Colossus

Man, was Colossus a blast to paint. I am so glad I had the opportunity to tackle NMM chrome on several other models before trying to do Colossus. He's such a cool sculpt and I would just feel bad going with a more traditional TMM approach. I think one of the big lessons I learned with him is when doing NMM, I need to go heavier into white than I have been with my NMM attempts. If you look at, for instance, Luke Cage's bracers, the areas on Warmachine that are brighter than the black metal, all of Black Dwarf's armor or the countless examples where I've painted a sword or gun a vague grey color, these were all attempts at a kind of NMM. In some cases, it was a full-fledged attempt at chrome. In others, it was just an attempt at making it look generally metallic. When I first started with the chrome on Colossus, I originally was going with a much more mid-tone grey and something about it just didn't look right. It was coming across too dark like on the examples I mentioned above. Fortunately I found a couple pics of another brave soul who was doing NMM chrome on his Colossus and had done a pretty damn good job and it made me realize that what mine was missing was that it was too dark.

I also added in some general color reflections, like purple on the underside of his right leg to represent the reflection of the sentinel head and blues on his head and left arm to show the reflection of the arm, but I generally tried to keep these subtle. I didn't want it to be overpowering. I was very sensitive to the idea that going too heavy on that would be a mistake. Honestly I'm not sure there's any merit to that at all, but I felt it greatly while painting him.

I also made the conscious decision to understate the detail in the sentinel pieces. I toyed with the idea of of throwing in some brighter colors for the wiring in the sentinel arm, but I didn't want to distract from Colossus himself, so I ultimately decided to leave it as some vague greys and blacks to help focus your attention more towards the detail on the metal man himself.

Painting him also helped me realize that where and how high to bring highlights is feeling more and more natural. I really like how the musculature on his torso turned out and it makes me excited to do repaints of models that are predominately muscles, like Venom. 

It also made me realize that my perspective on "contrast" is constantly updating as I paint more models. Early on I switched to this idea of taking everything to white as a way to make the model "pop". This resulted in a lot of models having some really harsh highlights (the original paints on the core models are perfect examples). I eventually shifted more to focus on transitions to get away from all this harshness, but as I continued I noticed that a lot of the models weren't "popping" anymore (Deadpool is a great example of this). More recently I've realized that "going all the way to white" doesn't mean that significant portions of the highlights need to be full on white. You can get the same "pop" effect by just adding a single dot on a highlight that is pure white, so long as you transition up to it appropriately. This lesson was a rough lesson to learn on certain colors, like Red and Black. I think with Colossus I'm finally getting that lesson down and I was able to bring everything all the way to white, but the model doesn't look overly highlighted, the transitions are generally smooth. It's interesting how a single lesson sometimes takes several steps, half of which are missteps themselves, to really learn. Makes me wonder how many other perspectives I have on painting that a year from now I will look at and feel naive about.