I’ve had my Marvel Crisis Protocol core set languishing on the shelf for a while. Love the game and likely will get a review up sometime. But I eagerly assembled and primed the minis, but they sat on the back of the paint bench for months. In that interim I’ve been dabbling a little more with contrast paints and finally was able to pick up the Vallejo Xpress line. I really love these contrast paints and they have vibrant colors. For some minis they might not be a good fit, needing a fair amount of thinning to use. But for my MCP stuff they seemed a perfect fit to match that pop of comic book colors.

For Iron Man I decided to try a different approach that I typically use for contrasts, and gave the entire model a base coat of Vallejo gold. Usually I use the “slop chop” method. Take a gray primed mini, give it a thinned black wash, and then a strong drybrush of white. For the Vallejo contrasts I don’t even bother using a black wash, and instead just rely on white drybrushed over gray primed figures. However for Iron Man I wanted to try and get a slight metallic tint of red so I went with a gold base coat.

Over sections I wanted red, I used Xpress Velvet Red. I used it undiluted with a single coat. In retrospect, likely thinning it out more and doing multiple coats would have given a better candy apple paint job for the armor, but I was still happy with the results.

For the eyes, hand repulsors and arc reactor, I went with white blended some with Xpress Space Grey. Just enough to give a tinge of blue around the edges. I also touched up a few parts on the boots and legs with Vallejo gun metal for those few bits that had a different paint job.

I used a matte varnish to coat the mini and then later painted on a gloss varnish. This gave the figure a subtle shine. A little bit of detail on the base and I was done. A super simple paint job to get Iron Man ready for the tabletop.

I also found a site that does suit replicas. While it’s not likely a 100% accurate depiction of the Mk III suit, I thought it was good enough. And even better it had a lot of different perspectives to give you a good reference while painting.