Spider-Man was fun to paint. I already have a recipe I like for explosions and my only regret here with that one is having glued the metal bits and Spidey to the explosion, which made it harder to get in the drybrushing for the oranges and browns on the explosion. The metal was a bit of an experiment as I wasn't sure how to get an OSL effect on it because when you mix metallics with non-metallics it doesn't quite look right. However, I picked up a bunch of Vallejo Inks and was able to use a yellow ink on standard metallic highlights and I really like how it came out. The inks are great for the osl and I'll be using those as a standard going forward, which I think will make my effects cleaner in the future.
The red was also a bit of an experiment as I had just learned a painful lesson with Carnage and I wanted Spidey's red to be bright and vibrant. I ended up going with a bright yellow under coat and then painted a bright red wash over that and it is a night and day difference from how Carnage looks. However, I don't feel like it has the depth I'm going for, so I think in the future I'm going to try to go with the yellow under coat, bright red on top and then shade down into brown or violet to give the red depth. I think this will help to keep the red bright, while also giving it depth and hopefully finally give me a red I feel comfortable with and can rely on going forward.
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.
Blade
Where to start with Blade. For one, he was experimental in almost every sense of the word. From a modelling standpoint, a color choice standpoint and a paint process standpoint.
For the modelling, I really dislike that the vampire hands come out of concrete as I think it looks silly and ruins my immersion, so I wanted to change that. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to go about fixing that as I think the vampire hands themselves are really cool and it creates a very iconic pose from a comic cover and I wanted to retain that. What I ultimately ended up doing was sanding down the concrete off of a regular flat base and using liquid green stuff to try to smooth out the top and get rid of any gradient so that I could attempt to just make the base look like darkness with smoke/blood magic/whatever coming out of it. I also had just gotten in my Dormammu and I ended up with extra bits of flame that I felt worked fairly well as just more smoke so the base would be less empty. Overall I think this part of it turned out really well.
The color choice is another matter entirely. Originally I was leaning towards either a purple or a green for the smoke/magic/whatever with the vampire hands coming out of it. My wife suggested doing it in red, what with the vampire theme and all. I decided that made sense and went for it. My only real issue here is it feels very, very monochromatic and I'm not sure I care for it. I suspect I would've been happier with purple to break up the model more. However, he is Blade and he is a vampire hunting other vampires, so it does feel very "in theme", so I'm not going to sweat this too much. I do have a second copy coming as a Christmas present from a friend, so I might try another version with a different color for the smoke and see how that works.
As far as the painting process itself, I have very mixed feelings. Black is becoming more comfortable for me to paint and I'm pretty happy with how that turned out on him. I feel like I'm getting a lot better at highlighting things naturally and getting away from my habit of treating everything as a panel and shading from one end to the next. The NMM on his swords also felt more comfortable, but I almost feel like you have to throw in a light blue for NMM steel to really look right, which I think it unfortunate as it doesn't fit here, so I didn't do it. Thus, something about his swords doesn't feel "right" to me and other than adding a light blue, I'm not sure what to do about it. Finally the OSL was something I was really anxious about. I was really worried it would mess up the paint job and I can't really tell if I dislike the actual OSL or if I just don't care for the monochromatic nature of red as a color choice for the OSL on this model. It feels a bit heavy handed and part of me wonders if I'm rushing my point jobs because I'm trying to finish my backlog.
Overall I think he looks much better than what I could've accomplished a couple years ago and the fact that I look at him and see lots of things I wish I had done differently proves that I'm really pushing myself as a painter, so I guess I should put that in the win column. At any rate, I'm actually really excited to play Midnight Sons and now I'm only one painted model away from having the full faction painted, so I'm really excited about that.
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.
Daredevil
Daredevil painted up extremely quickly and I am super happy with how he came out. It's a different red than I am used to working with and I'm glad I had the forethought to intentionally focus on that red instead of defaulting into one of my more comfortable red recipes. I don't think he would look as good with a more traditional red. Originally I was worried that him being so monochrome was going to make painting him boring or make the output look dull, but there's so much little detail in his mini that painting him was really fun and it gave me all kinds of little areas to play with that really give the model depth. I honestly have no idea how I would improve upon him at this point.
Doctor Strange, Sorcerer 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.
