuse me, the hourglass. Just something that jumped out of me. I think that's a nice little color twice you made there. Things that could take this up another level is I think mainly in texturing, especially on the interior robes and the leather and stuff like that. So by that, I mean these areas here, having some more texturing scratches, hashes, dots, that kind of stuff, having more of a hard leather texture on the leather, having a few more, like you have rusty armor, having a few more scratches and hashes on the armor itself, like painted on scratches, in addition to the few that are there naturally that were clearly modeled in. I think that could help sell it. The other thing I noticed is that the chains kind of fall into the robe. So you may want to look at if you can keep a more dark line under those, pop the edges of the highlights out a little more so that they sort of reflect as metal, like the other pieces are, and that could really help the whole thing stand out. But overall, I think this is a great execution. It's a good color scheme. I think it's a very striking figure. So I think it was very successful. Okay, next up. Luigi, who brings us this, the, I don't remember what her name is, but yes, this thing. I've seen this figure before. It's a 40K dark elder thing and I can't remember for the life of me. I think it is. Maybe it's good elder people. Maybe it's a Howling Banshee person. Is it a Howling Banshee person? I don't know. Anyways, what's to do with the hair and next steps for improvement? Sure. So I mean, we've got a lot of sort of non-metallic effects going on all over the place here. It's one of the challenges of this figure. I've seen a lot of people do it in almost complete sort of non-metallic effects and it can be a bit overwhelming to the eye. One thing I'll say is the hair is definitely, like I've mentioned earlier, you basically did the hair in this sort of like everything recessed is dark and everything highlighted. Everything on the top is highlighted.  But that being said, what you've got to do here is create the halos of light.  I have videos on hair. If you go watch like any of my black hair, white hair, red hair videos, you'll see how I'm creating the light. So like on her, it would be, you know, here would probably be a light line and then one up on the top of the dome, there'd be one here. And then we probably want to integrate a little bit of a color. So instead of just being black to white, you know, hair is very satiny. It has a sheen to it. It's going to reflect some of the colors around it. So you want to bring a little bit of those tones in. So you could bring in some very light blue if you want to set the light in the end, which is very common in black hair to get you a little bit of the sort of blue light reflecting from a sky or something like that. And I think that would be the main thing there. Now, as far as other ways to improve this, I think it looks really good. You're capturing secondary reflections. I think the steel non-metallic is the really successful part. I think that's working for me very well. The gold doesn't work quite as well. It needs to come up to a slightly higher highlight and be smoothed out some. The steel is much more smooth than the gold in some places. So that's kind of what jumped out at me. Like some of these transitions, especially into the darker tone are a little rough. And it's not coming up to a high enough highlight in places where I would naturally expect highlights to fall on the gold. The steel, on the other hand, it's really hitting both the primary and secondary reflections I've talked about. We can really see that well here, like on this side of the sort of breast piece of armor. I think you captured that really well, this sort of conical shape and how that would treat with the light. So that totally works for me. But then we don't really have the same effect over here on the gold. So I think that's probably would be my recommendations. But overall, I think this is good. It's just, this is a very tough figure to be honest because it's sort of overwhelming in its shapes and where reflections can end up falling. So hope that helps. All right, next up we've got Kevin who's looking for feedback on the blood effects, the fur and an attempt at using dark tones to pump up the contrast. Sure. So I think the blood effects here largely work. They're pretty controlled. You might want a little bit more spatter. So like putting a little bit of the blood on the end of a paintbrush and then blowing your airbrush at it so we get little speckles up here in the fur might help a little bit because if this guy was really like ripping something apart in this way, there would be spatter coming up over parts of him, right? Now, as to the fur, I think the fur largely works. We could have a little bit more darker tones in some places to show kind of the depth of the fur. We don't go quite dark enough and it's a really careful balance with white fur. If you go and look at the chaos warrior video that I did where I had, where I was talking about popping the final details, you'll see there are cloaks and I did white fur in that and that'll kind of help you. I like the inclusion of the green. I think that works. I think that the texture on the leather largely works. So I think it's really just, yeah, a little bit more dark tones in the fur and then there's a couple of places, especially on the flesh where I noticed some of the blending was a little rough. So you want to kind of smooth some of that out. That white to gray transition is always tough to smooth but I think that would be my area of focus there. But on the whole, I think this works very well. It's a really obviously super great conversion of the arch region into the wolf. I think that totally sells as usual you're a master of green stuff. So I think this is a very cool conversion and overall is doing largely what you wanted to. Okay, next up, Emily bringing us her second submission. This was originally gonna be for Nova, RAP Nova. So, said she feels like the hat is lackluster. Not sure how to make the feathers look better. How about the skin and then, you know? Yeah, as far as the base, obviously don't use this base. I know