Hole in My Head Protocol

Elsa Bloodstone is just a fun character. When she first appeared (in a brief 4-issue miniseries in 2001) she was a bit of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer clone, but after a five year hiatus she reappeared in Warren Ellis’ brilliant Nextwave, reinvented as a world-weary monster hunter with gravity-defying hair and a sarcastic personality. She’s been a mainstay in Marvel’s supernatural-flavored books ever since.

For this one I decided to skip the speedpaint and went with a triad approach with washes for some of the darker areas and drybrushed highlights.

Man-Thing is…let’s be honest, he’s a blatant ripoff of DC’s Swamp Thing, with a name that proves we’re definitely not doing phrasing. Honestly, the juvenile jokes about priming my Man-Thing, varnishing my Man-Thing, etc, really are just too easy. That doesn’t mean those jokes weren’t made throughout the painting process though. Just imagine what it’s going to be like when he hits the tabletop…

(And yes, Giant-Size Man-Thing was a real Marvel title that ran for 5 issues in 1974. They must have been doing it on purpose, to see if anyone was paying attention. Clearly they weren’t.)

This one was a lot of fun to do. I’m sure I broke out just about every shade of green and brown I have in my paint collection, and the model’s texture made it a great candidate for the standard base color-wash-highlights approach. I’m very happy with how he turned out.

Spider-Man, Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel have almost identical color schemes, so I painted them together.

Thankfully, Spider-Man’s web pattern was indented rather than raised, so the speedpaint did most of the work for me. A bit of white and black for the eyes and chest emblem, and we’re done.

I have found that the blue speedpaints go on a little blotchy, especially over smooth areas like we see on the embiggened Ms. Marvel. I wound up doing a lot of course correction on both versions of Ms. Marvel as well as Captain Marvel, to the point that I might have been better off doing the blue in traditional paints instead.

To make things easy on myself, I grouped all the “black leather” characters and did them all in one go. Painting black leather is trickier than you would think — it should be dark with really bright highlights. I’ve found that drybrushing up from black primer, then dulling it back down with black speedpaint (thinned a bit with speedpaint medium) does the trick without taking too long.

Iron Man lives again…

These two were easy but fun. I did the initial drybrushed base coat in silver rather than Ancient Stone. For Ultron I just added the red bits in speedpaint. I did the same for the red parts of Iron Man’s armor, then did the gold in…well, gold, followed by a strong tone wash.

Until now I’ve avoided Marvel Crisis Protocol. In the distant past I was an avid Heroclix player, so I had the initial “what do you mean I have to buy models of characters I already have” response, but I’ve since relaxed on that front (not to mention I sold my Heroclix collection some time ago). More importantly, my partner and I have really been enjoying Shatterpoint, and the promise of a similar game is hard to resist. So here we are.

I picked up an original Core Set for a song — all the paper and cardboard is out of date, but it was worth it for the models and terrain. That would be a good starting place but of course I had to get a few more sets as well…

I decided to start with some of the more colorful characters.

As usual I’m using a mix of techniques for these: black primer, a heavy drybrush in an off-white (Army Painter Ancient Stone), speedpaints for the base colors, then a much lighter drybrush for highlights. There were a few cases where the speedpaint did some excessive coffee-staining, which had to be touched up in traditional paints using a more-or-less triad approach.