Ghost Rider
I could practically write an entire blog about this one model. I don't think I've put more thought or time into any other model. When I first started him I started with the wheel flames and my wife made a joke comment about them looking like roasted marshmallows. She was right. The flames were predominately white and when through yellow to orange to brown and the transition from yellow to brown was fairly quick. The flames were also only on the tires and the tires themselves were still black. They didn't look bad, but they didn't look like Hellfire. Something felt like it was missing, but I couldn't figure out what.
I went to discord and reddit with progress pics and asked people for advice and honestly most of the advice I got wasn't terribly helpful. However, one person showed an image of theirs and they had painted the entire wheel aflame and I thought that looked so much better. I also realized that the comic version is often depicted with the wheels entirely aflame instead of just on fire. Another person posted a guide on painting Legion of the Damned for 40k by a professional painter on YouTube (I think it was Sam Lens). Watching that video made me realize that to get the Hellfire look, I need to go more with oranges and yellows and save the white for the recesses of the flame. It also made me realize that going to brown was a mistake as it gives a burnt look and makes the fire look less hot.
At this point I stripped the roasted marshmallow paint job, reprimed and started again. I immediately was much happier with the paintjob. It was looking pretty great. However, this led to the next dilemma. I wanted to do a sort of NMM on at least the pipes of the bike if not the bike itself and at this point I hadn't realized that using dark blues for highlighting black is better, so I had to figure out how to paint all the black and the OSL on the black. Everything about this was intimidating to me.
For the "NMM" (if you can even call it that on this model), I just used my typical grayscale. In retrospect I should've included some blue for sky reflection to really sell the NMM effect. This is another model that I didn't have the luxury of relying on a Sorastro video and then got to see what Sorastro did with it after the fact. In this case it was a bit of a mixed bag because I think the NMM that Sorastro does would've looked much better than what I did and his way of highlighting the black looks so much better than what I did, but he painted the wheels like normal wheels with fire coming off of them and I think the wheel entirely aflame looks so much better.
Were I to repaint him, I'd follow Sorastro's guide to get the NMM and black highlighting and use my previous experience to get the wheels the way they are now.
Overall I'm really happy with this model. It was the most challenging paint job I've ever attempted and I think I grew more as a painter from this model than I have from any other model I've painted. It was a great experience. Every aspect of the model was outside of my comfort zone and now that I've tackled that it's made me more likely to take on projects and techniques that otherwise intimidate me.
Hawkeye
Hawkeye helped me grow a lot as a painter. I realized I wanted his pants to be blue, but I wanted it to be a darker blue, so I had a dilemma of how I highlight all the way to white without making it look chalky and overdone like what I've run into with my blacks on Black Widow or Red Skull. I decided to try to keep the highlighting minimal and hence keep a lot more of the dark color showing and I was really happy with how it turned out. I think without this experience I wouldn't be at a point to where I'm excited to repaint my black miniatures and my Miles Morales would probably look far worse than it does.
Hulk
Hulk is one of the few MCP minis I actually stripped as halfway through the paint job I realized the way I was going about highlighting it just didn't look right. Painting him made me realize that when highlighting muscles, you can't just treat them as a flat panel that goes from light up top to dark on the bottom. You need to treat it like a bunch of cylinders or orbs that have their bright and dark spots in logical places based on the shape of the muscle. Looking at the miniature now, there are many, many areas on the model where I still fell into that bad habit and it doesn't look quite right, but this is the model where I started to understand that as a concept and you can see the progress in some other miniatures like Beast and Venom, which I painted later.
Iron Fist
I finished up Iron Fist just in time for a tournament. He was a far more intimidating model to paint in my mind then he was to actually paint. Once I got into painting him the work just kind of flowed and it was really fun. I'm not sure of how much I should equate this to the fact that I painted him entirely with Scale color paints. They flow so nicely and blend into each other so well that things that are normally difficult to paint, like pale flesh and fire, just kind of came together. I've noticed that I spend far less time when using Scale color analyzing my blends and trying to figure out how to "fix" them to blend together better. I've noticed that when I add a layer with them and it dries it looks almost like I wet blended, which is really surreal. They're quickly turning me into a Scale color salesman.
However, I also just got done doing explosions on Domino and Cable and working with flame effects on models like Ghost Rider, so a lot of this might be due to my being much more comfortable with painting those things. I think being in a hurry to get him done for a tournament actually helped me, because I already knew how I wanted to paint him and had experience with each of the things involved in painting him (flesh, osl, etc.) and had I just sat around looking at him with no "hurry up and get him done, you don't have a day left" mentality to push me into it, I think I would've agonized too much over how to paint him.
