Guardians of the Galaxy

With Angela finally complete, the Guardians are done for now. They are a faction that I did not at all prioritize as I wasn't really that excited about them. Which is weird because the movies are easily my favorite of all the MCU films. Ironically, my putting them off means most of them got to benefit from all the painful lessons I learned with my earlier models and so their paint jobs look quite a bit better than most of my other paint jobs, making them easily one of my best looking factions. Funny how life works out like that.

Star-Lord

Painting Star-Lord taught me that I should've been using Sorastro's guide for a NMM recipe this whole time. I think this is the first NMM job I've done that I feel genuinely good about and I think it has a lot to do with the specific paints used. Makes me excited to tackle my Ultron repaint. Although I generally like the OSL effects I've been doing with the likes of Star-Lord, Cable and Domino, I think with Star-Lord I can really feel how rough the effect is when using regular paints. Sorastro uses inks in his guides and the only reason I haven't done that is because I haven't had a chance to pick any up. I think next time I'm out I'm going to pick up some fluorescents and some inks so in the future I can try to get a smoother blend going for the OSL.

Overall I'm pretty happy with him though. Highlighting the NMM is getting a lot more instinctual and I'm getting much happier with the results. I think he's the first mini I've done NMM on that doesn't feel "off" to me. I think I'm also learning that so long as I'm taking some things all the way to white, it's maybe not necessary to take every color to white. With Star-Lord bringing the metal to white and having the OSL effects on parts of the mini made me feel like also bringing his pants and coat all the way to white would just distract from the NMM and OSL. It didn't really feel right to take everything all the way to white. I'm not sure if this means that I shouldn't take more things to white in future projects or if I should only hold back like this when I have things like OSL and NMM that I'm trying to highlight, but I guess painting Star-Lord has kind of opened my mind up to a different way to thinking about these projects in this regard. I'm rather surprised with how much the Guardians minis have taught me about painting. I was expecting them to be quick and done paint jobs that I just knock out to be done with, but each one has given me insights I wasn't expecting. Kinda cool, really.

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.

Drax the Destroyer

Drax is one of my least favorite models in the entire MCP range. I think his pose is just derpy and makes him feel like a starter/push-to-fit model. The detail on the model is fine, but the pose really makes it feel like it doesn't belong with the rest of the range. So when I went to paint him I was not at all concerned with how well he looked and I viewed it as a chance to test out techniques I wasn't very comfortable with and if it didn't look great, no big deal. Ironically this really caused him to turn out so much better than a number of my other minis. I played with NMM for his daggers and boots and really played with the transitions and I think it's easily the best NMM attempt I've ever done. I also tried to stick with a natural highlight on the muscles and I feel his muscles look better highlighted than almost any other of my MCP minis.

Overall I'm really happy with how he turned out and I think the experience painting him is going to help out a lot when I do more NMM. Especially when I go to do my Iron Man repaint.

Gamora

Weirdly enough, despite the Guardians of the Galaxy movies being among my favorite of the MCU films, for some reason I just am not that into them in MCP. I have no idea why. Gamora was weird to paint because I'm not at all familiar with her comic version, which is what the model is based on. She was quite the challenge to paint because  she's very monochromatic. Now that I've worked with using blues in highlighting black instead of grays I think I couldn't done this model more justice, but overall I'm happy with how she turned out. Thanks to Corax White (the base paint, not the primer), painting all the white on her was actually rather painless and she painted up fairly quickly.

Groot

Groot, much like Daredevil, was a model that I was sure was going to incredibly boring to paint and was going to look 'meh' when I was done with it and, much like Daredevil, I could not have been more wrong. There's so much to play with on the sculpt that I just got lost in playing with transitions, highlights and shades. Originally, I planned on just giving him a drybrush, but as I did it I realized it wasn't doing justice to areas like the chest, where there's so much fun little detail, so I switched over to traditional layering/highlighting and in a short amount of time I was just going to town painting every little detail. Originally I had planned to give him some moss here and there, but once I had the wood painted I felt that the moss would take away from the comic style highlighting, so I opted not to do it. He's a model I'm really happy with and I can't think of anything I do differently were I to repaint him.

Nebula

Painted up Nebula. Finished her in only a couple of hours. I had originally basecoated her in GW paints and sealed her. The intention was being able to quickly go over and hit her up with washes/highlights and calling it done. But that was done many moons ago before I switched to Scalecolor and before the project became more about taking my time with my paint jobs. However, I'm not terribly attached to this faction (which is odd because they are my favorite Marvel movies), so rather than strip and repaint her I just decided to roll with her current basecoat. I'm pretty happy with how she turned out. Decided to stay away from the NMM on this one, although the gray on the mohawk thing on her head is almost NMM. I really like Scalecolor metallics and this was kind of a fun way to play with them. I've noticed that with the Guardians I tend to play around more while painting them and I just generally enjoy painting them more. I think it's due to not really having any sense of stakes in the outcome. It allows me to just kinda go with it.

Rocket Racoon

I painted Rocket as soon as I was done with Groot. I think I was worried about forgetting the recipe I used for this wood and wanted to make sure they matched. On one hand, his details are so small that picking them to highlight is really difficult. On the other hand, you don't have to do much highlighting to them to actually get him painted and he looks pretty good with minimal work. He painted up really quickly and I'm really happy with how he came out. Not sure what I would change about him if I were to repaint him.

Ronan the Accuser

Ronan was a lot of fun to paint and I think it's because I wasn't trying to do anything fancy with him and I wasn't very vested in how good he came out, so I just got to kind of turn my brain off and paint. Funnily enough, I find that some of my better paint jobs come from when that happens. I suspect that's because I don't overthink the paint job and I just kind of go with what looks good. He was a fairly lazy paint job and I'm pretty happy with how he came out. I might have to come back and comment on him later once I've had a chance to sit with my feelings about him or learn something about his paint job with a future paint experience, as right now I'm more excited to be done with him than I am what I did with him. Getting close to being done with my backlog and ready for new releases, which is what really has me excited.