you said you're not. As far as the base goes, just get a nice round display base from like Green Stuff World or something like that. It's an easy place to get it or go to competition minis. They have some really nice round bases you can order. So that would be the items I would do. I agree on the hat. It is flat. Now the key with the hat is to make it not flat is we need some scratches, hashes and dots, right? So the hat itself has, well, first of all, it has a little, what do I wanna call it? Like, yeah, it has this little thingy around it, this little line. And I know McGonagall might not have had this be colored in the movie, but you're an artist, we can do whatever we want. And I think bringing some color to this piece would honestly spice the whole thing up. I would just use the exact same green as down here on her cloth. I think the texturing and patterning on her robes actually works and sells really well. I think we need a similar effect up here on the hat. Right? Instead of doing the same sort of stippling, it's clearly probably a wool hat or something like that. So it's a different material. So instead we could do like the hashing texture across it and that would sell it in a really interesting way. And you could be pretty minimal with it, but it would really break up all that space. Now, as to the skin, I actually think it's a triumph. I think it's the most successful element on here. By far, it's great. The skin itself looks wonderful. I love the warm tones in the highlights. I think you captured the shadows really, really effectively. The sort of, you've got a almost rembrandt lighting where this side of the face is really warm and this side's really cold. And I think that actually works really well. So your skin tone here is absolutely magnificent. I think that is absolutely the triumph of the piece. Quick note on the eyes. They're all very similarly colored. When you do eyes that big, you can have irises of that size, but they shouldn't be that similarly colored. Like in the iris, one of the things you wanna do is you want there to be more of a color transition. So the darker part up here should go into the deeper green emerald, should be integrating some glazes of some darker green, some deep blues maybe, maybe even a little hint of purple in there. It should get darker toward the pupil and it should get darker toward the outside of the iris.  Eyes have a really, really, really complicated structure. And when you're gonna paint them this big, like on something of this scale, you wanna make sure you're capturing all that detail. As to the feathers, I think they're fine. I don't have any problem with them at all. I think they look interesting and cool. And I like the change of the sort of pattern you've done. It's not a perfect pattern, which is good. It shouldn't be. It's natural feathers. Natural creatures don't have perfect patterns. They have patterns that are random and organic. So honestly, I think the feathers are great. So yeah, but the skin here is just really fantastic, Emily. Like, I mean, this is, when I talk about adding shading and value and tone to skin and really pulling out that interest in the folds and the creases, folks, this is what I'm talking about. So that is an absolute triumph. Okay, next up, bleep bloop. Always a good month when we get a bleep bloop submission with Lady O mentioned that he got rid of the vines, which I think actually works really well. I like this so much better without the vines. So that was absolutely the right choice. She looks so much cleaner. So I think that that's, it's just a really good move.  And I think it works really well here. The cloth really stands out as a success. One thing that I did notice is the, on her headpiece, it doesn't feel as non-metallic as everything else because I think we need more edge highlighting. Like you have the good light spread where it's got the two light lines coming up and then getting dark, but I don't feel the edge highlights as strongly as I should.  That's the one thing that jumped out at me.  So great stuff, great stuff, bleep, bleep. Alrighty, next up Dwight with another Lady O, very popular. Tried to build a scene on the base, what general tips do you have to improve it? Sure, so one thing I'll say is, you know, I think the scene that you're going for, the couple of things jump out at me. The cross-hatching pattern, I'm not really sure if it works. Like I'm not sure what you were going for with it. It feels a little bit like you were aiming for an illustrative effect, but I'm not sure exactly what that effect was because all these little hashes are very, like they're not even in a way that would make them be sort of fabric patterning. They're like, they're kind of messy. So I'm not sure what we were aiming at with that. Now, as to the scene, this would be much improved if she was actually turned like this. So in other words, if right now she was facing me straight on, because the problem is this is actually the front of your mini and she's very, like this is, this tree being big creates a lot of confusion because it's blocking part of the ghost and it's tough to tell exactly what's happening because this creates a lot of, this is imbalancing the composition of your piece, okay? The other thing I would say is when you use this sort of like hanging moss stuff, which you can do, it needs to be thinner. So you want to like tear it up a little thinner and have it really hanging down and like a little more of like a stranding type of thing. And then you want to get it darker and you want to get some more paint on it to really actually make it feel like it's part of the rest of the piece. Right now the tree feels very separate from the figure. And so I think that's where your big challenge is. Integrating the two elements of it together, I think is where you want to focus on. So I hope that helps. It's a very cool idea. I love the overall concept of the thing. I think, yeah, we just got some execution improvement opportunities there, but overall, very cool stuff. Okay, next up, James, looking for the, just trying to work on what we mentioned last month. He says the transitions and the feathers could be a bit smoother, but any tips would