S.H.I.E.L.D.

Still waiting for Nick Fury to release before this faction can even technically begin, but since I already have all the members painted save for Nick himself, figured I'd get the faction page put together.

Nick Fury

Black Widow

If there is any model I cringe at every time I look at them, it is this model. This model was a victim of being one of my first in this project and my first attempt at painting a mostly black model. My aims for this project were very different when I first started and drastically shifted as I was painting the core set models. That transformation mainly happened because of my experience painting Cap, so I'll go into that detail when I talk about him, but long story short, I started Black Widow by slobbering GW contrast paints onto her as a basecoat and then decided I wanted to paint everything in high contrast style, highlighting to white and shading to either pure black or near it and Black Widow being my trial run at doing this with black really didn't help. I've already purchased another core set and she will definitely be one of the models that gets a repaint. I want to prioritize new models first though, so it might be a while. I'm thinking I might include both Black Widow and Winter Soldier in my repaints when Nick Fury drops so the faction can hit the ground with some decent paint jobs.

Black Widow, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Painting Black Widow 2.0 was a weird experience because it was like a mirror universe version of the experience of painting Core Widow. Painting Core Widow was a frustrating and painful experience because it was my first time trying to do a high contrast paint job on a predominately black miniature and it was horrible. I had no idea how to highlight black and it really shows. This time having the experience of painting black so many more times and getting a good feel for how to do it dare I say "well", this went very smoothly and felt really good the whole time. 

I'm overall very happy with how she turned out and I'm more upset with my inability to take good pictures of black miniatures than I am anything about her paint job. The only real painting critique I have of her right now is I don't think the NMM of the gauntlets look right. It's such a small area to work with that I'm not sure what I would do differently, but something about it looks off. I suspect it's the top of the gauntlets and how they just reflect the sky and so you don't really get the ground/sky effect.

Hawkeye

Hawkeye helped me grow a lot as a painter. I realized I wanted his pants to be blue, but I wanted it to be a darker blue, so I had a dilemma of how I highlight all the way to white without making it look chalky and overdone like what I've run into with my blacks on Black Widow or Red Skull. I decided to try to keep the highlighting minimal and hence keep a lot more of the dark color showing and I was really happy with how it turned out. I think without this experience I wouldn't be at a point to where I'm excited to repaint my black miniatures and my Miles Morales would probably look far worse than it does. 

Iron Man

Finally got Mr. Stark repainted. Painting him using everything I've learned since starting this project was incredibly rewarding. I really couldn't be happier with how he came out (for now anyway). I go pretty in-depth on that in my "Repaints" section for those interested. Now I'm ready to use these same techniques on Hulkbuster,

She-Hulk

With She-Hulk I wanted to try something different with her skin. I saw her "canon" skin tone was a much lighter green, but I wanted to try going with a deep green. After playing with it quite a bit I ended up pulling off what I feel is a pretty cool deep green. Overall I think it was a good experience and helped me understand how to do darker colors effectively, but I don't think it looks very good on her model. Honestly I probably should've gone with the "canon" skin tone. Oh well, it was a fun experience either way and I think I learned something.

Taskmaster

Taskmaster was one of several models I painted assembly line style to get them knocked out so I could move onto other minis. In retrospect I shouldn't have done this as I think it lowered the quality on a lot of those minis. However, Taskmaster in particular I think came out pretty well. I think this is mostly due to my comfort painting yellow and white. The only thing about him I would change were I to paint him today as his own project is giving his shield the Captain America treatment. That is, painting it to look like it's got lines of light reflecting from the middle to the edges of the shield. I think that could've looked really good and I probably should've taken the time to do it. I did end up with an extra of this mini (my wife wanted her own Punisher to paint), so perhaps in the future I will do a repaint on him.

War Machine

War Machine was a surprisingly fun model to paint. I was really worried about him being way too monochromatic, but painting him felt similar to painting Daredevil in that there are so many little details that you can just highlight away for eternity on all the little bits and it makes the model really stand out in a way you wouldn't expect given how monochromatic he is. Another big worry I had was differentiating between the black metal and the chrome metal since I was using the same color recipe for both. It retrospect I think I should've worked in some blues into the chrome as a sort of sky reflection to really make it stand out, but I think what I did works well enough that the panels generally stand out, so I'm not sure it's necessary. 

I finished him just a week before Hulkbuster is supposed to drop and I think the experience will really help when working on Hulkbuster as he was essentially an exercise in shading and highlighting polished metal. I shudder to think what this model would've looked like had I painted it two years ago. Painting him really drove home how much more comfortable I've become with painting black. Overall I'm really happy with him and anything I look at that I think could use work is fairly minor, so I'm gonna chalk him up as a win. 

Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier will be getting a repaint as I was able to snag a discounted box of Vision and Winter Soldier. He unfortunately was one of the first I painted in the project and I did it using contrast paints for base coats and I put it on way too thick and I think it generally looks terrible because of it. Also, I think using blue for the pants is a poor color choice for him. New one will be mostly black and I'm going to attempt some NMM for the arm. Very excited to try this one again. I'll probably include his repaint when I go to paint Nick Fury as a kind of fresh faction start.