Convocation of Wizards

Ancient One

Ancient One was a pretty fun project. For starters, I saw someone do the base effect online and knew I had to steal it. It's too good an idea. Also gives me a chance to use up some of the "metal plate" bases, which frankly I'm not the biggest fan of so I end up with tons of them. I ended up needing to use a metal washer in the base, which was a little tricky because I also use Magnaracks for transport, so I had to be careful to get it situated along with the magnet correctly.

As far as painting goes, she was fairly straight forward. I knew I wanted to use my normal yellow recipe, save for the energy effects, which I wanted to have more of a fiery feel to them, so I used oranges as shades for those. Highlighting black is feeling more and more natural. One of things I've learned in this project that I think is really counter-intuitive is that often to make something look more detailed you use less paint. Had I painted her at the start of this project the black would've had a ton more greys on it because I was trying to go "all the way to white" and I hadn't yet figured out that to make a color like red, black, white or yellow look like those colors, you use your highlights sparingly and you can still take it to white and get the "pop" contrast effect without making it look like my first Black Widow model.

I've also noticed that as I paint more and more I care more about getting the face right. I'm now actively trying to do eyes whereas I used to just rely on a wash to make the eye socket area look shaded. I now try to plan out where I want the highlights to hit to emphasize certain sections of the checkbone or forehead depending on the model's facial structure and where the lighting would fall on their face. I didn't use to think about those things. So with Ancient One I explicitly tried to emphasize the lighting on the bottom right side of her face to make the shadow from her cowl look realistic.

Overall I'm really happy with her (I need to find another way to say that as I say it way too often). I painted her while kind of assembly line painting the most recent batch of my Convocation characters and this time around I don't feel like the assembly line style of painting harmed the paint jobs like it did the first time I did it.

Baron Mordo

I don't have a whole lot to say about Mordo. Not a character I'm very invested in or frankly interested in. Wanted to get him painted as part of my Convocation. I saw doing his staff as an opportunity to practice Gambit's NMM staff I plan on doing, so it received much more attention than the rest of him did. I've noticed that doing chrome NMM is much easier when you have explicit borders like flat panels to work with. When doing it on a cylindrical surface it's not nearly as straight forward. You don't have the same border to accentuate to drive home the reflective look. Not sure how I can adjust what I did to get a better NMM chrome look. I'll have to put some thought into this before I attempt Gambit's staff.

Outside of that he was a relatively quick and straight forward paint job. I suspect he's one of those models that when I look back on I'll see all the things I could've done differently.

Clea

With Clea I feel rather mixed about her paint job. One one hand I like how a lot of it turned out. I think the purples have a lot of depth, I like how the black highlights land and I feel like the face at the very least doesn't detract from the model. On the other hand I feel like none of it turned out how I was planning. I was trying to make the purples on her outfit look like two different purples, with the cape and belt sash being lighter than the purple on the main body. However, I didn't use a different hue of purple, I just started with a lighter shade on those parts and as a result I can't really tell that one was intended to be lighter. With the magic bits the effect worked better because I used different hues to begin with and in retrospect I should've done the same thing with the sash and cape, although I'm at a loss for what hues I would've use to distinguish them. Either way, I still think she came out well, so I suppose I should take the win on this one.

Doctor Strange

The job I did on Doctor Strange is a mixed bag for me. I struggled with the red as I wanted to bring it up in highlight more, but I didn't want it to turn pink. This struggle has been an ongoing part of this project. I'm happy with my deep reds, but I've never really been happy with highlighting my brighter ones. I eventually opted for using oranges/yellows for the highlighting and I think it really helped. Overall I'm really happy with how the red turned out, so I see that as a victory. That being said, I kind of feel like the rest of the mini is a miss. The highlighting on the blue doesn't feel natural to me. I think the gold on the rings was a mistake. I think I should've opted for another color and used OSL effects. I painted this before Sorastro came out with his video on it and I really wish I would've had that as a resource before I painted mine. Now that I think about it, I think he is a good candidate for a repaint, especially since I feel similarly about Wong. Perhaps I'll look into picking up another box.