be appreciated. By the way, you don't need a light box. You just need to set it in front of a book, put some disused lighting on it. Again, go to Games Workshop, right on the right side of the page. And no matter where you go, they always have this thing for how to take pictures of your minis. Go look at it, highly recommend, okay? So yes, the feather transitions aren't as smooth as they could be. I agree with that. I mean, that's just a matter of more glazing. That's all that is. Now, as to the rest of the piece, what are our options? Well, the blue skin is still a little too flat. So this is where we have our options. So if we come in here, I think this is the right image to really see it. We need to, again, create more volumes on the skin itself. So let's just break it down to the leg part here. This should be deeper in shadow. This should be deeper in shadow. There should be some shadow lines running up on this muscle structure. And this part of the leg should be higher highlighted. This should be higher highlighted. This piece and this top muscle structure should be higher highlighted. Like that's where we need to be pushing the contrast. Okay? So that's, I think, the main thing that jumps out of me on our little skinky-do here. Cool dude, I like him. We just need to push up that contrast. And that'll help him feel a lot more organic and natural and a little more alive, especially if it has our highlight color. We integrate something like a Caucasian flesh tone or something, because it'll feel very naturalistic as a highlight. All right. Next up, Matt O'Brien, who was working on his tabletop goblins. And he mentioned last month, I had said, you know, there's not a lot to do. And, but he did add the, I mentioned weathering and he added that. So let's take a look at how that worked. Yeah, overall, again, understanding what you were aiming at last month, which is, you know, it's an army of gits. You're not looking to spend a million hours per git. You're looking for something that's nice and tabletop. I think this is good. I think your weathering is absolutely in the right direction. You may want to look at some little specks of a brown orange, maybe even a few specks of pure orange rust on the edges of some chains, like right here or here, or maybe a couple of dots on the ball. Maybe a couple of dots up on the ball at the end of his hat. Just some stuff like that is what jumps out at me as potential. But overall, I think we're where we want to be here. You know, for tabletop and getting these guys going, I think it's good. I think we could have to create a little more color into the base. That's the other thing I noticed. It looks, feel it very flat, very muddy, which is fine, but even mud will have some variance to it. So working in some greens or some purples, some pigment, something, to just break up that image a little bit or that flat color a little bit, will I think help? But overall, cool stuff. I think it's definitely an improvement. All right, next up, Sam. So he basically, he had tried to integrate some advice from last month, trying to introduce a bit more variation in hue, as well as in contrast and add a bit of texture to make it look like the plants were growing in the shell. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think the texture works as far as the little like mossy things you've added. So I think that's fine. Overall, there's a little bit of a gloss sheen to some things we don't want. So some of these, like the tree looks very saddened and it shouldn't, it's wood, it should be like very, very matte, right? I think where our opportunities here are now are largely in to continue pushing the value contrast, especially on things like the shell, bringing up the high highlights of that. Like right now, this top part of the shell that's very exposed to the light is basically highlighted the same as this lower part of the shell over here that's a little less exposed to the light. Same with the skin, like this part of his head with the big slug piece or a snail or whatever he is, is about the same yellow as this stuff down here. So creating a little more, we still need to keep pushing that value contrast. That's the number one thing that jumps out of me. So, but overall, I think it's really nice. I can definitely see the improvement from last month. So, okay, good stuff. Let's keep going. All right, Jacob. So this is his abhorrent arch-region, painted to the best of his abilities. So this first attempt at display quality. So looking for feedback on how to improve further? Sure. Okay. So it's good. I like you're capturing the muscle structure rather well here. I think that's working. The ground dirt looks rather nice. Like, again, we've got good, we can see some orange, just some red, some greens in there. So I think that's working well. The red around the mouth doesn't quite work. It's a little too, like, I get what you're going for, but it's a little too samey, like to the point where it looks more like makeup than it does like blood spatter or something like that. So I think what I would do is this should be a little more, I honestly would kind of not do that at all, would be my best advice.  The other thing I'll note is that it feels like we could use a little bit of the infusion of some purple tones down into the low colors, especially in deep shadows. So here what I'm thinking of is places like in the side of his face, in the lower part of his ear, here under his head, here in the recess of his arm, where we've got these deep shadows, a little bit of like that maybe blue-purple tone, kind of softly glazed in there, would be a way to continue to push that up. When it comes to the volume on the muscles, I think they're very well treated, but we do need to soften a little bit more fore into the lower side of these muscles. So when the arm is sitting there and it's very exposed to the light on one side, look how far the shadow is coming up on the structure of my arm here, right? And how deep this shadow is. This is still relatively, like this is still highlighted roughly the same as this, right? And what we need is a little more of the naturalistic shadows to be tracing the overall volume of the arm structure, as