Marvel: Crisis Protocol

I feel like this challenge might’ve helped me grow as a painter more than anything I’ve ever done before. Feels like I smashed through a threshold with him. Very cool feeling.

Man, where to begin with Omega Red. Everything about this model was an exploration and a risk. Since switching over to Scalecolor paints I am no longer comfortable painting red or yellow. I don’t have a recipe down for either of those colors that I feel confident in. On top of that, I decided that I was going to try to do all his metal in chrome to 1.) challenge myself and 2.) because Omega Red has been a favorite character of mine for a long time.

Prior to painting Omega Red, the model that held the crown for the model I’ve spent the most time painting was Thanos. Omega Red has officially taken that crown and honestly I think it’ll be awhile until his throne gets challenged. I had to do him in steps and painted full other models in between those steps to prevent burn out. He’s easily the most ambitious piece I’ve painted so far.

As far as how I feel about him; I’m generally thrilled. I think the chrome turned out so much better than I feared it would when I started. I think the coils are incredibly imperfect and there a millions of little missteps on them, but with how nuts it is to even try to chrome like 50 or so little trapezoidal metal panels (per coil), I’m more than willing to leave it alone and just take him in as a model and be fine with the imperfections. For my first attempt at highly reflective non-metallic metal, I really don’t think I could’ve expected this good of a performance, let alone expected more. I’m really glad I challenged myself in this way if for no other reason than that it fully demystified painting chrome for me. I no longer find the idea of chroming Cable’s gun or Deadpool’s sword to be even remotely intimidating. Even tackling an Ultron repaint seems very doable now. Can’t guarantee it’ll look great, but I no longer see the idea as some insane feat that only a madman would attempt. It’s weird because just typing that out and recognizing it is very empowering. That’s pretty cool.

As far as the yellow goes, I’m pretty happy with the yellow recipe. I think it captures “dirty blonde” pretty well. I’m still not 100% on it, but I feel like I’ve got a better grasp on it than I did before going in, so it’s progress.

As far as the red goes, it was almost as big a journey as the chrome was. In particular, I’m having a difficult time finding a level of highlighting and shading on red that doesn’t make it look orange or pink. I seem to constantly struggle finding a way to highlight it all the way to white without over highlighting it and making it look atrocious. This is the same issue I run into with black (look at my first Punisher for an example of that). I tried watching several YouTube videos on this exact topic and everything I found didn’t really tackle it. What I think I finally figured out with Omega Red was that just because I’m going all the way to white with my highlights doesn’t mean everything that gets highlighted has to go all the way to white. It’s okay to leave big panels at a brighter version of the base color and not have to get pure white in there somewhere. So when I went to do his highlights I used various red tones to highlight, but saved the very “pink” and “white” highlights for only certain small areas. Overall I feel like it works. I think especially since the model already has an insane amount of contrast thanks to the chrome, had I over-highlighted the red I think it might make the model very distracting and confused. This also makes me think that perhaps in the future when I do black, I should approach highlighting it from the same perspective and I might get similar results.