Doctor Strange, Sorceror Supreme

Painting Doctor Strange this time around makes me realize how little I really understood painting yellow and red the first time I painted Doctor Strange. Which is weird (or perhaps I should say strange? ba-dum tiss), because at the time I painted the first Strange I felt like I had those colors down fairly well, so it's not a lesson I thought I needed to learn. Makes me glad I have another copy of the first Strange so I can do a repaint.

Come to think of it, this model represents every "problem color" I've had to struggle through in this project. The list of models where I really didn't know what I was doing while painting black is a long list and it's only relatively recently that I feel like I've figured out how to do the color justice. Yellow is a recipe that I had a decent formula down when I was using GW paints, but I had to relearn it using different colors when I switched to Scalecolor. White was a color that I was entirely dependent on the GW base of Corax White until I learned about the Scalecolor NMM mixes of Black, Anthracite Grey and White Sands, which I now use to do all my whites, greys and blacks. Ever since then doing those colors is now so much less effort and far more fun. Finally red is a color that I really struggled with figuring out how to highlight as it's really easy to accidentally make it pink or make it orange and just like with painting black, the key is less paint and very targeted, sparse highlights.

I shudder to think of how bad this model would look had it been in the core set and been one of the first models I painted on this project.

At the time of writing this, the only thing I look at and think "I could've done this better" is I didn't even bother with an OSL effect for his flames and honestly it never even occurred to me while I was painting him. Same goes with the portal, which easily could've been used to make some cool underlighting effects. It makes me realize that despite my progress, I'm still not thinking about my paint jobs very deeply before I dig into them. However, this might be due to painting him in an assembly line manner while I painted my other Convocation characters. Perhaps that's the real drawback to doing things assembly line; you spend less time thinking and planning out your paint jobs and even if what you paint is well executed, you miss out on paint choices that really could've elevated the paint job.

Doctor Voodoo

Still unpainted and/or unreleased.

Magik

Man I'm really glad I didn't try to paint this model a year ago. I've learned so much since then about painting black, faces, blending that the things I was able to accomplish here I would absolutely have botched or not bothered with a year ago. The only real critique I have of her is I'm not thrilled about the face, but I'm not sure yet what about it I could've done better. Whenever I have moments like that I always suspect that I will return to that model later after learning some other lesson and it will be immediately obvious to me what I should've done differently.

I'm really, really happy with the black on the outfit. I think the highlight placements feel really natural and the amount of highlighting gives it depth while still keeping it looking like the color black. I also really like how the sword and the blue magic and portal effect came out. I worry that had I tried to do this with a different paint brand, it wouldn't blend as nicely and at least a portion of my progress as a painter is tied to the paints cheating for me. There's something about the Scalecolor paints that just kind of blend together even though I'm just doing layering. I often get questions if I'm doing wet-blending or glazing or something along those lines and really the closest I get to any of that is I'll go back in and soften transitions with a mix if the transitions look too rough, but for the most part the paint is just cheating for me, giving me a better paint job than I likely deserve.

So overall I'm really happy with how Magik came out. She was a fun model to paint and I think she looks really striking on the table top.

Wong

Wong is one of several minis I painted in an assembly line to get them knocked out so I could move onto other minis. Going forward I'm going to try to avoid doing that as I think it lowers the quality of the paint jobs too much. Wong is a good example of that. All of things that are highlighted didn't quite go all the way to white and had I been painting him by himself I would've spent more time on transitions. Overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think in retrospect I should've done an OSL for the purple energy and maybe even have reversed the highlighting to make it look like there's some kind of heat emanating from within the smoke. He wasn't a huge priority for me as a mini, so I'm okay with him as he is, but there's plenty of room for improvement.