well as the individual volume of the muscle structure. But overall, very cool. I think he definitely sells and I think it's a nice looking piece. Okay, next up, Alex, with bringing us a sitan, sitan, however you say it. And he's really curious about the base and does the base draw away from the model? And I think the answer there is kind of yes, mainly because of actually the purple, the purple's so bright. So just kind of dimming that down some would have been a good way to go. Like you kind of paint it on the base and it's just kind of runes. Having that be something like the floor of a spaceship or like something like that that the runes are on as opposed to just the kind of black plastic, I think would really help. At the same time, even though we have this bright up here, the purple and the green draw a lot of attention and don't really have much in a match. The way to balance this out would have been to have the robes around here, like around his shoulders and around the top of his head be this same intense purple glow. That would have actually been a really nice contrast to the yellow, purple and yellow are contrasting colors, complimentary colors. So that would have actually been a really nice move with the bright yellow elements you've got up here to bring up some of that purple tone and create that kind of contrast up here would have drawn the attention away. You could also put a rune like right smack dab on the top of his head to match to some of these runes. And that would, I mean, clearly you're comfortable free handing runes and that would have again, tied the two things together and helped to create some bright light up top. So there you go. Hope that helps. Okay, so let's keep going. All right, next up, Raphael bringing us his first submission. Could use general feedback on the model and where should he put his focus? So overall, I think this looks really nice. It's a good piece. I think the colors are really well separated. Everything's really nicely lined. The pink fire really works. So, but a couple of things jumped out at me. The first thing is the green tone skulls. I like just fine. I think that's a cool touch. It's a very sort of soft duck egg green, which I enjoy. But we can still use a little more shading and shadow, a little more value contrast on the skulls themselves, especially down where they're very hidden from the light, like here on the side of the skull, stuff like that in these areas and popping up the highlights a little bit, bringing it into a little more of a naturalistic yellow green white, I think would really be a strong place. It's just a little more value contrast on that. Same with the horns. They are kind of flat all the way through. That jumps out at me is something that could use a little more contrast. Like something where there's some kind of transition going on on the horns. They get darker toward one end or the other, I think would be quite good. The only other element that jumps out at me is the red, could use a little bit more very soft shadow glazing. This is very minimal, but that's like the red itself feels a little flat. So bringing in some just softer tones of maybe some soft purple or deep blue glazes, really light, really soft, I think could help it pop. But overall, I think this is a really great piece. I think it's very strong. I love the execution of the different colors. I think it works well together and I think it looks really nice. Okay, next up, Brian bringing us his Ogroid Thaumatage. So he's like some feedback on the OSL and the internal glow emanating from the tattoos of the flesh, sure. So let's take a look at, first of all, when it comes to like the OSL, I'm not sure I really see anything that I'm reading as OSL. I understand what you are actually probably going for, which I think what you mean is this green color here on this side of his face and here, I don't have a color that's, or I don't have an image that's really super capturing it because this guy's kind of traditionally hard to photograph. But the problem we have is that there's no motivating source for this light. I think what you mean it to be is this staff. But the problem is, is that this light is brighter than this light, like this isn't light. This just looks like green smoke because it's very dark. When you do, like if you go and watch my OSL video, or you could even watch the glowing eyes video because both of those actually cover the same sort of subjects. When you have that, the central source, the thing that's giving off light needs to be bright. Now at the same time, you've also painted this whole figure as though he's standing in a bright light, okay? So there shouldn't be this amount of glow. This is one of the tricks with OSL. If a figure standing in bright light, then the glow doesn't have any effect. Walk outside on a sunny day and turn a flashlight on and see what happens. Nothing is what happens, okay? If you're at night and you turn that flashlight on, huge difference, right? Huge. So the ambient lighting conditions matter in how you create shadows. Now as far as the glow on the tattoos go, I think it's fine. You actually probably want to have a little bit of darkness around the very edge, it's very tricky to do. But the best way that you can do it is you paint all the tattoos like a slightly deeper green and then you go through with a thin sharp brush and you trace the inner part of it leaving just a smidge of the darker color on each side of brighter green. That will make them feel more like they're glowing, like they're emanating light because again, you can't strike a match without creating a shadow. And so light needs to feel like there's transition between brightness and darkness. If you've ever looked at like a light bulb alone on a ceiling, you'll notice there's a shadow around the light bulb where the base of the bulb and stuff like that is preventing the light from casting its full glow. So you'll get this like ring of light emanating out, right? So that's what I would say. The OSL, if you're gonna try to go for that kind of OSL, then this needs to be very bright and emanating. And I'm not sure where it's standing it would actually cast much of any glow up on him. But if it