Spider Foes

Green Goblin

Green Goblin was surprisingly rewarding to paint. I had the advantage of having a Sorastro guide on how to paint him (PDF from his website, not a YouTube video). The biggest part that I was worried about that caused me to seek out a guide was I knew I didn't want his smoke plume to look really basic. I wanted to up my game on it, but I wasn't sure how to go about that. This might be my first deliberate attempt at wet blending. I think I've accidentally/unintentionally done wet blending in the past, but I think with Green Goblin I went into it knowing I was worried about the transitions in the smoke plume and wanted to make them as seemless as possible. I coulnd't be happier with how his plume turned out. Smoothest transition I've ever painted.

The rest of the model just kind of fell together. I used what I learned with Ghost Rider on this flames to make sure the pumpkins look "hot" internally and that their plumes looked like they were coming from a fire and I'm really happy with how that turned out. The only thing I wish I had done differently is using blue for some of the NMM on the glider as right now it doesn't really read like NMM. I can add that to another of the long lessons I've learned from this project.

Carnage

Carnage was an experiment with a new way to paint red and honestly I'm really not happy with it. He's one of the models that when I look at it I want to strip and repaint the model. I was told about a couple of ways you can use color theory to aid in your painting of miniatures. In particular, using blue to shade red is supposed to give it a gore feel to it. So I started with a base coat of a fairly bright-ish red and then used GW Drakenhof Nightshade to give the red some depth. Even after bringing up the red with various highlights I feel that it darkened it way too much and hence the model doesn't really "pop" like I'm going for with this Marvel project.

This isn't to say that the advice I got was wrong. Quite the opposite in fact. If what I wanted was a dark, gore-like red it would have been the right move. However, had I known it would be that dark and be that difficult to bring up in tone, I would have instead opted for a yellow undercoat with a red wash to make a more vibrant red. It's a shame too, because Carnage is a favorite of mine. I've been a huge fan of his character ever since the Maximum Carnage days. This is definitely a character I will consider doing a repaint of in the future as I feel I haven't come close to doing it justice. But alas, working through my backlog continues.

Doctor Octopus

Poor Doctor Octopus. He was a victim of my early painting on this project and got a thick base coat of contrast paints and it really shows. However, doing the yellow on him I think was instrumental in learning how I wanted to paint yellow and I think my future success with that color on this project can largely be credited to my early work on this model.

In the future when I do my core set repaint I am going to do the circle on his belly another color (perhaps red) and do an OSL coming off of it and I'm definitely going to try NMM on his tentacles. Essentially I'll be following the Sorastro guide on him. I'm excited for that as I think with everything I've learned since starting the project I can do much more justice on this model.

Kingpin

Kingpin was a joy to paint and the process was really straight forward as I just followed Sorastro's video on him (subbing out paints for GW paints). I would not have had the foresight to shade the pants the way I did were it not for that video and I think that is a key component to making the model really look good. I'm thankful that I had enough experience painting white on other minis before I got to him, as painting so many giant white sections on a model would otherwise have been a really negative experience. Thank God for Corax White is all I can say. This is another model where when I look at it I don't really see anything I can improve on right now. I'm sure as my skill grows that'll change (hopefully), but as of this writing I think this is the best I can do.

Kraven the Hunter

Kraven painted up pretty quickly. My worry going into it was I was afraid he would look boring with how monochromatic he can be. Thus, I really dug into my earthy browns, oranges and yellows to try to come up with a different recipe for each piece of clothing to make sure his outfit looks diverse. I feel like I pulled it off. In retrospect, I think I should've increased the contrast on him. I think bringing the fur up to pure white would've looked better and perhaps go darker with the musculature. One of the things I've noticed about Scalecolor is although they blend really easily, their whites are fairly muted. As such I tried to mix in some GW White Scar, but I don't think I put enough in to really get the "pop" effect I usually go for. I've noticed in Sorastro's guides he is often using a Titanium White from some artist brand. I've went ahead and ordered some, but it won't be here for a while, so in the meantime I'll have to try to make GW White Scar work.

I tried to play a bit with the blades of his spear and kukuri doing some NMM. I'm trying to get more comfortable with it as I'm trying to work up to my Ultron repaint. Looking at Kraven now I realize I forgot to paint the eyes of the lion on his vest. Whoops. I'll have to correct that at some point. For now I'm moving on to getting my backlog basecoated as it's the most daunting part for me for painting and once it's done I can really knock out some minis.

Lizard

Lizard painted up really quickly. It's nice to tackle a project that is a little more straight forward after spending 20+ hours on Thanos doing NMM and OSL effects. With Lizard I wanted something simple and more importantly, something dirty and dingy. I intentionally avoided NMM for the sewer and wanted the water to have hints of blue, green and brown in it to give a nice "gross" look. So I stuck with real metallics for the sewer and used a heavy amount of washes for both the sewer and the water.

Tragically I put quite a bit of work into the coat to make it look similarly dingy, but thanks to my poor photographing skills, you can't really see it as it all got washed out in the light. Now that my move is done I think I need to invest in a permanent spot to set up for taking photos of minis so I can start playing with lighting and backdrops and come up with a better way of capturing my work.

In retrospect, I probably should've put similar dingy-ness into his pants. They look too clean compared to the rest of him. Perhaps in the future I can put some more work into him, but for now I feel like he looks good on the tabletop and I want to actually try to finish my backlog before I get overwhelmed in new releases again. At the time of writing I have 18 more miniatures to paint before I'm at 100% of locally released miniatures painted.

Mysterio

I had the benefit of a Sorastro guide for painting Mysterio, so he painted up pretty smoothly. He was a lot of fun to paint. I have a couple of critiques of him. One, my gold is not nearly as vibrant as Sorastro's and I think it's because I used less Sol Yellow when I was painting it. That's what I get for using the video loosely and not following the steps more carefully. The other main critique I have is I don't think I did a very good job on getting his bubble to look smooth. I tried to give it a swirly, cloudy mist look and I don't think it looks bad, but I do feel it looks too rough. In retrospect I think I should've spent some time wet blending it and really working on the helmet. It's such a critical component of the mini and obviously intended to be a focal point. I think since I was nearly done with him I got a little impatient and just tried to sprint the rest of the way to the finish line. I guess on the bright side I can always go back and just focus on the helmet. It's so isolated from the rest of the mini that I can play with it without compromising the rest of the model's paint job.

Venom

So Venom is one of my all time favorite comic book characters. I love his aesthetic and character. The Maximum Carnage comic event really made me fall in love with the character. After painting the core set characters and feeling disastrously bad at doing black (I'm so sorry Black Widow and Red Skull. I promise I'll do you justice someday), I really didn't want to mess up Venom. After getting more practice in and feeling relatively successful with it when I did Black Panther, I decided to finally tackle Venom. I also think what I learned doing Hulk helped out greatly here as I learned a lot about what I liked and didn't like with highlighting muscles. I was really happy with how he came out, but now looking at him and in especially in the context of using dark blues to highlight black and seeing the muscles that could've been highlighted more logically, he's a model I'd really like to repaint.

On a funny note about him, the studio model has been painted incorrectly (or at least not according to "canon"). The body of the spider has been painted as if it is not a body, but rather legs. I noticed this when I went to paint mine and when I referenced the studio model something just didn't look right.