Descent into the Dark Dimension

Hello! Dr. Phil here, and this post is about one of my Marvel: Crisis Protocol hobby projects. Dormammu is an evil spirit from the Dark Dimension and a powerful dark magician. Sorceress Supreme of the Dark Dimension, Clea has some synergy with Dormammu so I also made a roster focused on them playing together.

I started by looking at pictures of Dormammu and Clea. I knew I wanted to paint him differently, so I was thinking white armor for a bit, but he has a relatively consistent appearance in the comic books. I do love purple though and I see some purple notes in some of the primary armor color, so I went with purple armor as my way to paint him differently. Clea is often depicted as having purple as a primary color, so I had my Dark Dimension theme. Clea also likes leggings with a circular pattern so I thought I would challenge myself to try and replicate that pattern.

 

I have gained a lot of painting wisdom through watching Sorastro's painting tutorials on Youtube, and he always starts with a Zenithal coat of white paint sprayed from the top. I started Dormammu and Clea with the Games Workshop Chaos Black spray paint to prime the entire model, and then the GW Corax White was used to spray from the top. This creates a natural effect of lighting on the model. For Dormammu's armor, I used a thinned, translucent coat of purple to preserve the effect, and also used the pattern as a guide to paint the shadows a darker purple. To create the darker purple, I just mixed in a bit of black on my palette. I mixed some white and purple and painted some non-metallic metal highlights while the zenithal pattern was still fresh on my mind. It also helps if the base coat is still a little wet so that the white can blend together but since I'm only using a slightly lighter purple and I plan to go much higher, you can be pretty much free with this step. Notice the nice zenithal on the cape from behind!

I worked a bit more on the non-metallic purple effect by adding more and more white to the mix and adding smaller and smaller light reflections. This creates a gradual build-up from purple to white. I understand that metallic surfaces can exhibit a high amount of contrast: that is, the color changes suddenly from one color to the other. Reflected light on a purple metal would look white, but using a gradual build-up from purple to white gives a distorted appearance to the reflection. Usually this is referred to as Non-Metallic Metal (NMM). I painted the cape red by using a translucent layer, and repeated the process of using a black mix and white mix to do the highlights. I would warn about using too much white though, because I found it turned a little pink. Next time I might try using yellow or orange to brighten up my red for highlights. For the next step, I painted the oranges including all of the flames with a bit more solid of a coat. I try to preserve the zenithal on the flames to get a natural variation in orange, but also the orange needs to be clear enough so that the black undercoat doesn't show through. I also roughed some reflections of Dormammu's two balls of light in his armor with a thick line of translucent orange, and reflections of the flames around Dormammu's feet in his boots. Around this point, I got distracted by Clea's pants and did a rough draft.

 

I then worked on adding yellows to Dormammu's flames and base. I followed Sorastro's tutorial on Ghost Rider for the flames, and tried to skip a step on a few flames by going directly from the pure orange basecoat to the yellow highlights, and it looked bad. Definitely mix yellow and orange and paint a thicker highlight first, and then you can highlight with yellow to create a smooth transition. I had to go back and correct the cheating attempts by smoothing it out with a yellow-orange "glaze". A glaze is basically a paint consistency, it's hard to explain but basically it has a consistency that makes it want to go over and tint all of the colors on the model. A glaze tends to make transitions smoother in general, so here I just created a very wet mix of yellow and orange and painted it along the bad transitions from pure orange to pure yellow. The photos below were taken before I corrected the transitions on the flame in his right hand, and you can definitely notice a difference. I also painted up Clea and did her base in the same fiery effect as Dormammu's. The grasping hands are from Blade's base; he is jumping over a fallen mailbox instead. I think Dormammu and Clea look pretty great together!

 

 

In Marvel Crisis Protocol (MCP), Dormammu is a big bully that has really powerful attacks. He gives his allies one additional power per turn, which turns on some fun interactions with some of the heroes who wouldn't normally fit into other affiliations. He gains power when his allies are attacked and also has a tactics card that can raise an ally from the dead threat 3 or less. This makes Sacrifice or any other ability that can redirect attacks from him onto his allies very strong. Clea helps Dormammu in MCP with a teleport. Her and Heimdall together can each teleport Dormammu on turn one, so he's in the center of the board before you even start to activate him. They can also help to fix his position if the enemy tries to throw or push him out of place. Dormammu can also place himself, so that means on one turn Dormammu can teleport a significant distance over the board without using up either of his activations. This strategy is nice to either place him right in the middle of the board to start turreting down enemies, or if you find yourself in a tough, spread out mission where enemies will be hiding from Dormammu all around the board. Clea and Heimdall are both threat 3, so can be resurrected, and thus my Dark Dominion roster was born!

My current roster is something like Dormammu, Clea, Heimdall, Baron Mordo, Ancient One, Ghost Rider, Hood, Omega Red, Iron Fist, and Honey Badger. Honey Badger is all painted up for my X-Force, and Ghost Rider is mostly painted as a personal project, and I'd started a base coat on Iron Fist, but the rest were unpainted when I started the project. When I saw how great Clea and Dormammu looked here together, I decided Baron Mordo, Ancient One, Hood, Omega Red, and Iron Fist should all have the same fire effect on their base so that I can even more of a themed appearance with the entire roster. For Baron Mordo and Ancient One, I followed the same zenithal, purple, and purple/white highlights strategy that I used on Clea, but I've only completed a few of the steps on these. Baron Mordo is also involved with Dormammu in the comics, so there's a nice precedent to having him on the team.

