I've been putting Thanos off for quite some time due to frankly being intimidated. He's a big deal in game. There's an ultimate encounter where one player just plays Thanos with all the gems and he goes against an entire team by himself. As such, I really wanted to do the model justice. I've seen Sorastro's video on him for some time and I wanted to use that video to paint him, but Sorastro specifies a bunch of Scalecolor paints that I didn't have a way to get due to my location. In particular the blues he used are much more vibrant than the ones I was using, so I really wanted to get ahold of those paints before I tried following the guide. Now that I've moved and was able to get a full range of Scalecolor paints and I've gotten more practice in doing things like NMM and OSL, I decided I'd bite the bullet and finally sit down and paint him.
My goal was to have him done by the weekend, but destiny had other plans. Work and family life gave me a helping heap of obligation that took my focus away for most of the weekend. As such, I was only able to work on him on Sunday. You'd think an entire day on one model that isn't particularly large would be enough, but the NMM process really ate up my time. The blue went relatively quickly and smoothly, as did the face and skin. However, once I hit the gold and in particular when I was blocking out the shaded areas of the gold for the NMM, the process was kind of a grind and took several hours. I almost decided to give up and work on him another day, but due to how much mixing is involved in the NMM and the gold I decided I wanted to at least finish blocking out the shading before calling it a day.
Then, a funny thing happened. Once I finished blocking out the shading I realized that all that was left for the gold was the highlighting, and due to how much of the gold was to remain shaded or with the base color, the highlighting would actually be relatively minimal and would likely go really, really quick. This breathed a lot of life into me and reenergized me and I was able to knock out several layers of highlighting, all but finishing him save for his infinity gems and base. One of things I've noticed about paint projects is that the earlier processes before you get to see the end results can be kind of daunting and feel like a bit of a grind at times, but once you get that part done and you start doing highlighting and you get to see what is closer to an end result where the model starts to pop, the painting immediately becomes really fun and suddenly I can paint for hours, even if I've already been painting for hours. That's what happened here with Thanos.
At this point it was getting late and would have been a bad idea to try to stick it out and finish him right then. However, due to Sorastro's guide, I was able to prep his gauntlet with the OSL highlights he needed that I will use inks to give color to. Knocking out the gems and the base should be relatively straight forward and quick to do, so Thanos should probably be done the same day that I'm writing this, but I wanted to get these thoughts down while the process is still fresh in my head.
As far as how I feel I did on him, overall I'm thrilled. The NMM feels really good, the transitions seem pretty smooth save for the spots on the NMM where I was intentionally trying to make them look a little rougher. The only area I can see where in retrospect I should've done things differently is I think some of the NMM on the boots isn't blocked out rationally. Especially in the rounded tips of the boots, I think I should've relied more on Sorastro's guide as what he did looks much more natural than what I did. However, since I'm very new to NMM and this was my literal first attempt at NMM gold, I'm not going to be too hard on myself about it. I wouldn't have been able to do half as well on him had I tried this 6 months ago, so I'm not going to overthink it and I'll just call it a win.
I'll be sure to add an update once I finish the gems and base and I'll also be throwing up some group shots of him and the rest of the Black Order now that they're all done.
