Marvel: Crisis Protocol

Tried out some different color backgrounds and red is definitely better than the white, black and grey backgrounds I was working with. It seems to have all the advantages of the white (brighter colors, more detail) with less of the muting of the highlights.

Generally speaking, I like the red background better, but I have noticed that some minis benefit from it much more than others, so I think from here on out, I’m going to test out different color backgrounds with each mini and use the one that gives the best results.

So here’s the final product for my Iron Man. I realized when I was nearly done that this is technically a Non-Metallic Metal paint job, which if you told me a year ago I would even attempt I would’ve laughed at you. Overall I’m fairly happy with the results. Honestly the photos don’t really do it justice. It looks much cleaner in person. I tried several different backgrounds for the photos and once again, none of them really worked as well as the red did.

I had an idea of using a background with terrain and a mat instead of using just a colored background. Now that I’ve finished my core set, I need to get the terrain painted up anyway, so this is a good excuse to focus on knocking out some terrain. Once I do that, I’ll try some pictures of my painted minis with a gaming background and see if that helps better capture their paint jobs.

I’m going to start with the scatter terrain and then move onto the vehicles and buildings, so the next update should be some scatter terrain.

Dumpsters are ready to go. Really happy with how these came out. I’m thinking of bringing in some more highlights on the yellow logos and on the green dumpsters as I think the blue dumpsters kind of outclass them, but for now these are perfectly acceptable for tabletop, so I’m happy.

So I just got word back on the painting competition and it turns out my Captain America won gold! This put him in the top 3 of the competition for that category with another gold medalist with an incredibly smoothly painted Captian Marvel and with the overall winner of the competition, who painted an amazingly well detailed M.O.D.O.K. complete with NMM gold.

As proud as I am of my work on Cap, I had no idea it would do this well, so this pretty much made my weekend.

Hobby wise I’ve been working on the Wave 6 of the Walking Dead minis (progress is on that blog), but once those are complete, I’m back to knocking out terrain for MCP, then the plan is to post new pics of the minis with proper backgrounds. Then, finally, I’ll be able to start working on all the expansion characters I’ve been itching to get to.

So I finished Thor this week. Pretty happy with how he came out. I am getting more and more comfortable with this technique on black. I’m definitely going to have to revisit Black Widow eventually, but I still have Black Panther and Venom to practice on, so I’ll probably wait until they’re done before I do that.

Got Vision completed this week as well. He was really fun to paint, although to anyone reading this that hasn’t completed him yet, definitely paint him before gluing his leg to the brick wall, it made it a lot easier to get to all the details. I really like how colorful he was. On retrospect I might want to bring some of the colors up a little bit (the light green, for instance). But overall I’m happy with him.

Finished Winter Soldier this week as well. He was tricky to paint as his pose makes it difficult to discern where light should be falling and where it shouldn’t, so doing on overhead lighting scheme is counterintuitive. Either way, I’m pretty happy with the end result.

Next up is Black Panther, then I’ll probably move on to Hulk so that all the Avengers are finished.