Goonhammer Guides Painters Through Quasar's Glowing Energy Effects for Marvel Crisis Protocol
Fluorescent paint is the entire trick to Quasar's energy effect, and brushwizard's Army Painter-heavy recipe gets her tabletop-ready in one evening.
Quasar, Phyla-Vell, looks like she demands a weekend. She doesn't. The sculpt from Atomic Mass Games' Adam Warlock, Moondragon and Quasar character pack comes packed with glowing energy effects, a vibrant red suit, and a base that deserves more than a brown wash, but brushwizard's Goonhammer walkthrough breaks the whole job into stages that land comfortably inside a single hobby session. The fluorescent technique at its core is the real prize: once you've learned it on Quasar, it unlocks every cosmic and magical energy effect in your Marvel Crisis Protocol collection.
The Paint Checklist
Before you touch a brush, pull these together. The suit runs almost entirely on Army Painter's range; the energy effect needs fluorescents, which are the one category worth buying specifically for this job.
- Basecoat: Army Painter Basilisk Red
- Shadow mix: Army Painter Basilisk Red + Army Painter Angel Green
- Layer: Army Painter Wyvern Fury
- Highlight: Army Painter Dragon Red
Red Suit:
- Undercoat: White (primer or paint over primer)
- Layer 1: Fluorescent Yellow
- Layer 2: Fluorescent Orange (blended wet into Yellow)
- Edge highlight: White
Energy Effect:
- Basecoat: Citadel Stormvermin Fur
- Stipple 1: Army Painter Ash Grey
- Stipple 2: Army Painter Brigade Grey
- Wash: Citadel Nuln Oil
Base (standard brushwizard MCP recipe):
- Basecoat: Citadel Mechanicus Standard Grey
- Splotchy layer: Citadel Mournfang Brown (thinned)
- Drybrush: Army Painter Flickering Flame
Rusty metal details:
Brand Substitutions
The Army Painter suit colors map cleanly onto Citadel if that's what you have in the rack:
- Basilisk Red: Citadel Mephiston Red
- Angel Green (shadow mix): Citadel Warpstone Glow
- Wyvern Fury: Citadel Evil Sunz Scarlet
- Dragon Red: Citadel Wild Rider Red
- Ash Grey / Brigade Grey: Citadel Administratum Grey / Ulthuan Grey (for the stippling step these are close enough to be interchangeable)
For the fluorescents, Army Painter, Vallejo's fluorescent range, and AK Interactive's fluorescent inks all work. AK Interactive's inks are especially vibrant glazed over a white undercoat, and the brand appears across multiple MCP guides in the same Goonhammer series for exactly that reason.
The Key Steps: Order of Operations
This is where sequence matters. Do the energy effect after the suit is finished; trying to protect wet fluorescent paint while working around it adds unnecessary frustration.
1. Prep and prime.
Clean mold lines, especially around the energy effect where jagged plastic will fight your smooth blends. Prime white, or at minimum apply white paint over a grey primer to the energy areas before fluorescents go on. Fluorescents are semi-transparent, and white underneath is what makes them read as luminous rather than just pale.
2. Basecoat the suit.
Lay down Basilisk Red (or Mephiston Red) in an even coat. Aim for full coverage; this is the color you'll be shading down from and highlighting up from, so patchy basecoats create extra correction work later.
3. Mix the shadow tone.
Add a small amount of Angel Green (or Warpstone Glow) into your basecoat red. This desaturates and darkens it without the deadening effect of black, which is the standard MCP red approach across most brushwizard guides. Push this into all the recesses.
4. Clean up and layer.
Restate the basecoat red on raised surfaces to restore saturation, then apply Wyvern Fury (or Evil Sunz Scarlet) on the raised planes to add upward contrast.
5. Edge highlight.
Thin Dragon Red (or Wild Rider Red) and run it along all the raised edges. Catch the seams of the suit panels and any sharp costume details the sculptor has given you.
6. Paint the energy effect.
Apply Fluorescent Yellow as a solid basecoat over the white-primed energy areas. While the yellow is still wet, load Fluorescent Orange onto your brush and work it into the outer edges and deeper zones, blending the two together. Then, once everything is dry, edge highlight the entire energy effect with White. The white edge is what sells the glow: it creates the impression that the light is brightest at the source.