did, then we would need the rest of this to be in a much darker tone on the side, okay? So we would need like the other parts, the back of them, everything that's not in the light to be much more deeply shadowed. So hope that helps overall. I do like the colors. I think that works really well and the painting looks clean. I especially like the hooves down at the bottom. I think that looks really nice. The striations look good there. Okay, next up Cameron, spirit of Derthu. Any advice to push it further? Sure, so I think he, again, I think this guy looks nice. The separation of the elements between like the softwood, the hard shell, all of that stuff works. I think where we need everything though is kind of very evenly highlighted. Like everything has the exact same amount of highlights that's applied to it. The leaves are highlighted the same amount as the bark, as the inner bark, as the sword, as the claws. There's no differentiation of material here, even though it feels like these should be somewhat different. And so what I think we wanna do here is stuff like the inner runes, those should be coming up to a brighter light. The bark should be largely darker. I believe Colta Paint did an actual thing on this in one of his videos where he talked about something he was doing with the Sylvaneth and he talked about how he, or maybe it was a post, I don't know, but he talked about how he left most of the bark actually rather dark, right? Maybe it was when I interviewed Andy. Yeah, go back and watch my interview with Andy. That's when it was. I watch all of his stuff. I really think Andy is a great artist. But go back and watch my interview with the artist for Andy Wardle and look at how, and go to the episode or the part of the episode where he does his arch-regent or whatever it's called, whatever that leader is called. And you'll see what I mean about the difference of highlighting the tones. Where it really stands out to me is the sword and the claws that feel like they need a little more color and value tone, especially shadows. Where we're really lacking here is going into the deep tones that are separating things out. You're actually missing mostly four and five on this. It's more of a problem of that than it is a problem of ones and twos. So having some deeper shadows in the barkwood to separate it, having some deeper shadows in the sword to kind of create more value contrast and same with the claws to separate those elements out and make them feel like a different sort of material I think would be very helpful to it. So hope that helps overall. All right, next up. Eben, who first time posting, he's been painting for about two years. This was for a competition. He didn't really receive any feedback, how to incorporate a background and tell a story without it distracting from the model. Sure. So, and then he also mentioned blends. Yeah, so I think overall this is nice. I love the painted background. One thing I'll say is it's, this whole thing is too big for this piece, okay? Like we need to shrink this down. So like this piece should probably end about right here and this background should be going, like don't have a misalignment between the background and your background piece.  Now, so I like this needs to stretch out. What I would largely do is like, I would have this be the edge of the piece and move this whole art left. Like if it was me, I would chop this whole part off, scoot this over, end it about right here, cut this whole side of your image off because you don't need it and then make sure it's flat side to side.  Now, obviously you can't do that. You can't pull this whole thing apart but I'm just telling you how I would construct it, right? You always want to use the most minimal amount of space possible to tell a story in a diorama. The more non-figure you have, the less the figure matters, okay? That's the easiest way I can say it. Now, as far as getting smoother blends in a small space, it's a matter of working very subtle soft glazes. I think the armor looks really nice here. I think that really works. And as far as the skin goes and things like that, it's just a question of working in some very soft glazes with some pigment rich paint. You can also use inks to do those final glazes, thin them down. Inks having a liquid pigment will be very strong as far as creating that smoothness and eliminating chalkiness. So final glazes with things like inks or by the way, even contrast paints can work for this if thinned out and controlled. So those kinds of things will I think be very strong for you. Final note that occurs to me is with stuff like rocks and things like that, again, make sure that they look a little bit more messed up. This feels kind of satiny and shiny and it doesn't have like the scratches, the hashes, the other colors that I would expect to see on a big boulder that they just clearly pulled up out of the ground. It would still have to try this of nature on and things like that. So little bits of green and those kinds of elements. Same with the rock wall behind. Overall, I think it's a really cool idea. I love this dude, maybe probably riding the rock in as I assume what happened. And now he's ready to get down and do some smashing and some bashing. So I think it's a great idea. And I think the color scheme on him works actually really, really well. I think that's very strong. So there you go. Okay. Next up, Teebo bringing us a really cool, interesting piece. He said that, you know, some of those parts ended up broken so he couldn't get it as far as he wanted. However, he had fun working on the texture on the frog and some of the non-metallic metal. Curious about what you think the weakness of such a paint job where you're not going 100%. Sure. Okay. So, overall, I think it's really nice. I love the color transitions. I love all the bright colors. I think that's working really well. The frog especially stands out. Places where I think we could step it up, probably a little more highlighting on the guy, especially across the center part of his torso and the lower part of his chin. Because that's kind of not covered by the umbrella thing he has, whatever this sort of thing over top of him is. So, popping that up a little more and maybe a little deeper shadows on the side, just increasing the contrast right here across his line, would I think be helpful in drawing the attention up here?  