Thanos - WIP

Thanos WIP

I've been putting Thanos off for quite some time due to frankly being intimidated. He's a big deal in game. There's an ultimate encounter where one player just plays Thanos with all the gems and he goes against an entire team by himself. As such, I really wanted to do the model justice. I've seen Sorastro's video on him for some time and I wanted to use that video to paint him, but Sorastro specifies a bunch of Scalecolor paints that I didn't have a way to get due to my location. In particular the blues he used are much more vibrant than the ones I was using, so I really wanted to get ahold of those paints before I tried following the guide. Now that I've moved and was able to get a full range of Scalecolor paints and I've gotten more practice in doing things like NMM and OSL, I decided I'd bite the bullet and finally sit down and paint him.

My goal was to have him done by the weekend, but destiny had other plans. Work and family life gave me a helping heap of obligation that took my focus away for most of the weekend. As such, I was only able to work on him on Sunday. You'd think an entire day on one model that isn't particularly large would be enough, but the NMM process really ate up my time. The blue went relatively quickly and smoothly, as did the face and skin. However, once I hit the gold and in particular when I was blocking out the shaded areas of the gold for the NMM, the process was kind of a grind and took several hours. I almost decided to give up and work on him another day, but due to how much mixing is involved in the NMM and the gold I decided I wanted to at least finish blocking out the shading before calling it a day.

Then, a funny thing happened. Once I finished blocking out the shading I realized that all that was left for the gold was the highlighting, and due to how much of the gold was to remain shaded or with the base color, the highlighting would actually be relatively minimal and would likely go really, really quick. This breathed a lot of life into me and reenergized me and I was able to knock out several layers of highlighting, all but finishing him save for his infinity gems and base. One of things I've noticed about paint projects is that the earlier processes before you get to see the end results can be kind of daunting and feel like a bit of a grind at times, but once you get that part done and you start doing highlighting and you get to see what is closer to an end result where the model starts to pop, the painting immediately becomes really fun and suddenly I can paint for hours, even if I've already been painting for hours. That's what happened here with Thanos.

At this point it was getting late and would have been a bad idea to try to stick it out and finish him right then. However, due to Sorastro's guide, I was able to prep his gauntlet with the OSL highlights he needed that I will use inks to give color to. Knocking out the gems and the base should be relatively straight forward and quick to do, so Thanos should probably be done the same day that I'm writing this, but I wanted to get these thoughts down while the process is still fresh in my head.

As far as how I feel I did on him, overall I'm thrilled. The NMM feels really good, the transitions seem pretty smooth save for the spots on the NMM where I was intentionally trying to make them look a little rougher. The only area I can see where in retrospect I should've done things differently is I think some of the NMM on the boots isn't blocked out rationally. Especially in the rounded tips of the boots, I think I should've relied more on Sorastro's guide as what he did looks much more natural than what I did. However, since I'm very new to NMM and this was my literal first attempt at NMM gold, I'm not going to be too hard on myself about it. I wouldn't have been able to do half as well on him had I tried this 6 months ago, so I'm not going to overthink it and I'll just call it a win.

I'll be sure to add an update once I finish the gems and base and I'll also be throwing up some group shots of him and the rest of the Black Order now that they're all done.

Repaint - Red Skull

 

Red Skull becomes the first of the core set models that I repaint. The first take on him is on the left and the second take is on the right. Throughout this project, I have constantly learned the lesson that I need to use dark blues in highlighting my blacks. I decided Red Skull was an ideal model to try this out on since he's predominately black and desperately needed a repaint anyway. The level of detail I was able to maintain on the model is so much more than I was expecting, although I think a lot of that is due to 1. not using a thick contrast paint as a base coat and 2. learning how to more carefully apply thinner coats of paint. I'm really happy with how he came out. He's a much better finished piece and I'm glad my Cabal doesn't have to have a messy paintjob for their leader whenever I play as them.

I decided to make a couple stylistic changes. One, in preparation for painting Iron Man, I want to get out of the habit of highlighting red into orange, so I went with a couple red highlights and then used white mixes for the highlights. Originally I worried it would give too much of a pink vibe, but I think I pulled it off and it looks red with highlights. I also decided his hydra symbols on his arms would make more sense as red and I also didn't care for gold for his buckle. Overall I think the changes work a lot better and the miniature just has a better presence. I think the only critique I have in comparison to the first model is the heavy use of dark blues causes the model to have less contrast that the first paint job, which is unfortunate, but ultimately I feel the new model still retains a lot of contrast while simultaneously looking a lot cleaner and a lot more detailed, so it's a trade off I am very okay with.

The only real critique I have of the paint job right now is that I never really found a good balance between the red of his skull and the blue OSL from the cube. I had to repaint his face because my attempts at OSL were just making his face purple and it didn't look right. Ultimately I went with more pronounced highlights on his face and a couple really thin coats of a blue glaze for the OSL. I think it generally turned out well, but honestly I think that's only because you don't really notice it on his face, which due to the distance of the cube, I'm fine with. Outside of that I'm really happy with everything and the only improvements I can see are just spending more time on transitions, which I'm beginning to think is one of those things that you can never stop working on, so I'm not going to beat myself up about it. All works of art are eventually abandoned, so you gotta stop somewhere.

So Red Skull is finished and I've officially started my repaints. I'll probably bounce around between doing repaints and working on models I haven't painted yet to keep things fresh, but I consider this one to be a resounding success. Makes me really look forward to what I can do with Black Widow, Doc Oc, Crossbones, Baron Zemo and especially Ultron. It should be fun. I've included some closer up pics for those interested.