Black Order

Originally my plan was to paint a faction at a time and when I tried painting Black Order I hit a huge motivation block because honestly I'm just not invested in this faction. I want to have them done so I can do Infinity War stuff, but Thanos' lackeys are just not interesting for me to paint and I wanted to save Thanos for the end. However, I'm getting to the point of being caught up on my backlog, so it shouldn't be too much longer until I get to them.

Thanos, the Mad Titan

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.

Although I wasn't able to finish him that same day, with only the gems and base left I was able to finish him up the next day pretty quickly. Finally my Black Order are finished and ready to play with.

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.

Black Dwarf

So Black Dwarf is unique in my collection in that he is the only model I started painting and then finished several months later. At the time I started him he was fairly new and I was trying to stick to the release schedule. However, I have a hard time painting the characters that I'm not very invested in and I was quickly approaching hobby burnout trying to focus on the Black Order flunkies. I have to say as much as I like Marvel, some of their villains are drier than the Sahara. So to save my hobby and my sanity I switched over to other minis and recently I realized I only have two factions that aren't currently playable: Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Order. So I decided come hell or high water I'm going to finish them.

When I picked Black Dwarf back up his skin and the gauntlet on his arm were done, but everything else was merely basecoated. Interestingly, this means I can see how my NMM has changed by just looking at this one model. The shoulder pad, legs and belt are all my new attempts at NMM and personally I can really tell when I look at the mini. That being said, I don't think the gauntlet looks bad and I'm not sure how obvious it is to other people that they were done so far apart from one another that it's essentially two different painters.

One thing about him that irks me is I can see gaps that should've been filled more properly on the underside of his arm, but I wasn't about to strip, re-prime and repaint him, so it's gonna have to do for now. If I were being less lazy I would've attempted gold NMM on the axe, but even with his skin and gauntlet arm done, he took so long to paint that I just wanted to be done at that point, so I decided to use it as an excuse to use Scalecolors metallics, which I've really grown to love. Overall I'm happy enough with him and honestly probably spent far more time on him than I should have considering I'll probably only play him when I'm doing the Thanos ultimate encounter. However, I have to say that spending the time on the NMM on the rest of him really helped me get a better idea of how to effectively no NMM. I think the reflection pattern on the gauntlet and the shoulder pad are way off. They don't look right. However I think I nailed the reflection pattern of the NMM on the metal bits on the legs, albeit they are not as smooth as I'd prefer. I'm really happy with how those came out.

Corvus Glaive

Corvus is officially the first model I've ever painted in my entire life where I feel like I did the color black justice. I think it even looks better than what I managed to pull off with my Red Skull repaint. I finally found the recipe for black that gives it depth without looking rough and sloppy and without looking grey. Now I think I'm finally ready to tackle repaints like Venom, Black Widow, Black Panther, Punisher, etc.

I feel kind of mixed about the metallics here. One one hand I used the Scalecolor ones and they're generally great, but even after washing and drybrushing to get a nice tarnish to it it feels a little too flat. Which is weird because I used the same scheme for the gold on Black Dwarf's axe and I was really happy with how it turned out. It might have something to do with how physically flat the glaive is in comparison to Black Dwarf's axe. I'm not quite sure yet. Really that's all there is to Corvus, black and some gold, little bit of white. He painted up really, really quickly and I'm really glad that I now get to move on to Thanos. I've already got him base coating as of writing this, so hopefully a day or two after this update I'll have the mad titan ready for battle.

Ebony Maw

Ebony Maw was the first of the Black Order that I started to paint. Other than my usual comments on how I wish I had used dark blues for highlighting the black I don't really have anything to say about him. I think the flesh turned out pretty well and I really like how the yellow, white and blue came out. He was more fun to paint than I expected.

Proxima Midnight

Proxima was one of a number of models I pained all at once in an assembly line style. With her I definitely regret doing that as there are a number of things I think would look great if I took the time on them. The hair and particularly the metal arm would've been a great opportunity for some NMM. Also, like all my models I've painted black I would love to use dark blues instead of grayscale for the highlighting. That being said, she was very low on my priority list, so I'm okay with leaving her as is.