It really draws the attention down. The only other thing that really jumps out at me as a potential source, and again, I know you said you didn't go to 100%, so I totally understand. Sometimes we just don't wanna do that with a piece. But if you were going to do it, the other element that jumps out at me is something like texturing on the cloth, I think is a place you could go for some additional detail that would really bring it up. So, there we go, hope that helps, Steve-O. All right, let's keep going. So, next up, we've got John. First attempt at display quality and looking for possible feedback on the highlighting of the armor and the skin colors. Sure, so I think what we need to do with the armor is, one, it needs to be smoothed out some and we need more low tones. So, going into a little bit deeper shadows. Also, with orcs like this, some minor damages and scratches really go a long way because these guys have very damaged, beat-up armor. So, making sure you capture those kinds of elements, having some darker shadows in here. You wanna make sure you smooth out any lines like this where you've got a deep line that needs to be a smooth transition out to the, that or be really thin so you come back in with your main color. The skin needs more contrast in general, so we need to pop up the highlights. I like the addition of the pinks into the lips and the ears. You also wanna probably put some of that around the nose and this part of the eyes, like right in here, okay? And then as far as the teeth go and stuff like that, you wanna make sure we have a little more naturalistic transition, little more darker tones near the base of the teeth, maybe some small striations, stuff like that. Overall, I think he's good. I think the cloak looks really nice. I think that's a good execution. I think the fur could have a little more contrast on it. But overall, I think where you've got the most opportunity is in increasing the value contrast on the skin and the armor, especially shadows on the armor and highlights on the skin. So that would be my advice for you, okay? Hope that helps, cool piece. All right, next up, brush. All right, so first time submitting and he entered his first painting competition with this model and wondering sort of what the general feedback might be. Sure, so obviously his bombardiers are really cool model. Looking at it, I like a lot of your choices. I think what we need to do is focus on some more value contrast in very specific ways. So I like the tones, the composition is good. What you need a couple, we need to focus on some areas of contrast though. So things like the armor is very flat. Like this is all just very gray and there's not a lot of highlight to it. I need to see more shadow, more highlight, more value contrast in the armor. When it comes to things like the skin, what we need is a little more contrast of hue. So I like the naturalistic fur that you painted down here, that looks really good. Same with what you did on the rats as well. I think that all sells, I'm in for that 100%. But we don't have any like real nice red tones or pinky hues and rat skin often has that real nice pinky hue to it. So like in between, you know, if you look at knuckles there's a lot of blood and veins and things like that running in there and there's a lot of tones of like pink that will be caught in those lower areas. So having that stuff in here, you know, more of like a maroon tone or magenta tone or pink tone there's lots of places you can go it can dip into the purple or not. The only other thing that jumped out of me is the teeth feel almost the same color as the skin. Same with the claws, they don't really feel like they're highlighted out. We want a nice dark area of separation in between that and you want those teeth to come out. Rats is like, I mean real rats but also assumingly scaven. Their teeth, you know, never stop growing. So they chew things and their claws would assumingly be the same sort of very hard material. And so having a really dark separation line at the edge of the claw and then coming out into something very bright I think would be helpful. I love the vertigris, the weathering. I think that really works well. The glow and the warp energy I think is great and the little freehand triangles on the end of the missile I think are all A plus. So that stuff all works great for me. No issue at all. All right. Very cool piece. Next up, Chris. General feedback on the areas needing improvement the most. Sure. So when we look at this guy, a couple of things jump out at me. One, it feels like the paint was a little thick in some places. So you may want to watch that. But I mean, overall the answer here is pretty straightforward. We need more value contrast. So the red is very, and we need to separate the elements more cleanly. The red is very flat. The clothes are very flat. Like the sword is very just blue. Like everything needs more. The skin is very single monotone. These things need more value contrast. So more shadows on the individual volumes and plates of the armor. More highlights of bringing it up into intense bright red with the skin. Again, more like go and look at some things I mentioned earlier. But this piece, like when you go to black and white, it really shows the whole image. Skin is all the same color. Armor is all the same color. Sword is all the same color. Like everything here in the black and white shows no contrast, right? So that's going to be your main challenge going forward. And what you really want to focus on is naturally blending in those highlights and shadows that create a lot more value contrast. That would be my best recommendation. Okay, next up, Mart. Bringing us a skeleton. New to painting, non-metallic and desert bases. Sure. So the first thing I'll say on the non-metallic is we're not really selling the non-metallic. So again, go back and look at something like what Bleep-Bloop did or some of the other ones I've commented on who I think have strong non-metallic. But we need to run way more value contrast