Uncanny X-Men

Cyclops

I have mixed feelings about my paint job on Cyclops. I think the yellow turned out pretty good. The blue I feel is a little over-highlighted, particularly on the chest area. Also I really wanted to do some kind of OSL effect coming from the visor, but when I went to paint it I couldn't quite find a way that I was happy with so I decided to just forgo the OSL altogether. Despite my misgivings, this is one model I've received more praise on than my other models. I'm honestly not sure why. Don't get me wrong, I think I did a good job on him, but I feel he doesn't really stand out compared to a lot of my other minis, so him getting the most positive feedback is a little puzzling to me.

Storm

Storm has been sitting on my paint desk for a very long time. I don’t think I’ve been more intimidated about painting a model as I have been with Storm and it’s caused me to put off her paint job in favor of less intimidating models for quite some time. I’ve seen so many paint jobs on her where the light from the lightning is entirely (or almost entirely) ignored and I really wanted to avoid that. I really liked the idea of virtually all of the light coming from the lightning, to really show how powerful the lightning strike is and be a nice focal point for the paint job. I also liked the idea of having a powerful glow come from her eyes.

I recently learned with Blade that doing the OSL via airbrush before painting the model doesn’t work. I ended up having to redo the OSL by hand afterwards and I think the model suffered for it. In retrospect I should’ve just airbrushed red on him after painting him and then touched it up with a brush to make the OSL clean. So with Storm I decided to try that. After giving her a general prime I used airbrush white to lay out the areas that were going to be lit up from the lightning strike.

I then laid down base coats for her skin, outfit and hair. I then re-established the OSL using very light white spray from an airbrush. I then picked out the highest highlight colors and watered them down to turn them into a glaze and worked the OSL into the base coats. I played with this step for some time, trying to make the transitions smooth and all the while trying to remember to keep the highlights going in the direction of what would be lit up from the lightning.

After doing that I noticed that the black on her outfit in particular just didn’t look finished. The problem here is that all of the lighting is coming from either beneath her or behind her, so the darkest area on her is the front of her torso. However, just leaving it black was making it look unfinished, which is no good. The fix I came up with for this is to highlight up the darkest areas with just a layer or two of highlight, keeping them a very dark bluish grey, to give them some depth. If I kept this minimal, in theory it should give the black depth without taking away from the OSL.

Finally I struggled with what to do with the lightning itself. I’ve seen it painted blue, yellow and white and of those I liked blue the most, but having the OSL from the lightning being blue didn’t seem right to me, so I opted to try to keep the lightning on the lighter end of blue and keep the OSL white. I’m still not sold that this was the right decision, but I feel like the piece looks good enough that I should just call it.

Overall I have no idea how I feel about the paint job. Everything with it was so experimental and the results are so mixed that I’m just not sure if the decisions I made on how to achieve what I was going for were the right decisions. It will be interesting to go back and review this mini once I’ve had more time to sit with my feelings about it and perhaps after I’ve had more practice with similar techniques.

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.

Cable

Cable is the first of my minis to be painted after I switched over to Scalecolor paints. I have to say, I couldn't be more impressed with those paints. They have this weird quality where as you paint your layers the paints seem to blend into the layer before as if you were wet blending even though you weren't. It honestly felt like I couldn't screw up the models if I tried as I was painting. It was very surreal. I'm completely sold on the line and highly recommend them.

As far as Cable himself, I started off with the telekinetic shield, which was a mistake because I had glued everything in place before painting, so I had to spend the rest of the time painting around the barrier. I definitely will paint the barrier separately from Cable if I do future versions, which I'm planning to do another version in X-Force garb. I'm really happy with how the explosion and the bullets and the ripple effect on the barrier turned out. However, I think the OSL from the explosion on the ground is pretty weak and I didn't really realize that until I was painting Domino, which was the next model I painted. With her I experimented more because the "yellow" glow just wasn't working. I may go back in and rework his OSL on the ground due to this.

The one thing I've found about the Scalecolor paints that I would criticize is that their brightest white seems rather muted compared to other whites I've worked with. Due to this, I think he "pops" less than other minis I've painted and even the NMM has a more muted quality to it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but one of the main aims of this project is to take everything to white to get it to "pop". So I might have to switch over to a different brand for whites to get that effect back. I'll have to experiment with that in future paint jobs. I definitely used Sorastro's pdf guide on his website when painting this model. The "singed" look on the cape is a dead giveaway of that. That being said, I've found the more I paint the more I find myself preferring to go in different directions on some aspects of a mini than what I see the pros do. I'm particularly glad I went my own direction with the force barrier as I feel like I really pulled it off and I really prefer it to what Sorastro did.

