Marvel: Crisis Protocol

Knocked out my Toady boy last week. He painted up really quickly and was quite fun to paint. Now I just need to knock out the twins and my Brotherhood will be complete.

Finished up Enchantress just in time for a test run of Black Order using Enchantress in the 4 threat drop and Toad in the 2 drop. Didn’t get a chance to play her, but I’m looking forward to annoying everyone by making them give me their objectives.

She was pretty fun to paint. I particularly learned a lot about painting faces and I think she’s easily my best face. Only 7 “bad guys” left to paint before Dormammu drops.

With Viper done I have 6 more “villains” left to paint before Dormammu drops. She was really fun to paint and I’m really happy with how her skin turned out. I wanted it to feel kind of pale and sickly and I feel like the recipe I experimented with worked really well.

I feel like this challenge might’ve helped me grow as a painter more than anything I’ve ever done before. Feels like I smashed through a threshold with him. Very cool feeling.

Man, where to begin with Omega Red. Everything about this model was an exploration and a risk. Since switching over to Scalecolor paints I am no longer comfortable painting red or yellow. I don’t have a recipe down for either of those colors that I feel confident in. On top of that, I decided that I was going to try to do all his metal in chrome to 1.) challenge myself and 2.) because Omega Red has been a favorite character of mine for a long time.

Prior to painting Omega Red, the model that held the crown for the model I’ve spent the most time painting was Thanos. Omega Red has officially taken that crown and honestly I think it’ll be awhile until his throne gets challenged. I had to do him in steps and painted full other models in between those steps to prevent burn out. He’s easily the most ambitious piece I’ve painted so far.

As far as how I feel about him; I’m generally thrilled. I think the chrome turned out so much better than I feared it would when I started. I think the coils are incredibly imperfect and there a millions of little missteps on them, but with how nuts it is to even try to chrome like 50 or so little trapezoidal metal panels (per coil), I’m more than willing to leave it alone and just take him in as a model and be fine with the imperfections. For my first attempt at highly reflective non-metallic metal, I really don’t think I could’ve expected this good of a performance, let alone expected more. I’m really glad I challenged myself in this way if for no other reason than that it fully demystified painting chrome for me. I no longer find the idea of chroming Cable’s gun or Deadpool’s sword to be even remotely intimidating. Even tackling an Ultron repaint seems very doable now. Can’t guarantee it’ll look great, but I no longer see the idea as some insane feat that only a madman would attempt. It’s weird because just typing that out and recognizing it is very empowering. That’s pretty cool.

As far as the yellow goes, I’m pretty happy with the yellow recipe. I think it captures “dirty blonde” pretty well. I’m still not 100% on it, but I feel like I’ve got a better grasp on it than I did before going in, so it’s progress.

As far as the red goes, it was almost as big a journey as the chrome was. In particular, I’m having a difficult time finding a level of highlighting and shading on red that doesn’t make it look orange or pink. I seem to constantly struggle finding a way to highlight it all the way to white without over highlighting it and making it look atrocious. This is the same issue I run into with black (look at my first Punisher for an example of that). I tried watching several YouTube videos on this exact topic and everything I found didn’t really tackle it. What I think I finally figured out with Omega Red was that just because I’m going all the way to white with my highlights doesn’t mean everything that gets highlighted has to go all the way to white. It’s okay to leave big panels at a brighter version of the base color and not have to get pure white in there somewhere. So when I went to do his highlights I used various red tones to highlight, but saved the very “pink” and “white” highlights for only certain small areas. Overall I feel like it works. I think especially since the model already has an insane amount of contrast thanks to the chrome, had I over-highlighted the red I think it might make the model very distracting and confused. This also makes me think that perhaps in the future when I do black, I should approach highlighting it from the same perspective and I might get similar results.

Finished up Bob this weekend. The rocket took some time, but I’ve noticed that since I just got done painting Omega Red in full chrome, the rocket wasn’t really all that intimidating, which is kinda cool.

Overall fairly happy with him. It’s quite a lot of work for a 2 drop, but whatever. I’ve got 4 villains left to paint to be 100% complete with all my baddies. Next up should be Carnage.

Carnage is ready to go and with him completes my Spider Foes (for now). I tried to experiment with him and I’m honestly really not happy with it. I used blue as a shade for the red and it darkened it so much that no matter how much highlighting I did, it still just feels way too dark. In retrospect I should’ve used a yellow undercoat and a red wash to make him have a much more vibrant red.

He’s definitely a good candidate for a repaint in the future. Alas, need to continue working through my backlog.

I’m not sure I’ve ever had so much fun painting a model. From the NMM effect on his muscles to the OSL from the smoke to the little plasma coils on his cloning tank, everything about him was fun to work on despite it being a challenge. Not everything I tried to do with him worked out the way I intended. I wanted the little plasma coils to look like the coils on a plasma gun you see in 40k and I don’t think it quite looks right and the OSL is rough in some spots, but overall I’m really happy with how he turned out and I can’t wait to constantly fail to get enough genetic samples in game to clone Cable.

Finished up Amazing Spider-Man last week. I’m really loving the explosion recipe I’ve come up with and using inks to create the OSL glow is so much easier than traditional paints. This was especially vital with the metallics, where I think any attempt at doing the lighting with traditional paints would’ve been very difficult and would’ve neutered the metal feel of the paints.

The only thing I’m not thrilled about is the red. On one hand, I learned my lesson from Carnage and used a yellow under coat, which makes the red far more vibrant than what I got with Carnage. On the other hand, I feel like the Red doesn’t have a lot of depth. I think in the future I’m going to do the yellow under coat and then shade the red down with brown, having a bright red as the highest of the reds. Theoretically this should allow the red to both be bright AND have depth to it, giving me that “pop” I’m looking for whilst still having a bright red that doesn’t go into oranges/pinks.

Overall I’m pretty happy with him. I think he’s good practice for when the new core parker model come out as part of the rivalry set.