Hey there! I hope you’re doing well and staying safe! We are all House Moderna now, happily vaccinated and trucking along. No tentacles, and the 5G service is seriously disappointing. 🙂

Anyways, I continued some more comic style characters, and I think it’s really coming along! Having had an epiphany that I can just paint the gigantic backlog without planning on using them for anything means that I have tons of options!

I started with this guy, the Lich Wurm from the game Middara (which is super fun, but toddlers are not conducive to gameplay). I decided not to worry about the chick on top since she is just straight white in the concept art, and her details were a little soft anyways. I also didn’t try to do NMM on the gold. I’m working on figuring out one thing at a time, thank you. I was going for a sort of “Venom” look on this, and I don’t think it turned out too shabby! Definitely want to go back to some more saturated, lighter colors, but this was a good practice piece.

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Then I decided to try something else different. One of the Epic Duck Studios videos covers painting just white and lining, and then using contrast paints to sort of ‘color in’ the mini. I found this super interesting, as the model was completely amazing to my eye when it was just black and white. I kept having to remind my brain that it was 3d and not 2d and that was exciting to me! So I decided to try my hand at it. Remember, I am no expert. I definitely found a few areas I need to work on with this mini.

First I primed him white, and then used 2 or 3 coats of Unicorn White, to make sure he had super duper coverage. Then I started the lining. It was actually really easy to do the lining at this stage, because I hadn’t painted anything to distract me from just the model itself.

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After this, it was just a matter of going through my contrast paints and using them in the separate areas! I found that I don’t have a ton of colors, but I think it was enough for this guy. I also learned that the ink needs to be completely, COMPLETELY dry before you add the contrast paints. Otherwise, it kind of smears into the contrast paint, and in the case of his sunglasses, removes it completely. But I’m pretty happy with these! Again, I wimped out on the NMM. I just think that’s gonna be it’s own whole process. And I don’t have a ton of painting time, so I try not to get discouraged. 🙂

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Last, but not least, my March duo mini with MaxStyles. We decided to challenge each other to colors we’re not super comfy with, and ended up both deciding on yellow (and I decided to add white in there cause I’m a sucker for punishment). 🙂 I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, I definitely learned a few things along the way. This was the first Bones USA mini that had some pretty gnarly mold lines. I ordered 2, but they both had pretty bad ones. They also suffer from the original bones problem that they don’t sand well, so if you can’t just cut it off with a scalpel, you have to kind of sand it in opposite directions until it peels off…So he has a gold right hand instead of a regular one. This guy has the best eyebrows ever, and I love the little mouse. I may paint another one up to a more competition quality later. We shall see.

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That’s all for now! I hope this was enjoyable for you. I’m going to continue my forays into comic style painting, and I plan to continue sharing my wins as well as the process that got me there as much as possible!

Let me know what you think!

-marinealRose