Marvel: Crisis Protocol

Finshed up War Machine this weekend.

He was a lot of fun to paint and really makes me realize how much more comfortable I’ve become with painting black. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to differentiate between the darker and brighter panels of his suit, since I was using the same recipe, just with different brightnesses, but overall I think it turned out alright. I think the experience with him will also be really helpful when painting Hulkbuster, so that’s good.

Finished up Sam Wilson this week. It’s funny, I’m noticing a few things as I paint minis:

1. My standards for myself are getting higher and higher
2. “Higher quality” paint jobs are getting easier and I’m accomplishing them quicker.
3. My criticisms of my work are getting more and more harsh.
4. My opinion on “quality” of paint jobs is getting more and more subjective and vague, to the point to where I might have to abandon using it as a term.

I knocked Sam out in a much quicker time than it would’ve taken me to do half as good a job on two years ago. I would never have believed I could’ve painted something this well two years ago and yet when I look at Sam all I see is all the things I could’ve done more work on and chose not to. I see all the sloppiness in the transitions of the OSL from the explosion on his wing. I see the lack of definition in his face. I see the lazy pseudo NMM I did for his metallics, where it’s kind of black and kind of NMM, but not really. There are many others, I could go on all day about it.

And yet, I put the model down on the table and think: “Man that looks cool” and kind of sit back and be not at all humble for a bit thinking about how good of a painter I’ve become. It makes me realize yet again, along with the last several minis I’ve painted, that it’s all subjective in the end. Does the paint job serve your purpose? In Sam’s case, I wanted a model that “pops” on the table top that I can play games with and generally feel good about the paint job. So despite there being a million little things I think could use a lot of work on, his paint job serves my purposes and serves them very well. Thus, he is a great paint job. He just also happens to be a testament to how far I still have to go as a painter. And that’s okay.

I was especially blown away when I compared his shield to Steve’s shield that I painted when the game first released. I’ve been holding up that shield as a source of pride for the past two years as it looks hands down better than anything I had painted previously, but I can now say I think my work on Sam’s shield just puts it to shame. It honestly makes me cringe a little when I compare them (and makes me want to do my Steve Rogers Cap repaint). I have to be careful about that, because it still looks good and I don’t want people to read my comments as critiques on their skill level by comparison. Painting is such a personal journey that I would hate for people to see how critical I am of my own work and then be ashamed of theirs in response. I would never want to put someone off the hobby like that.

So Lockjaw was a bit of a laid back fun experiment. My wife and I have a piebald miniature dachshund with a very unique and gorgeous color pattern and I wanted to see if I could make Lockjaw match that color pattern. I really did not hold myself to a very high standard with this model as I just wanted to look at it and have it remind me of my puppy. I spent more time focusing on getting the colors to match than I did focusing on how smooth the transitions were or on making everything highlighted and shaded in the way I normally do. As far as the color palette goes, I feel like I generally succeeded, and since that’s all I was going for I’m just gonna call it good.

Just Doctor Voodoo left to paint and the faction will be complete. Excited to be able to play them.

Still to be painted/released:

• Doctor Voodoo

Planned Repaints:

• Doctor Strange
• Wong

Storm has been sitting on my paint desk for a very long time. I don’t think I’ve been more intimidated about painting a model as I have been with Storm and it’s caused me to put off her paint job in favor of less intimidating models for quite some time. I’ve seen so many paint jobs on her where the light from the lightning is entirely (or almost entirely) ignored and I really wanted to avoid that. I really liked the idea of virtually all of the light coming from the lightning, to really show how powerful the lightning strike is and be a nice focal point for the paint job. I also liked the idea of having a powerful glow come from her eyes.

I recently learned with Blade that doing the OSL via airbrush before painting the model doesn’t work. I ended up having to redo the OSL by hand afterwards and I think the model suffered for it. In retrospect I should’ve just airbrushed red on him after painting him and then touched it up with a brush to make the OSL clean. So with Storm I decided to try that. After giving her a general prime I used airbrush white to lay out the areas that were going to be lit up from the lightning strike.

I then laid down base coats for her skin, outfit and hair. I then re-established the OSL using very light white spray from an airbrush. I then picked out the highest highlight colors and watered them down to turn them into a glaze and worked the OSL into the base coats. I played with this step for some time, trying to make the transitions smooth and all the while trying to remember to keep the highlights going in the direction of what would be lit up from the lightning.

After doing that I noticed that the black on her outfit in particular just didn’t look finished. The problem here is that all of the lighting is coming from either beneath her or behind her, so the darkest area on her is the front of her torso. However, just leaving it black was making it look unfinished, which is no good. The fix I came up with for this is to highlight up the darkest areas with just a layer or two of highlight, keeping them a very dark bluish grey, to give them some depth. If I kept this minimal, in theory it should give the black depth without taking away from the OSL.

Finally I struggled with what to do with the lightning itself. I’ve seen it painted blue, yellow and white and of those I liked blue the most, but having the OSL from the lightning being blue didn’t seem right to me, so I opted to try to keep the lightning on the lighter end of blue and keep the OSL white. I’m still not sold that this was the right decision, but I feel like the piece looks good enough that I should just call it.

Overall I have no idea how I feel about the paint job. Everything with it was so experimental and the results are so mixed that I’m just not sure if the decisions I made on how to achieve what I was going for were the right decisions. It will be interesting to go back and review this mini once I’ve had more time to sit with my feelings about it and perhaps after I’ve had more practice with similar techniques.

After struggling through Storm’s paint job, where I second guessed everything I did, it was nice to just go on autopilot for Ronan. Nothing super about his paint job, just the basics. Pretty happy with how he came out. Glad to be done with him.

Took me way to long to get around to painting Angela, especially considering how good she apparently is in the game. I might have to return to rewrite this write up for her as right now I’m not sure how much insight I have as to her paint job at the moment.

I returned to my Thanos recipe for her gold and I’m glad I did, as I’m gearing up to paint Hulkbuster and I think this gold looks better than what I did on my Iron Man repaint. I continued with my lazy man’s NMM for the all of the steel-esque metallics, which honestly looks too much like black and doesn’t feel at all like NMM, even though it technically is. I think I’m going to have to tackle that at some point, but I’m not sure when. I think the problem with my “lazy man’s” version is that it doesn’t have any sky or earth in the reflection and so it just looks like detailed black instead of any kind of metallic, which looks especially off on Angela when you contrast it with her ribbons, which are essentially painted the same.

I’m pretty happy with how the flesh turned out and I think overall the flesh and gold look really nice. I’m far less happy with the hair, which I think I kind of got lazy about and probably should’ve taken it higher and I think I should’ve started higher on the white so it look less  like a light grey. Overall though, I think the piece looks good and I’m generally happy with it. With her done I’m finally done with A-Force and Guardians of the Galaxy, at the time of writing anyway.

Finished up Ms. Marvel. After spending so much time working on models that require NMM or OSL or really complicated paint schemes, it’s nice to just sit back and knock out a simpler model that you can just do basic techniques on. She painted up really fast and was really fun to paint.