How to Paint MCP Miniatures: Painting Tutorial

By Travis Pasch | April 15th, 2024 | Categories: Army Painter, How To Tutorial, painting miniatures, Tabletop Gaming News, Tabletop Gaming Products, Videos

Here’s how to paint Marvel Crisis Protocol miniatures with Speedpaint in about 10-15 minutes in our first MCP painting tutorial!

The Army Painter is known for having some of the best and most affordable paints on the market, and their Speedpaint line really feels like a game-changer. There were some people confused about how to actually use them for great results, so since Rob has had them for a while now, he shows how to use them as their one-coat solution!

Let’s go!

How to paint Marvel Crisis Protocol Miniatures: Painting Tutorial

People have been asking Rob about this for a little while now. Considering he’s had the paints for so long. He made two tutorials, one is a how-to paint Marvel Crisis Protocol miniatures tutorial and earlier he did a how to speedpaint a Space Marine.

There has been a little bit of drama there about Speedpaint by folks who seem to want them to do more than what they are designed for. These paints are designed to be a single coat solution. However, you can wait for around 6-8 hours to add more coats, but you really don’t need to. It’s meant to just get your minis on the table super-quickly and get playing!

If you want to do anything else than speed paint with the new speedpaints, just use regular acrylics or even the old Citadel Contrast paints (for double the price).

To see what all the colors look like with different undercoats and such, you should check out the Goobertown Hobbies video, as he goes super in-depth on that aspect, and it’s totally worth a watch…

How To Paint Marvel Crisis Protocol Miniatures: Step 1

To start, he does a full black primer on the model, then he’s going to do a value highlight. For the value highlighting, you can use, Daler Rowney ink, Pro Acryl White, or The Army Painter Cadre Grey, it’s really just up to you and what you like the best. He is going to do this with an airbrush but it can also be done if you don’t have one via a heavy drybrush and it will look like the Space Mare above.

But with how many resources are out there for how to airbrush you should really think about learning to use one! If that doesn’t convince you though, again, you can just use a heavy drybrush to get the values you want like the picture above!

Now, when you’re doing the airbrushing, Rob puts just a little Flow Improver in there, then just throws in a few drops of the DR ink. He then sprays the white from a top-down, as where the light would hit, to start.

Then, he hits some of the areas where you want to draw attention to, like the hands and such. Make sure to leave some deeper areas dark so there will be more contrast.

Step 2:

The next step is doing cutbacks. This stage is optional, but will really add that pop of color and will only take about an extra minute.

Now he puts Matt Black Air into the airbrush and just makes some areas more pronounced where he may have gone a little too far with the white. This is usually done from the bottom up but focuses more on where you want it for contrast, not a particular place.

Step 3:

This step starts with a matte coat. Rob does this almost whenever he uses the airbrush. Rob uses the Testors Matte Coat and just sprays the whole thing and lets it sit overnight. If you cant find the Testors, he uses the Tamiya version.

This coat is super easy, he just sprays the whole model.

Step 4:

He starts with a wash and does a Dark Tone Wash from the Army Painter and puts it in a bottle cap and some flow improver mixed 50/50 with glazing medium. Just be sure to let your paints dry before going onto this step. Just mix it all up, get a bunch on your brush, and basically apply it to your entire model from the top down.

If you see anything too crazy, you can just take your brush with a little moisture on it and just dab off the excess. Then wait for the glaze to dry, and you can optionally matte coat your mini at this point as well. Before you glaze in that last step, you can actually drybrush your mini if you want that little bit of extra pop.

Step 5:

He’s using the Magic Blue speed paint for the main color and just fills up his brush with it. He goes over the entire thing that is supposed to be blue. If you use too much or little in one spot, you can just rub it right off with your finger or a moist paper towel!

Obviously, that won’t work forever but because it activates, you have a little time to fix your mistakes. The Speedpaint really takes care of most of the work for you, just throw it on and dab off your excess. Then, he just goes with Hardened Leather for the belt and pouches, Holy White for all the white areas, Blood Red for the red areas, Dark Wood for the skin, and then Gravelord Grey for the base.

Final Thoughts

If you just let this dry and maybe do some value highlighting prior, this stuff will get you great-looking results super fast! Just be sure to coat your minis and let everything dry! Overall, Rob loves using this as you can get great results in a very short amount of time.

For a one-coat solution, this is super hard to beat! Just be aware, this takes a while to dry and is made to be a one-coat solution, meaning you should really only be doing a single coat with Speedpaint.