here. Way more, okay? Like it's not even, right now we've got basically three and a little four. We need to go way higher on that for the armor and for the gold pieces and stuff like that. Really stretch that out, okay? As well, you want to look at things like, again, like I mentioned earlier, things like the secondary reflections and stuff like that. These two big planes wouldn't be the only sources of light reflecting like this. It wouldn't be this clean, right? The, when it comes to stuff like the spear tip, and I understand this model is really soft. So it's not the best thing to really get sharp edges on. But when it comes to stuff like the spear tip, again, if you're gonna push this sort of magical spear, which I would be wary of doing a bright blue when nothing else in the figure is like that. This draws all the attention and that's not really what you want. You want to focus more on having these lines be really sharp, really thin. Go back and watch my how to paint sharp thin lines video. And you, or the secondary how to cheat with edge highlighting video because you need to come back in with the blues and thin those lines down. They need to be really, really razor thin to sell the effect.  It immediately disrupts it and makes it look just like paint. So hope that helps. Okay. Next up, Jim, looking for feedback on the red armor weathering on the white arms and photography. Sure. So we definitely need to get this guy in a little more bright diffuse lighting. Like right now it's much too dim. Now, as far as the red armor goes, much like what I said earlier, we do need more contrast here. So I need a little bit more value contrast on the red. One of the problems of this is it's a little, like this figure is very busy. And so you have to really work hard to make sure the individual elements are have the right amount of value contrast and are well separated, which means clean black lines separating everything and sort of edge highlights to pull out the individual pieces. Some parts of the red are highlighted enough, but I think on the whole, it needs to be pushed up, especially when we get down to things like the legs and the top here, we need a little bit more of like the edges picked out and things like that, where there would still be light catches to really make it feel clean. The, some of our separation elements where we've used to wash, we still have this staining effect around here. We don't want that. That just makes the model look dirty, right? And dirty, not in a good way.  Okay. As far as the weathering on the white arms go, I think it's fine. Again, it's kind of, it's tough to tell because there's so much going on here and we're in very dim light. The, again, go look at the, I have a video on how to take photos. Games Workshop has a video or a tutorial on how to take photos. You want bright, diffuse lighting. So take a bright light, put a piece of paper over it or a paper towel, you know, you get two of them. You set it up at opposite angles, put it in front of any neutral background, snap a picture with your phone. That's all you gotta do. And that'll really help as far as evaluation goes. When it comes to weathering and stuff like that on the arms, you want to focus more on something like this, especially around the edges and deep into the recesses. And then you want to make sure that the steel parts are well picked out, well lined and have like the dark elements separating them from the white elements. If you go and look at some of the stuff I've done recently around the whirlwinds edge army, you'll see what I mean as far as the weathering on white goes and separating it from the other elements. So overall, hope that helps. Okay, next up, Jonas, practice for death guard. Appreciate overall technique feedback and the scheme. Yeah, I mean, the scheme is just the standard death guard scheme. So I mean, I think it works fine. What we need here is a lot more contrast of both hue and value. So again, you also probably want to make sure you're picking out all the individual elements. Like this should be probably that same gold bronze color, this top piece, this like line here, these things around the knee, just stuff like that needs to be well picked out. When it comes to things like the pink, natural fleshy bits, those need a lot more, both contrast of hue and value. So working in purple tones, more naturalistic flesh tones and carrying those up to higher highlights, I think would be good. Having some stippled on texture. So if you watched Darren Latham's masterclass when he did his Nurgle figure, some stippled texture to highlight and to shadow is actually a really nice way to go with Nurgle to create value contrast, but we need more of it. So overall, I think the scheme is fine. We just need to push it farther, okay? All right, next up, Adrian, more general feedback trying to improve to competition level. He said, I'm struggling to get nice dark shadows. The black keeps coming up as lighter in the shadow areas. Okay, so one thing I'll say is with the, so let's talk competition for a moment, okay? So why did that turn blue? Go away, there we go. Okay, so when you're gonna do steel and naturalistic metal, we've got to get a lot more control over it as far as the light. So again, go back and watch like my how to shade and handle true metallic, like non-metallic because that's what we've got to get a hold of. And we've got to get these elements more cleanly separated. Same with like the gold on his chest. Like the Aegis is just very gold and it was just kind of washed. We need each feather to have a separation line in it. If we're really talking about competition level, everything needs to be much more clean, much more separated. And it can't just be like, there's a line here that's kind of dirty, right? It needs to be like thin, sharp separation. Each little feather needs a thin, sharp separation. The ring around his eye, thin, sharp separation, like down, on and on and on and on, right? Everything has to be that kind of thing in between the fingies around the bottom of the hand, right? All of these things need to have those separation of elements. And definitely with the gold, we need to work in and control the matte colors more. So