Wakanda

Black Panther

Black Panther was the first black model that I felt I did justice on. My work with him is what made me think I was ready to tackle Venom. Of course in retrospect I wish I had used either dark blues for the highlights or in his case dark purples. I will be using dark blues going forward on most of my blacks. He's also one of the minis that made me realize my top down shading of muscles, although it doesn't look terrible, doesn't quite look right either. It's not the natural way light would hit the muscles. I started to correct for this when I painted venom and I've gotten progressively better at it with each mini. I really worked on my transitions with him and for a black model that's highlighted with grayscale, which I'm now avoiding as I think it's too difficult to get good transitions with, I think Black Panther's transitions are actually rather well done. I'm also really happy with how even though he's a completely monochrome paint job, there is still a ton of depth to him. He was a really valuable painting experience for me on this journey.

Killmonger

Killmonger was really, really fun to paint. I don't have much experience painting darker skin tones, so I was a little concerned about how I'd be able to pull that off, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. In restrospect I would probably change the highlighting on most of his muscles, but learning the appropriate way to highlight muscles has been a long learned lesson from this project and the process of painting him was one of the things that taught me that lesson.

Okoye

Okoye 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 also think she could have benefitted from some NMM play and that's just not something you're going to take the time to do when batch painting. Honestly she's a bit of a missed opportunity in my eyes, but there are so many other models I'm much more excited to get to, so I'm not really going to sweat it.

Shuri

Shuri 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. Honestly I don't have a lot to say about her because my process with her was very rushed.

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.