Brotherhood of Mutants

 One of my favorite factions. Very excited for new releases for this faction. Particularly Juggernaut.

Magneto

Magneto was one of the models I was most excited to paint and one of my proudest paint jobs. I was home visiting family over the holidays and he was a Christmas present. So while painting him and I just got to sit back and get lost in the painting. I built his base and cape and kept his body separate during painting. I have enough experience with red and purple that I was pretty confident going into it, but from my experience with Hulk and Venom, I knew I need to pay close attention to where I highlighted his muscles. I feel like with him I finally found the right spots to highlight and there's really nothing about this model that I am unhappy with. The model was such a joy to paint.

Mystique

Mystique was a real challenge for me. One of the first models where I was painting a huge amount of white and the blue was a very different shade of blue than what I was used to painting. I feel like she's a very serviceable paint job, but she's far from something I'm satisfied with. However, at this point, I'm not sure I could do a better job on her if I were to repaint her. This might be a model that years down the line I will look at and realize where I went wrong. Until then it'll have to do.

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.

Gambit

Still unpainted and/or unreleased.

Juggernaut

Still unpainted and/or unreleased.

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is a victim of my laziness. I'm not terribly invested in the character and I was so close at the time of painting him to being done with my backlog and at 100% (for now) for this project that I just wanted to be done with him. Due to that, I didn't bother with OSL on him save for the rock he's stepping off of. Normally I would want to add that in as I think it really helps the model and makes it look that much better. I'm generally pretty happy with him. For critique I think the face looks a bit uninspired. In contrast I'm really happy with how the blue turned out. I was worried going in that the blue was either going to be too dark or over highlighted with washed out details and I feel like I kind of threaded the needle on that one and it's still got a light feel to it without feeling overdone on the highlights.

Reflecting on my laziness and not choosing to add OSL really tells me how far I've come as a painter. Before the very idea of doing OSL was incredibly daunting and only something that "those really good painters that make YouTube videos and win paint competitions do" and here I am making it a standard for my models that I do normally unless I'm feeling lazy. That's a cool feeling.

Rogue

Still unpainted and/or unreleased.

Sabretooth

Sabretooth was unexpectedly one of the most fun models I've gotten to paint in this project. The sculpt is so clean and so detailed and everything about him just fell together. Granted, by the time I got to him I had found a recipe for yellow that I really liked, so that helped greatly, but overall he was just such a fun and rewarding model to paint.

Scarlet Witch

I used Sorastro's pdf guide to paint Scarlet Witch and I'm very glad I did. Before deciding on his guide I went back and forth a few times on how to go about painting her and as a result she ended up with a couple of base coats on her, so I think her detail could be better. Also, I really wish I hadn't glued her to her magic effects before painting her.

The magic was annoying to paint, but I think the effect works really well and I really like how striking it is. It was achieved using "Brilli White" from Scalecolor over a white base coat and then painting Vallejo's Magenta Ink over that. The funny part is I think I didn't go very bright with her reds and pinks and I think that would've brought the model down, but the brightness of the magic really brings it together.

Speaking of brightness, I'm really struggling with white on Scalecolor and I think it's really obvious with Scarlet Witch. If I use the Scalecolor brand of white the blends are really smooth, but the white is very muted and I don't get that "pop" effect I'm looking for. Sorastro often uses Titanium White from PrimAcryl, which is a very powerful and bright white, which is great, but it doesn't blend in with the Scalecolor paints the way the Scalecolor brand white does, so I get the "pop" effect, but the blend kinda goes to crap. I've been really struggling with that and I'm still not sure what to do about it.

I'm really thankful to my wife on this one, who as politely and gently to me as possible, suggested that I should go up higher on the highlights on her face. I can be rather sensitive to criticism when I've just finished a mini and I'm in the mood to celebrate being done with it and my wife is an angel for weathering that storm and still helping me to improve by challenging me even when it's hard to do. Had she not given me that advice I don't think I'd have come up on her face and I think doing so really helped the model look a lot better. 

With Scarlet Witch done my Defenders are complete (for now). I've only got another 10 models to go to be done with my backlog and with the news of indefinite delays on international shipping it loos like it's gonna be awhile until I get any new releases, so I really have no excuse for not finishing my backlog. Should probably be able to finish a bunch of terrain too.

Toad

Toad painted up really quickly and overall I'm really happy with how he came out. I think the most challenging part was actually the bricks, as I had yet to find a recipe using the Scalecolor paints for brick that I liked. I think with Toad I finally figured it out. I tried to go into a more orangey yellow with Toad than I did for say Luke Cage and I feel like I pulled it off, but it doesn't feel as natural as Luke Cage's yellow. There's something about his yellow that just melted together and feels to me like real clothing and Toad's yellow just didn't come out like that.

I had to experiment quite a bit on his tongue to get a nice bright pink that also feels fleshy and I feel like I found a good balance. Having to do this made me realize I need to pick up the fantasy range of Scalecolor as my paint sets are missing some of the more bright and vibrant colors and it appears those colors are in the fantasy range, so that's on its way. What I learned painting his tongue I think will help a lot on my Venom repaint.

The only part about him I'm not entirely happy with is the purple. Now that I've switched to Scalecolor I haven't really found a recipe for purple that I really like. I feel like his purple is a step down from Magneto's. I'm also trying to find a better balance of not over-highlighting my darker colors while still taking them to white and I feel like with Toad's purple I'm getting better at that, but it's still not there.