Monseter Kolor: The Right Way

Monster Kolor is Awesome

A follow up, and mea culpa to this post: How Not to Use Monster Kolor.  I bought an airbrush a few months back, and it's completely changed my view of MonsterKolor.  The paint was designed for an airbrush, and it is the finest airbrush paint I have found.  No thinning required, sprays smooth and consistent right from the bottle.  I've tried other airbrush paints as well, and nothing I've used even comes close.

Glyos Gobon with Monster Kolor C-Thru paint.

Monster Kolor is almost too easy.  I've been knocking out custom toys that actually look decent, and feature effects (color change, pearls, auto-paint worthy metallics) that I couldn't even approximate with a brush and hobby paint.

Now that I'm more familiar with the Monster Kolor's properties, I've been brushing it on as well.  In small areas, with a good brush, the results are excellent, for example the iris on Mini Xam, and gold highlights on Mini Eyezon below.  The paint provides smooth, vibrant colors with great consistency:

Left to right: My first Mini  Eyezon with MK brushed on. Mini Xam and Eyezon Airbrushed.

I've barely plumbed the depths of what Monster Kolor can do, and now my only gripe is that there aren't more colors (a standard, non-metallic purple would be great)!

Glyos Buildmen with very little MK color, and lots of MK clearcoat!

This is fantastic paint, and there's an active, helpful community growing up, at the Monster Kolor website to take care of newbies and veterans alike.  I would recommend it to anyone with an airbrush, or who is interested in starting with an airbrush.

New products like the just-introduced aerosol cans, and upcoming Monster Kolor Brushable should make an excellent product even more accessible.

How not to use Monster Kolor

Grrr! Arrgh!

I've been diving into custom toy painting recently.  While my usual water-based acrylics have served fine on most projects, custom toys are usually PVC or vinyl, and present some challenges.   Monster Kolor is a line of paint specifically formulated for plastic, and custom toy painting.  When used correctly, they produce amazing results. Specifically formulated to go straight from bottle to airbrush, they provide fantastic coverage, vibrant colors, and excellent durability.

One hangup: I don't own an airbrush.

Full review of Monster Kolor, and Mini Eyezon (pictured), after the jump.

Best to avoid Tron: Legacy

Plodding, humorless, and excessively gruesome, Tron: Legacy is best avoided.  Garret Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, and Bruce Boxlightener do a decent job with a terrible script, while Jeff Bridges takes The Dude up to eleven for his Kevin Flynn performance.  He may be doing an ok job as CLU, but the digital youngified Jeff Bridges is to awful and distracting to notice anything else.   Lets make a deal Hollywood: Never use CG to make a young version of an old actor again, and I'll consider going to more movies.

While the plot, and the rules of the digital world make no sense, I found it more offensive that the special effects and production design were incredibly boring and derivative.  While the first Tron featured groundbreaking production design from visionary artists, Tron: Legacy has nothing you haven't seen before, and most of the sets, designs, set-pieces, and even dialogue are lifted from other movies (Wargames, Blade Runner, 2001, the original Tron).

Finally it's oddly grisly for a PG movie.  Limbs are severed, combatants are decapitated, and characters dissolve into gouts of electronic blood, and cubes of digital gore.   A scene of a woman sobbing as she held the remains of a slaughter loved one felt particularly excessive, and tone-deaf.

It's not Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, bad, but it's best avoided.  I did enjoy the Cillian Murphy cameo.

I'm also apparently allergic to Real3D, as it gave me a blinding headache, but that's for another post.