Inhumans
Black Bolt
I'm pretty happy with how Black Bolt turned out overall, but now that I've decided to start using dark blues for highlights on black I get kind of sad whenever I see a black model I've used grayscales to highlight and Black Bolt is a perfect example of that. I painted him after I painted Ghost Rider and one of the things I learned with Ghost Rider to get around the overdone highlighting issue I run into when using grayscale on black (my Punisher is a great example of that) is to just be more conservative with the highlights. I think Black Bolt and Ghost Rider benefited greatly from this lesson as even though they are done with grayscale, the black looks much better than it does on my Red Skull/Black Widow/Venom/Punisher. That being said, I would love to see what I can do with this model using dark blues instead of grayscale for the black. I think it would look much better than it already does.
Beast
Beast was really fun to paint. Blue has always been a fun and rewarding color to paint. I was a little worried that highlighting everything to white was going to look weird since he's almost entirely organic, but I think it turned out really well. I also painted Beast after I learned to be more realistic about highlighting musculature and I think it really shows. I still struggle with it and you can tell on his back muscles where I kind of defaulted into highlighting them like flat panels, but I think on the arms and legs I moved away from that the highlighting looks much more natural.
Crystal
Crystal was quite the challenge to paint. I assembled her on her rocks and painted her and the rocks separately from the water and the base. In retrospect I should've put her rocks on her base and painted her separately from everything else. I painter her at the same time I painted several other minis for this project. I was trying to finish up a number of backlog minis that I wasn't really that into to get them done so I can move on to models I'm more excited about painting. However, of those models, she was the one I was actually excited to paint. I played around with different blues than I normally use as I wanted the water to have a brighter feel. For the OSL from the fire I used a thinned down Iyanden Yellow GW contrast. For it being such a quick paintjob (I think I spent maybe 3 hours on her total), I'm really happy with how it came out. It's a very fun model to paint.
Lockjaw
So Lockjaw was a bit of a laid back fun experiment. My wife and I have a piebald miniature dachshund with a very unique and gorgeous color pattern and I wanted to see if I could make Lockjaw match that color pattern. I really did not hold myself to a very high standard with this model as I just wanted to look at it and have it remind me of my puppy. I spent more time focusing on getting the colors to match than I did focusing on how smooth the transitions were or on making everything highlighted and shaded in the way I normally do. As far as the color palette goes, I feel like I generally succeeded, and since that’s all I was going for I’m just gonna call it good.
Medusa
This was probably the Inhuman I was the least excited to paint and the Inhuman I had the most fun painting. I assembled her body and kept it separate from her hair, save for gluing her face onto her hair (it fits onto her hair much easier than onto her body). This really allowed me to play with the tones on her hair. I had fun drybrushing, glazing and washing to my hearts content until the hair felt very full and detailed and varied. The only "hard" part was reminding myself when painting the body that I had to account for where her hair would be blocking the light. Really fun model to paint. Highly recommend. Don't glue her body in before you paint her.
Ms. Marvel
Ms. Marvel was a really fun and quick paint job. That was in large part due to having spent the last few models painting up tons of NMM and OSL and doing very experimental paint jobs that were quite agonizing to get through. Ms. Marvel didn't really have any of that going on and I thought it was a good opportunity to just kind of turn my brain off and enjoy the journey.
One of the things I noticed when painting her was that often I feel compelled to try to bring each color all the way to white and to heavily shade it to near black, but I wasn't feeling that compulsion with Ms. Marvel. It made me notice that this actually happens quite frequently with models on this project. Sometimes I feel like I really need to bring everything to white, sometimes it doesn't feel necessary. I'm still not sure what this means exactly. Part of me thinks that as I've grown as a painter I'm realizing that it's really not necessary to bring everything to white and you can still get a really impressive paint job without it. Part of me thinks that I should be at least doing pinpoint white highlights in certain spots and shade darker than I do and that my paint jobs would look that much better if I did and I'm just getting lazy or forgetting the lessons I learned on so many other models about why I started doing this in the first place. I think I'm leaning toward the latter.
One thing I will say about what I learned with my process on her is that I think I'm starting to get a handle on red. Normally I really struggle with it, trying to find the right highlight colors and the right amount of highlighting to get it to look highlighted without it becoming a different color. I think the trick is to use darker reds for shading and to keep the highest points of highlighting, where you're really using non-red colors like orange, yellow or pink, very minimal. I think doing both of those things really gives the red some depth without making it look like it's orange or pink. It's such a puzzling color for me because so many times I feel like I've finally "gotten" it, and then the next time I paint it I feel like it's a completely different puzzle and the lessons learned from my previous attempt don't apply.
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.
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.
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