Painting the jewel effect on the lenses, even if badly, has been a lot of fun, so I was actually excited to get my two minis to this stage already. Some pretty day I needed to sit down and start working on the about 145 earlier painted minis that only had a red dot or a blue wash on a metallic base.
Energy weaponizing
I spied from TRO 3050 how the weapons were officially located, so I'd paint the correct lenses the correct way. This time there were no flashlights or PPCs so for the mediums I used the green (VGA 72732 Escorpena Green) and larges I got blue (VGA 72721 Magic Blue). For mixing I used off-white (VMA 71270 White RAL9001).
Stormcrow
Here we had five rayguns to paint. Both arms had a medium and a large one, and somewhere in the head I was supposed to fit a third ERMLas. The head's lens was something I had probably missed on each of my earlier IWM minis, but all that could be fixed one by one.
Something had to be the first and this time I started with the green ERMLas lenses. In the laser barrels I painted the base layer of bright green. For the next dollop I mixed a drop of white and aimed to the 17:00-19:00 sector as well as I could with a tiny paintbrush onto a tiny target. Lastly I mixed another white drop in and attempted to do the tiny brightest dots with the even tinier opposing reflections.
This exact same was done for the ERLLasers but in blue and onto a bit larger target. The sizing alone made this somewhat easier.
I had managed better results before, but they worked fine by me.
Viper
I expected even less work from the Viper and its twin ERMPLasers. As long as I remembered to check that the RT-mounted double machine guns were barreled properly, everything was going to be fine. Again I was thinking that if the CGL's SRM-4 launchers had tips for the missiles like in many of the IWM minis, I'd be supremely happy to paint those as well.
These jewelings had gone better on earlier minis. Still, this was a vast improvement over my old approach of "lasers red".
Jump Jets
My Stormcrow was doomed to roam the ground on wherever it was deployed, so only the Viper got glowing JJ nozzles. To keep up with my earlier decisions and to remain somewhat constant, I got the same blue I used for the PPCs (VGC 72023 Electric Blue) and edited it with the same RAL white as all the jewelings. For a hopefully more gentle transitions I added a drop of tap water into my paint when I started.
According to the TRO the Jump Jet layout was LT/RT with 2 each, also LL/LR so eight nozzles for eight-hex leaps.
Hm. These looked nicer than the ones I painted previously into the butt-side of Grendel A. Maybe one day I'd get all these funny details into such a state where I was equally pleased with each of them.
My time usage crawled up to 2h 40mins. This last set of pics handily told me that I had accidentally skipped a caution stripe set from the LL.