Back around to Marvel United for today’s models. In the last week, I chose to paint both of these models because they were one-offs, meaning no corresponding model in Marvel Zombies – and although Punisher is in Crisis Protocol, the model isn’t in an outfit that needs to be consistent with this figure. They also both happened to wear a lot of black. Or in practical painting terms, dark greys.

On Frank, I avoided the earlier and more comic-book schemes that involve white gloves, boots and belt in favour of the more grounded and realistic look that I prefer. This is also why I kept the ATGM that he’s holding to shades of green with somewhat realistic markings and some weathering instead of painting it with bare metal and coloured furniture like a 40k weapon. I gave him a five-o’clock shadow on his chin and also used a grey-flesh tone in his hair’s short sides and attempted to show some grey in his hair as well as the obvious highlights.

Frank is a difficult one in a lot of ways – like Captain America, his origins are tied strongly to a war in a particular era, but unlike Steve, (or Natasha – he hasn’t had any special serum to keep him forever young, nor any other “special” elements to keep him forever young (radioactive spider-blood, gamma rays, being a mutant, nanites, etc….) So when I was last looking into his comics, he was visibly aging, but also keeping himself in good physical shape. That’s why they have to keep updating the relevant war in the various films and other media.

With Noir-Spidey, painting an aging face was all a non-issue! He’s got a black outfit, with a(nother) black trenchcoat – which I can only assume increases his agility while juimping around on walls. He was actually a pretty straightforward models to paint, and was the first of this pair that I worked on. One of the other reasons I chose him aside from what’s written up top was because of the all-black outfit, and wanting to do some more practise on painting dark clothing while not doing the “Black Templars” hard armour edge style of painting to off-white, and instead keeping it dark and soft – and only really bringing it up on his grapple gun.

The only other real point of interest is the wall – I painted it in colours rather than B&W, since in the game he’s clearly going to be a part of the shared “non-noir” world with the other characters – so therefore – colour!

I’m pretty pleased with how both of these came out – the very different styl;e of these models means that while we can still use most of our “standard” miniature painting techniques, there’s a real opportunity to push myself to make the most of the stylistic differences – the huge, caricature-style heads and not-quite-chibi proportions really call for a different way of working compared to a standard 28mm head. Much like painting busts, or larger scale models, or realistic armour kits, or planes and naval models – or even just terrain – all things I know many of you who read this blog often do – these steps outside of painting standard marines or orks or what have you that force you to do things differently if you want the best results are almost always a good thing.

At least they are for me!