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.

Domino

Domino was painted right after I finished Cable and she is entirely done with Scalecolor paints. I didn't realize until I had finished her and Deadpool that I used Navy Blue as a base instead of Abyssal Blue, which I think makes the black look much more gray than it otherwise would (it's mixed with black). That being said, I really like how she came out. Due to how important the explosion at her base is to the model, I wasn't really satisfied with the explosion effect and OSL I used for Cable on her, so I experimented with some Inktensity (Scalecolor inks) using red and yellow and I think it really paid off. The explosion at her feet really look to me like an explosion and I think it really elevates the model.

As I've said with both my Cable and Deapool comments, my one criticism of Scalecolor is that their whites seem a little muted and I feel like the model doesn't quite "pop" despite having been taken all the way to white. I think in the future I'll use another brand's white to get that effect back. Luckily (fitting for Domino), I'll have a second version of her to paint as I'm getting a second Cable to paint up in X-Force colors, so I'll get a chance to make all these changes on my second go-through with her.

Now that I've had a chance to do a few models using dark blues with whites mixed in for highlights for my blacks I think I really like how it looks. It feels much more natural and doesn't look as "chalky". Makes me really excited to paint up a new Venom.

Gambit

Still unpainted and/or unreleased.

Honey Badger

Painting Honey Badger was one of those experiences that makes me feel like I've really come a long way as a painter because she's a bunch of white, black, grey and yellow, which are colors that can be really difficult to paint and I've had to grapple with those so many times now and finally gotten to a place of comfort doing so that I just approached painting her with a color by numbers, knock out the steps mindset. I think had I done that same thing with her a couple years ago she'd be a pretty horrendous paint job, but instead I think she looks pretty good. Nothing to win a competition with or anything, but a very suitable paint job that I will be happy to play with. I was also able to knock her out the same time I painted X-23, so in the course of like 6 or so hours I knocked out two models to a good tabletop quality, all while binging some good TV. Not a bad day.

The photos didn't capture it, but she is one of my better faces, which I'm especially proud of because of how unbelievably tiny her model is. The amount of detail I was able to fit in was really impressive to me. The only thing I look at while I write this and think "it's not quite there yet" is her blades. I tried to do a general NMM with some sky reflection in them, but there's so little blade to work with that I honestly have no idea how to effectively do that. I'm not certain what I did sells it correctly. That being said, it's such a small area I'm not sure it matters. EDIT: Decided to add a closeup of her face.

Jean Grey

Jean Grey is ready for the table. Overall I'm really happy with how she turned out. I really like how the blue and yellow turned out and the hair recipe worked better than I expected. I'm not thrilled with the pink energy. I tried to experiment with some pink tones and I didn't want to go all glittery like I did with Scarlet Witch, but it just doesn't pop like I was hoping it would. However, I really like how the pink glow from the eyes came out. I'm trying to get better at faces and I feel like she's a relative success in that department.

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.

Rogue

Still unpainted and/or unreleased.

Wolverine

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.

X-23

I didn't capture it in the photos at all, by X-23 marks the first time in my life where I actually put pupils in the eyes of a model. Which now that I type that I realize I probably need to revisit Lockjaw and Hulk. In the past I've tried like crazy to ignore eyes for a number of reasons. 1. I actually think it's a level of detail you don't really see on a person until they are fairly close to you, so when working with models that are this scale I don't think it makes sense to go into that kind of detail on their eyes unless the model has enlarged eyes at that scale (like Lockjaw and Hulk). 2. It's a massive pain trying to make it look right and who wants to spend a bunch of time trying to do that? So I've always taken the lazy way out and done some kind of shading in the eye area and left it at that. Later when I was following a guide on painting Enchantress they did this clever trick of painting black in the eye area, cleaning up with flesh around it, then putting in a dot of white. It worked really well for Enchantress because having her eyes glow works really well for her character.

It works less well for a character like X-23 and that became obvious when my wife pointed out that her eyes looked like they were glowing. My wife is very tactful about giving feedback because when I'm proud of finishing a model I can be a big baby about negative feedback (she really is a saint for putting up with me). but she was right. I needed to do something about the eyes now that they had the black "eyeshadow" and the white dot in the middle. So I decided to break my rule and put in pupils. It was my first attempt and honestly I think I nailed it. I should probably gets pics taken of it to add to the blog. Here's a closeup pic of her to see what I'm talking about. Not bad for a first time.