Luke Cage
Luke Cage was another model that I had like a day to complete before a tournament and I'm really happy with how he turned out, for the most part. I finally feel like I figured out how to paint jeans. However, in retrospect I think I didn't really get the lighting right on the side of the jeans. I'm also not entirely sure I prefer this recipe for yellow over the GW recipe I am used to using. I don't think it looks bad, per se, but it does feel very different. I think perhaps I'll just approach it from the perspective of it being two different yellows. White paints for Scale color I've noticed are very muted, so I intentionally switched to Citadel White when mixing in my highest higlights and I definitely think it helps with the "pop" effect I'm going for.
I'd say the biggest criticism I have of Luke is the lighting on the head. Bald heads are still a bit of a struggle for me, mainly because I'm not sure how to paint it so that it looks good from multiple angles. I tried to focus on lighting it to look best straight on, but I feel like doing so prevents it from looking right from the sides and I'm not sure if that's something that anything can be done about or if I've found a catch-22 with painting 3D models.
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.
Moon Knight
Had to do some conversion work for Moon Knight. Didn't like the idea of the rooftop bit he's standing on being in the middle of the street, so I decided to convert it to look like he's standing on a rooftop. The conversion is far from perfect, but I feel like it gives off the general idea well enough.
As far as painting goes, he was an absolute blast to paint. I'm so glad I opted to go for a double OSL effect instead of just painting him white. I wanted to make it look like he's overlooking a city with neon lights in the middle of the night, so I decided to go with a cool blue moonlight lighting him up from above and a bold magenta lighting him from below. This has the added bonus or giving a pseudo synthwave look to it, which I dig. I added the OSL with an airbrush and used white and glazes to blend the airbrushing into the white and to do highlights. Overall I really like how it turned out, however I think it might've benefitted from my original zenithal being applied as both a zenithal and as a kind of reverse zenithal to aid with the pink lighting from the city. If I could do it again that's how I would go.
I think an important lesson I learned with him is that you really can continue painting a model indefinitely if you so desire. I lost count of how many times I looked at the model and thought: "Cool, he's done. Time to finish the base and take pics." and then moments later thought: "I feel like I should add a bit more to..." and continued working on transitions, highlights, OSL, etc. When I look at the model half of me thinks it looks really cool and that I'm really excited to put him on the table and the other half of me looks at how much smoother the transitions could be, how much higher I could take the highlights and it makes me realize I could've easily spent another dozen hours on this model. But it also makes realize that I don't need to. It makes me realize that at some point you have to just decide the model is "done" and no matter when you make that decision, it really is an arbitrary decision. It really is just personal preference. It really changes my perception as to what counts as a "good" paint job. Does it accomplish your purposes? Then it's good. Could it be better? That answer is ALWAYS yes. And it's irrelevant.
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.
Spider-Man (Peter Parker)
So Spidey was one of the core set models and as such I think it's one of my sloppier paint jobs. That being said, my relative comfort with blue and red helped a lot and I think he's a very serviceable paint job. I debated going back and forth between painting all his web lines in the red of suit black or just leaving them a dark red by picking out the raised portions with highlighting. I'm still not certain I made the right choice here. I also think the red needs to be brought up more. I struggle with highlighting bright red. It often ends up either looking pink or looking orange and it always feels off to me. Perhaps when I do my core set repaint I can play with this on him and see if I can find a recipe/technique that finally "fixes" this issue for me.
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.
Wolverine
Thinking of Wolverine as a Defender makes me wonder if they just threw Wolvie into every possible team they could due to his popularity. Can't say I blame them, he is pretty awesome. I grew up with the 90's cartoon and as soon as I saw that Wolverine was in his original outfit I knew there was no way I was painting him any other way. I watched Sorastro's video on him and as great as it looks, I wanted mine to look like the 90's outfit, so I took what I could from his video and tried to apply it to mine. At the time I painted Wolvie I had already become very comfortable painting yellow, which if you told me a year ago is how I'd feel about painting yellow I would have called you a liar. This model more than most I've painted just came together very easily, quickly and smoothly. The only thing I look at that I feel I wish I could repaint is the black. I think the transitions are very rough. Outside of that I think this model is very in line with where my skill level is right now.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment