Gray Death paintjob

Nomen est omen even in camouflage patterns

Both Sarna and UCC referred to Field Manual: Mercenaries when talking about the camo pattern and the markings:

The Gray Death Legion employs a gray-on-gray camo pattern. The Legion’s trademark gray skull insignia is set over a red crest and emblazoned on the left shoulder of unit ‘Mechs. A colored circle on the right leg tells what battalion they belong to. Yellow for first, Green for second, Blue for third and Red for Headquarters and Command. 

Sounded simple enough for a simple person like me. Grey on grey, a green dot on a leg and a red smudge with a skull on the left shoulder. Clear as day. Someone may have noticed how I have been grumbling against doing grey schemes and that's why I haven't done Smoke Jaguars, for example. My failure with the Hummel's crew uniforms gave me an idea as I mentioned in the last post.

Chilly grey basecoat

To get the party started I overbrushed Cold Grey (VGA 71750) all over the 'Mechs. The Cold Grey also defined my workin order so that as my next step I would paint the bare metals because they'd then get drybrushed with Cold Grey and that wouldn't ruin a thing on the bodies. I left some obviously bare bits unpainted but didn't care about a bit of spillage.

After this I gave the 'Mechs another coat of Cold Grey as the first layer was thin, which made especially the Phoenix Hawk look worse than necessary. Had I used an airbrush this'd been so quick and simple, but then I'd also covered the plain metals. Not that it'd been a problem, but I felt like brush painting.

Bare metals

I applied a layer of Black Grey (VMA 71056) over the joints and key parts of different weapons, and when that layer had dried, I drybrushed them with Cold Grey. Looking at these photos I had been perhaps a bit overexcited with the drybrushingn and I would need to wash especially the gun barrels darker. Nothing catastrophic had happened so I didn't stop to lament.

With the grey drybrushing out of the way, I then drybrushed all the hull parts with Stonewall Grey (VGA 72749) with the idea of getting the edges brightened conveniently before doing a darker grey wash for the upcoming stripes. There wasn't a huge change with the previous step but it was there and that was what counted.

Striping with a wash-y black grey

As advertised, this idea came from the uniform failure or more accurately my last attempt at salvaging them with a dark grey over green. I tried the exact same recipe but with a very different goal: I diluted my black grey to be very thin but still dark enough. My first paint:thinner ratio was so offset that the paint was way too light. With the better one I painted a bunch of stripes to break the shapes and forms with the idea of returning to this step if I deemed it necessary.

Warhammer's missile launcher and the arm pod's insides probably needed some more camouflage.

The theme of undercamouflaged arms was repeated on the Ostsol.

Shadow Hawk's left arm was also undercamouflaged and I was thinking if the shoulder-mounted AutoCannon's long upper bits ought to be painted as hull instead. That required more pondering and model-spinning.

Phoenix Hawk IIC had ended as the most completely patterned. Maybe it was because of the 'Mech had so little else to play with. Looking at these photos I noticed that I had ignored that one laser or sensor bit over the cockpit. According to the IIC specs it wasn't a beam weapon so forgetting it wasn't critical. Making it more visible wasn't harmful either so I added it to my //FIXME list.

Black gaps

Before taking a second look at the camo stripes I painted all the weapon ports and cockpit glass panes black. Ostsol was the only one with any weapons in the back, the two laser lenses were small so I could've easily mixed them in my mind with some exhausts or cooling ports...

Black grey fine-tuning

With other prepwork done I diluted more black grey and started by applying it over the overlightened bare metals. Next I spun the miniatures in my hands and painted more tiger stripes here and there to break some more shapes in places I had skipped or most likely simply overlooked the previous time. The changes were not enormous and that was good.

Now I also darkened the bit on Phoenix Hawk's forehead. While looking at the fists I thought that these called for some chipping, considering that the freebirths were much more likely to engage in melee combat than Trueborns.

A beginning of an idea

While the previous changes were drying I was thinking of the novels where the Gray Death Legion had the habit of being heavily mangled in long battles, that would give a handy justifications to try showing some armour panels being replaced with fresh and unpainted ones. The idea came to me long ago and I thought that I could use some very boring grey for it to make them stand out from everything else. When I thought of boring grey I was definitely talking about Vallejo's "USAF Light Grey" that I had used at least in the F-22's nose cone. I didn't really know what annoyed me in that colour but I didn't like to use it in anything important or clearly visible.

The idea here was that I'd paint and weather the 'Mechs pretty much as usual until they were done. After that I'd choose some bits here and there and I'd repaint those with this paint without a care in the world for ruining camouflage or anything else, the goal was to show that the machines had been shot through in places and the Techs had bolted on new, fresh armour plates before the 'Mech marched back to the fight.

I was quite amused by this idea, and it had held my interest for a good while but I hadn't gotten a good grasp of it until now. Just this rambling here was the most refined version of this so far, and I'd let it stew for a bit while I worked on the normal paintjob.

A Jump Jet plume

The Shadow Hawk, as mentioned, came with an optional jumping effect. The last time I painted these I started with a red basecoat, but now I felt like building things over black. I started by painting red brow (VMA 71105 Red Brown RLM26) parts, concentrating mostly on the tail end of the actual blast above the billowing clouds, but I also added it to a number of deep crevices in the clouds as well. My limited understanding of explosion fireballs was that the core was the hottest and whitest, while the expanding gases got gradually colder and redder via yellow and orange until they turned black. That was the gist of it, as far as I had understood it.

After the red browns I used the RLM-red (VMA 71003) that I then kept mixing with yellow (VMC 70952 Lemon Yellow) to get the gradient painted in a few different shades, and painted the effect based on my gut feeling.

 

To the top end of the jet I drybrushed some white (VGA 72701 Dead White) but that needed more tweaking. Onto the gradually cooling parts I drybrushed gradually lighter greys to add dirtiness to the show. It may very well be that I started this the wrong way and I should've done the cloudy gradient exactly the opposite way, as this ended looking like a bit more like a volcano than a fireball.

Dry-fitting this on the Shadow Hawk looked pretty nice, it didn't reveal anything absolutely horrendous. What I didn't realize was the attachment bits: I had to paint them white to the end, as they depicted the tight fusion blast. I'd paint them white and maybe give them a hint of blue with a bit of drybrushing to make them fit with my blue Jump Jet approach. The billowing clouds needed a bit touching up, maybe adding some thin lighter gray to the deeper bits of them, and drybrushing later with black. Just a tiny course-fixing instead of a complete repaint, as long as I didn't ruin my red-oranges at this point.

Another evening I then painted the tips of the effects in white, drybrushed the clouds with black and pokes some RLM23 red into some deeper cracks that caught my attention. A gentle blue drybrushing was going to have to wait until I was painting the JJs and jewelings. Maybe this was the most I should even poke at this point.

  

Batallion identifiers

The Right Leg of each 'Mech needed a circle to denote the Battallion the belonged to, and remembered watching a Camospecs video for the Gray Death Legion some ages ago and checked it yesterday. The idea was to also add a coloured stripe around the forearm, in the video B1BFlyer used red for Command but I was working on a Second Battallion or Hassan's Assassins' Lance. The Second Battallion meant a green marking, I used Light Green (VMC 70942)

Of course I could've used a darker shade but I quite liked that the stripes stood out from the greyness as more than just hints of colour. The little blobs on the right knees also didn't show up from many viewing angles, which made the arm stripes more fun to me.

Unit markings

Now I had to get a red field with a grinning skull on each left shoulder. That ought to be achievable even for me. In some artwork the sign was visible from the front, in some it was like an armband. I decided that the infamous artistic license allowed me to do whatever I pleased.

For the bases of the red fields I painted irregular splotches of RLM26 (VMA 71105) and when it was set, I stippled the insides with RLM23 red.

The skulls I painted with white straight away as far as I could paint anything skull-like in this scale. My original idea was to paint them in layers of greys but I came to my senses. A white grinner was going to stand out better than a grey one, on a grey BattleMech.

Inside the skulls I painted the eyes and a couple of tooth lines. I wasted absolutely no time on the nose holes, those would've just made these look confusing.

The Shadow Hawk's insignia ended up working the best of the lot so I used that as my example. Next I'd finally get to tweaking, which meant chipping, cockpits, and lenses \o/

Project VI/26

Legionnaires of the Gray Death type

At some point in 1986 William H. Keith the younger pushed out his first part of a trilogy, and later on a larger saga about the first steps of young Grayson Death Carlyle in the world of mercenaries. Grayson spent much of his time after the very beginning piloting a glorious Marauder. I had already assigned my two Marauders elsewhere so this Lance couldn't have mr G Death himself in the ranks.

The idea for implementing the grey on grey pattern with stripes came to me when I flailed in vain with the Hummel's crew figures: if I set up the basecoat in Cold Grey with brighter highlights, and then painted the stripes with a heavily diluted dark grey? I wanted to give it a shot so I picked four miniatures as volunteers. It would've been way too simple to just take everything but the Kuritapult from the GDL ForcePack I recently bought, so I mixed and matched from four different sets.

Composition

The aforementioned Gray Death Legion Heavy Battle Lance gave this project a Shadow Hawk with the optional jump effect. Legendary MechWarriors III volunteered a Warhammer that I could've assigned elsewhere but I really like Warhammers too and therefore wanted to paint it now. From my BT:Mercs Salvage Boxes I got a Phoenix Hawk IIC. The last one to round the Lance was a bigger headscratcher and I half-blindly caught a Mercenaries-box's Ostsol in the BTTracker.

Warhammer WHM-6R

This was the one to start with, a fantastic design.

Phoenix Hawk IIC

On the opposite spectrum of 'Mech styles was the much more animelike unit, and maybe my eighties was seriously underfed with mecha, I just didn't like the smoother-shaped 'Mechs nearly as much as the clunky and angluar ones. That might not be a surprise to anyone who knew me as a fan of German Panzers.

Shadow Hawk SHD-7D

With the Shadow Hawk I was most excited about trying the flame colum effect again, for I had enjoyed playing with the two Elemental Jump Jet plumes some time ago. I'd try a different approach with this one, maybe I wouldn't even ruin anything.

Then I checked when did I actually paint the jumping Elementals. Almost exactly four years ago. Right. 

Ostsol OTL-4D

All these Ost* types of 'Mechs were known to my from some random Sarna articles, maybe a mention or two in novels at best. I knew that there were at least a handful of them from Ostscout to Ostroc and Ostsol, ending in Ostwar. Their names were supposedly describing what they were designed for.

 

Finished: Project V/26

Fiery monkeys in the Kerensky Cluster

Apparently I got excited about this stuff as the project practically flew from start to finish. This also happened with the recent Diamond Sharks so maybe new and different was a good motivator for me. Of course I was boosted by my decision of not attempting to do roundels or any such difficult things.

Point 5 - Fire Moth Prime

As we have seen these before, the somewhat speedy Fire Moth with its normal top speed of 160km/h, not to mention the MASCed 200+km/h rapidity was also the lightest of the lights with its mere twenty tons of mass. At least it had a bit more varied weapon than its Starmate Howler: two ERMLas in one arm, a SRM-6 in the other, and a SRM-4 on one shoulder. Being the Point number five it was the Star's commander and quite likely the MechWarrior in question was also ranked a Star Commander.

Point 4 - Howler

The only actual BattleMech of the Star was a totem 'Mech of the Fire Mandrills, or one of them at least. This twenty-tonner ran almost 120km/h on good terrain and as a stroke of genious had a triple of LRM-5 launchers installed on the right shoulder, along with three tons worth of long range missiles. Yes, the Howler sported fists, too, but Truborns abhorred barbaric melee fighting so they didn't count as actual weapons.

Kit Fox Prime

Each of the three Kit Foxes were super boringly configured the same exact way, so the only way the visually differed from each other was by their highlights. These three were both heavier and slower than the two more senior Points and they didn't quite reach three-digit speeds. In the Right Arm the Kit Fox had an LB-5X AutoCannon and a Streak SRM-4 launcher. The opposite arm had, in addition to a fist, an ER Large Laser right next to a Small Pulse Laser.

Of course I could claim, had I painted the lasers differently, that some of them were B configs where the LB-5X was actually an UAC/10 and the SSRM-4 an SRM-6, while the ERLLas was downgraded to ERMLas and the SPLas to an ERSLas. But I had not thought of this that far.

Point 3

Point 2

Point 1

The Star's Point 1 was the unit's lowest-ranking Warrior. Maybe this was also depicted with the Kit Fox looking like it was about to fall. Or maybe it was just taking a nickel-ferrous Gauss slug or a PPC blast into its front left corner. That could happen to anyone, regardless of rank and experience level.

Fire Mandrill jewels and oils

Project's second and last stage?

Having the viewports prepared in black the last time, it was a quick start this time. But. The IWM miniatures, especially the Kit Foxes had incredibly tiny lens spaces. I would be taking this jewel stuff much easier than earlier.

Jeweling effects

I decided to use only two layers on the energy weapons: first with the actual type colour, then a single white-grey dot for the effect itself.

The canopies I thought to paint in blue, as it would stand out nicely. This time I didn't start mixing shades myself but used two blues instead. Over the black I painted a layer of Magic Blue (VGA 72721), then a smaller more or less L or crescent-shaped effect on each panel with AMT-7 (VMA 71318 Greyish Blue AMT-7), and then in the inner and opposing corrners off-white (VMA 71119 White Grey) fake reflections, just like in the energy weapon lenses.

Howler was a piece of cake, it only had viewports and they were decently sized for my talents. I also prepared its hex base to be able to tell the toes and random paint smudges apart from each other.

Fire Moth had a tight viewport area, but I got some kind of an effect painted on with enough spinning around. Its Left Arm's ERMLas pair was tiny in diameter but at least you could see them. I spent a moment thinking of the SRM tips because I wanted to keep using my old idea of two-tone caps. First I painted the peeking missile tips greyish white, then I touched their very tips with some black grey. Even if these were of an acceptable size to paint, it was still a bit funky to paint them half-cross-eyed. 

Kit Foxes were each treated identically. Their viewports were even narrower than the Fire Moth's but I did my best. Those two lasers in the Left Arm were ridiculous to paint to say the least. Those shapes I declared the lenses of the Small Pulse Lasers I painted red, then the identical bits next to them, ER Large Lasers, I painted with Magic Blue. Finally I attempted to paint the even tinier grey white dots into them. On their foreheads they had those huge sensors, which I painted Fire Orange, again with the off-white reflection.

On the Right Arm's pod they had a Streak SRM-6 launcher riding next to an LB-5X, this version apparently blasted out the full set of one single tube. I painted them the same exact way I painted the Fire Moth's SRMs.

A group photo:

There was a detail I was thinking of was the pretty simple Point rank marking that the Fire Mandrills had. A red triangle standing on its tip with one to five golden semihorizontal lines behind it. I just couldn't paint them acceptably in this scale on those tiny armour plates, so I didn't do it.

Oil washing and cleaning

My usual approach to this was the familiar Abteilung's Sepia oil paint (ABT002 Sepia) thinned down to a wash. I let the wash settle in for about twenty minutes.

Then I cleaned up the excesses and let the minis to cure overnight.

Before going further I was thinking if I should highlight the upper red and yellow parts after the oil wash had toned them all down a bit. Of course this wasn't my own idea, I had seen it in a bunch of places already, so I gave it a shot and returned some brightness to the minis.

Howler's hex base

Being the only one with an unprepared the base, the Howler required some terrain for it. Maybe I'd use Vallejo's Mud goo and then apply some Woodland Scenics' Ballast and Foliage as the others had something similar?

When the glue holding the ballast was dry, I thinned down some Abteilung's Industrial Earth (ABT090) and used that on each of the five minis and feet. This unified them somewhat more, despite the age difference.

Now I only needed to remember to superglue some greenery in there...

Front edges

For the hex edges I thought I'd do them yellow the same way I painted the yellow parts of the 'Mechs. first the sand yellow, then lemon yellow. That then gave me the idea of making them somehow unique: I'd paint the Point marking in there, because the symbol was pretty simple. As the starting point I painted the down-facing triangles with hull red, and then added the 1-5 slashes as the space allowed.

I outsourced the Point ranking to Project Assistant II: Howler was #4, Fire Moth #5 and the Kit Foxes in order #1, #3, #2. You could tell that in this scale painting anything more than three tiny lines was overdifficult for me.

With the ranks decided I painted, just for the simple fun of it, the marks into the bottoms as well. It was a complete waste of time but I happened to have some idle time, I did it anyway. 

With these done I redid the rest of the hex edges with black grey, and started feeling like this pack of monkeys was ready. Except that I had forgotten to use the gloss varnish on the glossy bits. After a quick varnish-applying moment, and gluing that cursed tuft in place, I was actually done.