Asgard
Thor, Prince of Asgard
Thor was one of the first minis I painted after the core set was complete. I'm happy with how the flesh turned out, but the rest of the model I look at and just see what would look better if I painted it now. The black in particular is too overdone and I think I should've done more work on the cape. I would've preferred doing NMM on the hammer as I think it just looks like stone, which doesn't really do it justice. Interestingly I assembled him wrong the first time and there was a horrendous gap between his head and his cape that didn't get fixed until after he was painted. I had to do so much work on fix it that I had to use green stuff to fill in the area on the front of his neck and repaint part of him. I'm still not 100% that I've built him correctly.
Angela
Took me way to long to get around to painting Angela, especially considering how good she apparently is in the game. I might have to return to rewrite this write up for her as right now I'm not sure how much insight I have as to her paint job at the moment.
I returned to my Thanos recipe for her gold and I'm glad I did, as I'm gearing up to paint Hulkbuster and I think this gold looks better than what I did on my Iron Man repaint. I continued with my lazy man's NMM for the all of the steel-esque metallics, which honestly looks too much like black and doesn't feel at all like NMM, even though it technically is. I think I'm going to have to tackle that at some point, but I'm not sure when. I think the problem with my "lazy man's" version is that it doesn't have any sky or earth in the reflection and so it just looks like detailed black instead of any kind of metallic, which looks especially off on Angela when you contrast it with her ribbons, which are essentially painted the same.
I'm pretty happy with how the flesh turned out and I think overall the flesh and gold look really nice. I'm far less happy with the hair, which I think I kind of got lazy about and probably should've taken it higher and I think I should've started higher on the white so it look less like a light grey. Overall though, I think the piece looks good and I'm generally happy with it. With her done I'm finally done with A-Force and Guardians of the Galaxy, at the time of writing anyway.
Enchantress
I'm really proud of how Enchantress turned out. In particular, I'm really happy with her face. I think it's easily my best face so far. Faces are a major weakness in my painting, particularly due to the eyes which I honestly usually just avoid painting entirely (you may have noticed). However, when I was looking up how to paint Scarlet Witch I found a guide from Sorastro and in that guide he paints her eyes by first painting the whole eye area black and then painting flesh around it to clean it up and then painting white in the eye itself. I was really blown away by how good it looks. Now, it's possible that this trick won't work as well on male characters as the effect is intended to give an eye-shadow kind of look, but at least for Enchantress it works really well.
Outside of the face, I tried to make the green as varied as possible due to the monochromatic scheme of the character and I feel like I did a pretty good job. She feels varied enough to not be boring. I also feel like she's a good example of how I'm getting more comfortable with placing my highlights. Her skin, leg and hand highlights feel very natural to me. I think the only highlights I'm not really sold on are the torso highlights, particularly below the boobs. I think that's an area I still struggle with placing highlights on due to it's flat nature. Overall I think it's pretty passable though. Other than that, there isn't anything about her that I currently take issue with. I'm sure that'll change over time though.
Hela, Queen of Hel
Painting Hela was a lot of fun. I had the fortune of being able to rely on a Sorastro PDF guide from his website and it made the whole process smooth, straightforward and fun. I've noticed that the more I learn about painting the more I notice when I'm getting lazy about a paint job and there are many little areas on her where I could've done so much more and just decided not to. I ended up with a second copy of her, so at some point I might just decide to give her a repaint, but honestly I'm really happy with how she came out and at the moment I don't really see much value in repainting her.
One of the things I love about what Sorastro did is his incorporation of all the different hues of green. It's such a monochromatic model, generally speaking, but his decision to use very different kinds of greens for the different areas of the model really helps break it up and really gives the model a very dynamic and interesting look that I feel like it would otherwise lack. I don't think I would've had the foresight to see this coming had I painted it according to my own recipe and I think the model would've greatly suffered for it. It really shows how differently Sorastro perceives miniature painting than I do. It's quite humbling. I'm really looking forward to keeping this in mind when I go to take on a model that is similarly monochromatic and see if I can replicate this on my own to similar success.
Loki, God of Mischief
Loki was one of my early victories in this project. It was my first attempt at any decent amount of yellow and at a lighter green and was one of the first attempts at highlighting everything to white. I was really happy with how smoothly the yellow turned out and bringing everything to white worked really well. In retrospect I might have done more work on the orb in his staff, but generally speaking there's nothing I look at on Loki and think about how badly I want to redo it, which I've come to realize is my standard for being happy with my paintjob.
Valkyrie
Valkyrie was one of a number of minis I batch painted because I wanted to be done with them. In retrospect I don't want to do that anymore because I think all the models I do that to don't get fully highlighted up to white as I'm in too much of a hurry and they just don't "pop" as much as the others do. I'm generally happy with how her cape turned out, but I wonder if it would have benefitted from using dark blues for the highlights instead of a grayscale. I liked getting to practice on leather with her as I haven't had much chance to do that with this project.
No comments:
Post a Comment