Marvel: Crisis Protocol

Crossbones is ready to go. I definitely prefer the white background to the black for photo purposes, but the white does such a terrible job of showcasing the highlights. It makes the whole thing look much sloppier than it looks in person. Either way, Crossbones is done. I’m getting a lot better at doing the extreme highlighting on the black. I think I’m going to revisit Black Widow soon now that I’m more comfortable with the color.

Baron Zemo is done. Still trying to find a good background for my photos. The white just makes all the highlighting look too blocky and simplistic. Will be experimenting with that later.

Tried out some different color backgrounds and red is definitely better than the white, black and grey backgrounds I was working with. It seems to have all the advantages of the white (brighter colors, more detail) with less of the muting of the highlights.

Generally speaking, I like the red background better, but I have noticed that some minis benefit from it much more than others, so I think from here on out, I’m going to test out different color backgrounds with each mini and use the one that gives the best results.

So here’s the final product for my Iron Man. I realized when I was nearly done that this is technically a Non-Metallic Metal paint job, which if you told me a year ago I would even attempt I would’ve laughed at you. Overall I’m fairly happy with the results. Honestly the photos don’t really do it justice. It looks much cleaner in person. I tried several different backgrounds for the photos and once again, none of them really worked as well as the red did.

I had an idea of using a background with terrain and a mat instead of using just a colored background. Now that I’ve finished my core set, I need to get the terrain painted up anyway, so this is a good excuse to focus on knocking out some terrain. Once I do that, I’ll try some pictures of my painted minis with a gaming background and see if that helps better capture their paint jobs.

I’m going to start with the scatter terrain and then move onto the vehicles and buildings, so the next update should be some scatter terrain.

Dumpsters are ready to go. Really happy with how these came out. I’m thinking of bringing in some more highlights on the yellow logos and on the green dumpsters as I think the blue dumpsters kind of outclass them, but for now these are perfectly acceptable for tabletop, so I’m happy.

So I just got word back on the painting competition and it turns out my Captain America won gold! This put him in the top 3 of the competition for that category with another gold medalist with an incredibly smoothly painted Captian Marvel and with the overall winner of the competition, who painted an amazingly well detailed M.O.D.O.K. complete with NMM gold.

As proud as I am of my work on Cap, I had no idea it would do this well, so this pretty much made my weekend.

Hobby wise I’ve been working on the Wave 6 of the Walking Dead minis (progress is on that blog), but once those are complete, I’m back to knocking out terrain for MCP, then the plan is to post new pics of the minis with proper backgrounds. Then, finally, I’ll be able to start working on all the expansion characters I’ve been itching to get to.