My painting has slowed down a little bit over the past few weeks, but I wanted to show off my most recent figure: Venom! I’m slowly working through the rest of my Marvel United characters, although I recently got my hands on the Into the Spider-verse expansion and was gifted Marvel United: X-Men for my birthday!
I have plenty of painting to do, and I now have a rough timeframe of two months to knock as many figures out of my pile of shame. According to their most recent update, my copy of the Darkest Dungeon board game should be arriving around September! I’m excited to get my hands on the game of course, but the miniatures look fantastic and I’ve been waiting nearly two years since backing the project.
What I Like
Returning my focus to Venom, I like how the color pops out from his black symbiote. The wild red tongue has a pretty iconic look, and I’m happy with how his eyes and teeth turned out. His spider symbol looks cleaner than I expected after a few rough first coats, but the consistency of the white on the body of the spider could use some cleaning up.
Venom was a straight forward project. I tried mixing together some black, grey and blue to show off some of the raised parts of his muscles but those areas seem to be a bit clearer in person than in the photo.
What I Want to Improve
Highlights continue to be a tricky hurdle for me: sometimes I feel like I’m doing enough but most of the time I think my figures could use a little more depth. A part of me knows that my cell phone camera can’t quite capture the highlight on Venom’s tongue for example, but for the most part I believe I’m just not confident enough yet in building up using layers of paint.
The difference in highlighting my brother’s Night’s Watch army and highlighting Venom boils down to the shapes of the figures. The defenders of Westeros’ northern wall had cloaks with defined ripples in them, while Venom is much more rounded overall. I’ll continue to learn more about shapes, depth, and lighting to get some clearer definition on my finished figures.
Finally, my consistency of white paint continues to be messy, but I picked Spider-Gwen and Taskmaster to paint next to force myself to get better. I plan to show off Spider-Gwen next Friday.
The Paints I Used
- Symbiote: Citadel Abaddon Black
- Symbiote Highlights: Vallejo Dark Prussian Blue and Citadel Mechanichus Standard Grey
- Symbol: Master Series Paint Dragon White
- Tongue: Citadel Mephiston Red
- Washes: Army Painter Red and Citadel Nuln Oil
