Last week we faced the Elementals, they brought doom and gloom to our little dungeon, so to balance it out we have some heroes to spread light, hope and glory.
I'll be honest when I backed Massive Darkness 2 I didn't plan on picking up much in the way of extra stuff. I figured I'd pick up a couple of the monster expansions to paint, especially ones I couldn't proxy, like the elementals, but I had no plans on picking up any of the hero expansions because MD2 would be shipping with plenty and the differences between each hero are only slight...
But then I painted one and I was hooked. My first hero out of the gate was Victoria and I loved painting her. I have been trying my hand at some non-metallic metals for a while now, starting with the SDE stuff but I feel like I really hit on a striking style with Victoria.
However once you pick a style for an entire board game you have to stick with it for the rest of the collection and that has been a little time consuming. My average time per hero for Zombicide Invader (my last big #Cmon project) was between an hour and an hour and a half, while the MD heroes have been clocking in at close to double that.
It's not just the NMM which is a time consuming process but I've been playing around with directional highlights. For each of these heroes I've tried to insinuate that the light is coming from above and to the right, applying brighter highlights to the upper right of each mini.
I've also been doing more layers and using fewer washes. I start with a base colour, usually a contrast paint for speed but it could be a mix. Then I'll apply upto five highlight layers to really bring out the details which I think shows well in something like the blue of Sarah's skirt.
I really did hit my peak with her, in particular, I love how her shield came out.
Unfortunately I disliked the other two heroes in that expansion. I found them both tricky to do well. This seemed, to me, to be a combination of things. With these minis I have switched back to an older technique I used to use of basing in a light colour and washing with Army Painter Strong Tone, which brings out all the detail and allows me to see what I'm painting but it also leaves a shininess in the recesses.
This doesn't work well with the darker colours of Silence and Ajax. And neither does my extreme highlighting that I've been doing on the other models. However, even if I only adore four of the six heroes, that's still a good batting average. Unfortunately, each hero pack also comes with a big ol' scary monster and for this expansion, that's Lord Tusk!
And with that I'm signing off. I don't know what I'll be painting next week, could be more Massive Darkness, could be something else entirely, but until then, have fun painting.
The Duke
The Duke is not scared of much, except spiders, social situations and unexpected sandwich fillings, but for over a decade he has shied away from non-metallic metal effects and now he wishes he'd spent the last ten years getting in some practice!