      

   

Omega Red has an episode of the classic 90's X-Men cartoon dedicated to him, and is kind of a mix of Dr. Octopus and Wolverine. Dormammu gives him one extra power per turn to enable him to pull enemies medium distance towards himself. Dormammu really wants to attack twice each turn, so bringing your enemy closer is one way to make sure you can get your full value out of Dormammu. Omega Red reduces all damage by one, making him an ideal target to redirect attacks onto with Sacrifice, and he can get right into the fray to distract enemies from Dormammu. For Omega Red, I wanted to match the shiny purple metallic armor that Dormammu has, since he has quite a bit of metal on his mini. I got started with the NMM on the purple metal but completely forgot the greaves or whatever you call what's on his wrists. I think the NMM is coming along well, I am really proud of myself because overall it only took me around two hours of painting to get such a dynamic effect, and mastering this technique has always been one of my goals when I started painting MCP.

 

Baron Mordo and Heimdall can use their ability to add to ally's attack dice (reroll in Heimdall's case) when Dormammu attacks. Baron Mordo, Heimdall, and Ancient One have nice spender attacks, which cost lots of power to use but are easier to get to in Dark Dimension. Baron Mordo's strength 7, range 4 spender gives out Incinerate, and Heimdall's comes with a push of Medium with no size restriction. Ancient One spender is harder for enemies to defend against, is strength 8, and gives out Stagger if it does any damage. Since Ancient One is threat 4, I look at him as a brawling alternative to Omega Red. If enemies don't want to come to me, Omega Red can pull them in, but if they are already on their way to me, Ancient One can clap back hard with a guaranteed spender attack each turn that he starts his activation within range of the enemy. If he's not within range of the enemy, Clea or Heimdall can fix that!

 

As far as the Dark Dimension roster is concerned, Iron Fist is a bit of a heat-seeking missile in MCP that has the weakness of being easily K.O.d by the enemy's reaction or even pre-emptively before he can accomplish his mission. For Dark Dimension, I'm fine with enemies attacking someone other than Dormammu, and I can bring him back from the dead, meaning he can perform his heat-seeking missile duty twice in one game! He has a great tactics card that works like Sacrifice to redirect attacks onto him, so he's almost a defensive option for the team, matching up well against big enemy threats like Hulk. The fire thing going on with his model goes right into my theme.

 

I had painted a bit of Hood earlier, more on his normal form and less on his possessed form. In the comics, Hood is a leader of the Criminal Syndicate from time to time, who has the power to transform to a powerful possessed demon when he gets into trouble. In MCP, he has a very thematic ability to transform from his normal side to his possessed side when he becomes damaged. I think it's cool how when he's in normal form, he has a normal base, but when he's possessed, he has the signature Dark Dimension fire for when he let's Dormammu take control. Both sides of Hood got a great Zenithal, and I managed to keep that alive in his jacket and pants for his normal form. All of the highlights are there for me to work with on the signature hood and cape when I get around to him again. On his normal side, Hood can heal three damage for three power, and gives out Bleed to the target; Dormammu gives him power to make this happen more reliably and is immune to Bleed so can get healed with no downside. On his possessed side, Hood has really scary attacks and a charge that can be used every turn thanks to Dormammu. Even Hood's normal side can be deadly: the only rapid fire mystical attack in the game can one-shot many of the game's heroes. Hood is a glass cannon who usually gets one chance to pop off each game before he's K.O.d by the enemy. Dormammu won't let him rest so easily.

I followed Sorastro's Ghost Rider tutorial on Ghost Rider a few months ago, and I have been eyeing him for my Dark Dimension roster for his immunity to Incinerate and ability to grab someone and drag them across the map for Dormammu to kill. His ability to come back from the dead by K.O.ing a threat 3 also seems to combo with Dormammu's ability to raise a threat level 3 from the dead for some crazy resurrection hijinks. If you attack Dormammu, Ghost Rider gains power, and if you attack Ghost Rider, Dormammu gains power, so that's fun. Also, the fire. For this project I'll be touching him up from where I left off and I added a streak of fire to his base. As for the paint, he's mostly black, with a challenge of getting a metallic feel on the bike but a cloth feel for the jacket. I learned a lot about NMM through working through Sorastro's tutorial on his bike, and he's one of the first models I feel like I really accomplished the effect with, although I'm not ready to declare it finished yet!

On the subject of glazes, I finally picked up some blue glaze to try and tinge Ultron and War Machine's "Blue Sky" NMM to make it look like the sky is reflecting in their armor. Ultron was my first NMM attempt, again following Sorastro's tutorial, which I decided to do by first painting with metallic silver and then gradually adding the highlights where the light actually reflected. But I wouldn't recommend trying this, because the metallic silver paint does not blend well (one of the incentives to do NMM is to avoid the gross metallic paint!), and I basically have been repainting him ever sinc. Using the blue glaze did smooth out my rough NMM attempts.

 

Thank you all and I hope you've enjoyed this catchup on my hobby progress.