7. Base the groundwork.
Stormvermin Fur across the whole base surface, then stipple the top with Ash Grey and Brigade Grey to build texture. Nuln Oil ties the stippling together and deepens the recesses. Any rusty metal gets Mechanicus Standard Grey, a splotchy thinned coat of Mournfang Brown, and a Flickering Flame drybrush to finish.
8. Seal.
Matte varnish is standard for gaming models; a light satin layer first can help the fluorescents hold their pop under a flat topcoat.
Time Budget
Realistic allocation for one evening:
- Prep and prime: 10-15 minutes
- Red suit (all stages): 35-45 minutes
- Energy effect: 15-20 minutes (the blending step rewards a slightly slower pace; keep a water cup close)
- Base: 10-15 minutes
- Total active brush time: 70-95 minutes, plus drying windows
If you're working wet-on-wet for the fluorescent blend, the energy effect practically completes itself inside a focused fifteen-minute window. That's the efficiency of fluorescents over traditional OSL layering: fewer steps, higher visual payoff.
The One Skill This Guide Is Really Teaching: Glowing Energy with Fluorescents
Conventional OSL asks you to paint the glow's effect on surrounding surfaces, which is technically demanding and easy to overdo. Brushwizard's fluorescent approach sidesteps that entirely. White undercoat, fluorescent yellow, fluorescent orange blended in while wet, white edge: four materials, one technique, a result that reads as genuinely luminous at arm's length on the gaming table. The physics shortcut here is that fluorescent paints absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it as visible color, so they register as brighter than ordinary paint under gaming room lighting. No faking required.
The same construction transfers directly to other cosmic MCP sculpts. Any character with quantum bands, energy constructs, Infinity Stone effects, or elemental flame can be approached with the same white-foundation, fluorescent-layer, white-edge pipeline. It's the most useful single technique in the MCP painter's toolkit, and Quasar is the clearest possible introduction to it.
Quick Variant Schemes
The fluorescent energy effect is scheme-agnostic. Swap the surrounding suit color and the energy reads completely differently:
Cosmic Glow (deep-space palette): Replace the red suit with Kantor Blue or Caledor Sky, highlighted through Teclis Blue and Lothern Blue in the standard MCP blue approach. Shift the energy effect from yellow/orange to Fluorescent Blue over white, edge highlighted with Ulthuan Grey and White. The result reads cold and cosmically alien, closer to a quantum band or Nova Corps aesthetic. Beta Ray Bill's guide in the same Goonhammer series uses AK Interactive Fluorescent Blue for exactly this effect.
Comic-Book Cel Shade: Keep the red suit but abandon the smooth layering. Work in flat color blocks, skip mid-blending, and drop hard black lining into the deepest recesses with thinned Black. Pair this with a simplified energy effect: Fluorescent Yellow basecoat and white edge only, no orange blend. The reduced-step approach was pioneered on Spider-Ham in the same series to capture a 2D panel aesthetic, and it translates to any character where you want bold graphic contrast over realistic rendering.
Classic Black-and-Gold Cosmic: Replace the suit with a black-and-gold scheme grounded in Rhinox Hide, layered through Mournfang Brown and finished with Retributor Armour, washed with Reikland Fleshshade. Keep the fluorescent yellow-orange energy effect unchanged. This mirrors certain comic-run Quasar quantum band aesthetics and pairs neatly with Adam Warlock's predominantly gold palette if you want the whole pack to read as a unified cosmic squad.
Why MCP Guides Keep Coming
The Quasar tutorial is the latest in a stretch of MCP-specific walkthroughs brushwizard has published throughout early 2026, following guides for Ronin, Echo, and Prowler in rapid succession. The pace reflects something real about how Crisis Protocol painters approach the hobby: the sculpts sit at the intersection of a gaming miniature and a collectible character model, and painters want both gaming durability and display-quality results from the same paint job. Model-specific recipes, grounded in a character's specific colors and sculpted details, answer that demand far more usefully than generic technique guides. Quasar's energy effect is the latest proof that the most transferable lessons in miniature painting often hide inside the most character-specific problems.
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