taking away from the reflection with a lot more matte colors. So matte inks or even matte glazes of regular paints or contrast paints, something like that work well for this. But we've got to get those, those paints under control. Same with things like the, so when we get to stuff like these blue knee pads, you want to do something with those. They have a perfectly fine transition, but they're boring. If we're really talking about competition, then this needs to be separated somehow. You know, that's often where battle markings or various things, company markings can go on the knee pads. You want to get those like free-handed, get something on there to make it look a little more visually interesting. Or you can do things like scuff and battle damage if you don't want to do the freehand. That works too. But you want to break up large, flat spaces. Competition figures will rarely have a big area of the same color. Things need to be happening. There needs to be visual interest down to that level. So that's my best recommendations for you. I hope that helps. Okay, next up. Sang bringing us, continuing exploring non-metallic metal this time with blue. Sure, so I think this is largely working. I like the transition of the gold. We need a little bit more zoomed in photo here, by the way. You kind of got excited and just took some photos with you holding it. Still set the figure up in a nice place and give me a good photo and a neutral background. But I think it's working. I think we need to pump up some of the secondary reflections. And I like, especially on stuff like the arms, the legs I think are fine. The knees need a little more work on the secondary reflections like the under part of the globe reflection probably needs a little bit of work. The gold needs to come to a higher highlight. I like the tone, but it doesn't go high enough. It doesn't have enough one in it. Frankly, not enough one and two. So it needs to get up to a higher highlight. I think the blue largely has the right amount of contrast for the most part, except that up top we need more one. I need more light catches, more push very lightly here or there into like a glacier blue with maybe a hint of if we're really going for non-metallic. Again, those light catches, those slight points of light where the light would really catch and hit off something metallic and have that sheen. As I recommended earlier, you could go watch the recent Angel Garaldes video. He does, I keep recommending because he does one of the best jobs I've ever seen in a video of explaining the concept of light catches at the end and how it sells the effect. So it's the one where he was painting a non-metallic storm cast night in Cantor. It's a great video and it's not like Angel needs me to rep him, but I think it just explains it really well. And so I like that video. Okay. Next up, Dan loves some input on the muzzle flash effects and advice now to highlight the cape more effectively. Sure. So note on the muzzle flash effect. It should be the brightest here at the point of the muzzle where it's going out. And then it should, like, that is to say, if you look at an explosion coming out of an end of a gun barrel, if you actually like, you know, go Google image to this because people took those kinds of concepts. This should be almost a bright white yellow. It shouldn't be out here in the top. It needs to be down here right near the barrel because that's where the flash is happening from.  So pulling the highlight in a little bit more toward this area I think is what you wanna do. Now, as to how to highlight the cloak. So how do you, what do you do with a cloak? There you go, we'll flip to this. What do we do with a cloak that has this little patterning on it? Well, the answer is we use global highlighting. So we wanna take a color like maybe a soft ink, like a Payne's gray. We wanna thin that way down and we wanna glaze in some soft shadows under all of these folds. I think, I wish this channel was still around, but Darren Latham did a nice job of it in a video explaining like how you reinforce the sort of global highlights on a textured pattern like this. But that's the short answer. Take something like a Payne's gray or you could use a dark contrast paint or even just like a regular paint if you really want to but inks will work the best since they're naturally transparent. And we wanna glaze that softly here into the shadows because all of these colors, it doesn't matter. They're all gonna be pulled by the universal shadow of the ambient environmental lighting. So that's kind of where you wanna go there. All right, hope that helps. Okay, Tomas, grateful for the feedback on the skin. Sure. So I know this is a rather small figure. I think it's good. What we need to do is really, we need a little bit more still deeper shadows, more fours and fives, especially up under the arms and around the volumes of the lower parts of the arm and the musculature there. We also need to connect these together a little more. So one of the things you wanna be wary of is each muscle standing out, like right now you're building each muscle where it's like a circle, where it's darker on the edge and then it just comes up into a highlight. That's not how muscle structure works, right? Like this should be somewhat connected by like a two and then there can be a higher highlight of a one on the individual one. So you wanna pay attention not just to the volume of the individual muscle but the whole shape itself needs to also feed into that. So like the top of his chest here should be catching more light, right? And then it should be going, like this should be a line across the other two coming up into maybe a one here and a one here with a softer shadow coming in down on this side. So that would be my recommendation to you. Hope that helps. There it's Moss. Okay. Next up, Xavier. So feedback on how to improve his silvin' elves. Sure, this is a lot of figures. So, you know, okay. But the short answer here is going to be something I've said many times. I think these guys look perfectly nice. Where we have the most opportunity for improvement is of course in our value contrast more tonal variation, especially on the green. So brin