Hole in My Head Protocol
Recommendations: 8
About the Project
I need a new game like I need a hole in my head. However, Over the past few years I have found that I really enjoy painting Atomic Mass Games' Shatterpoint models, and it's also my current favorite miniatures game by a fairly wide margin. So, with AMG scaling Shatterpoint back to just a few releases per year, there's a hole in my hobby budget that needs to be filled. Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself...
Related Game: Marvel Crisis Protocol Miniatures Game
Related Company: Atomic Mass Games
Related Genre: General
This Project is Active
Red and blue are back in style
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.
Black leather is what all the superheroes are wearing these days
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.
Nobody wants him, he just stares at the world
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.
What Have I Done?
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.
