Marvel United Core Villians

Ultron

I got my Core Box of Marvel United in the wave 1 of two wave shipping. I chose to paint Hulk, Red Skull, and Ultron first, who oddly enough all have roughly the same pose. I'd been searching for the right green color paint in preparation for Hulk, and decided to use the Vallejo Model Air Olive Green from the Model Air starter box. 

This looked to be the easiest to paint of the bunch. I decided early that I'd be doing him with metallic silver paint, instead of the NMM I plan to use for the rest of the box. Too much metal on him, and I wanted to try the Vallejo Air silver through my airbrush. I primed him completely black, as metal paints look much better over black.

There wasn't a whole lot to embellish here. I added a little more color in places where I could with Deep Sea Blue on the shoulder circles and neck tubes. The neck tubes were fun to highlight, and look cool in the YouTube video. The shoe caps are a Necromancer Grey, but they nearly blend in with the base below them. Perhaps I should have used Deep Sea Blue here as well.

   

Red Skull

This was another chance to use my airbrush. I'm only using it for base colors because my 0.3mm doesn't lend itself well to detail. I painted both the trenchcoat and his skull with it. Some of the green oversprayed onto the neck and lower head, but the red was translucent and it actually turned into a nice shadow. A happy little accident!

Yes, I decided to paint the coat green to match the game art. Many will prefer it the classic black, but I've made an early decision to try to match game art as much as possible, unless I have a pretty darn good reason (see: Hulk's purple pants). 

The buttons and buckles are metallic paint, same color as Ultron. I wanted to see how it brushed on, and I think it turned out nicely. It's a very opaque paint and bright silver.

Taskmaster

With Taskmaster, I was dreading painting all the white. The blending of the cape seemed like a giant task. So I saved him until we were tired of beating up on the other two villains and needed some variety. There was a lack of reference photos for his outfit because of the way he's leaning forward. I've tried to capture mine in hopes of aiding someone on the same quest.

The shield was a composite of multiple color schemes I came across. The Black Widow movie isn't out yet, so if this figure is based on that version, we'll soon see. The comics seemed to have a different pattern for the shield, so I went with some nice bold color patterns as to not make it any harder than it needed to be. It fits the vibe of the game nicely during gameplay.

I'm very happy overall with how this turned out. He did take the longest of all of the core figures, probably around 5-6 hours total. Most if that was spent on his cape pushing paint around trying to get something I liked. And then painting over that ad nauseum. The only grip I have is with his sword. It's NMM, but I was ready to be done by the time I got to painting it. Looking at it now, I've done much better NMM weapons, but hey, gotta keep moving.