Finished: I/24

Doomguy Urbie

 

So here it was, Doomguy-Urbie, an UrbanMech painted a bit like Doomguy himself, inspired by Eldoniusrex's artwork but without the horde of Barons of Hell, bright green splatter on the ground, or the guy running to help you in the distance. Not too many people would make this connection without being pointed to it, I felt, but such was life. Of course I forgot to even think of doing the ripped fabric and wounds on the inner right thigh for the Urbie but that kind of a detail could've been completely lost even if I tried to copy it.

Union Aerospace Corporation

Like I said while pondering on the paint scheme, the Union Aerospace Corporation -conglomerate from Doom (1 and 2) fit inside Battletech's corporate-run neofeodal universe like a glove, so of course UAC also had its own private heavily armed security forces to keep them from relying on Mercs or the benevolence of the armed forces of the Successor States.

While we were speaking of a game which had a few-sentence backstory, there wasn't much official worldbuilding anywhere, as very little of Tom Hall's design document was used in the end. So I decided myself that Doomguy was the perfect incarnation of the UAC scheme, even though I could've used any of the four co-op/deathmatch colours (green, indigo, brown, red) or the former humans' uniforms (zombie, shotgun sarge, minigun-baldie) to draw inspiration from. Or I could've added the blue megaarmor over the green combat overalls! Nothing else fit the cover art, so these ponderings went to /dev/null for this project.

Now that I had one, I could later implement the same or similar pattern on three other Light BattleMechs and have a full lance of corporate goons to fight against the Clans, Mercenaries, and the space AT&T (or whatever was your favourite-hateful teleoperator).

UrbanMech UM-R60

Here we had a thirty-ton light BattleMech, slow as a legless goat in a deep snow bank, whose most exciting feature was the 360° rotating torso. This walking trash can was armed with an Imperator-B Autocannon (AC/10) in its Right Arm, loaded with a ton of ammunition (for 10 shots), and in its left arm it had a Light Laser for those critical "the boss dropped their keys in the rubble" missions. Being a city fighter it at least had Jump Jets, and I imagined the three points of damage threatened into the upper 'Mech brought by a DOA attack were a better threat than nothing.

Photos

Painting this one was fun, the biggest issues I caused myself by using red primer. Spending a bit more time planning the paintable areas and maybe even masking I could've gotten it a tiny bit better, but I was quite happy as it was now.

 

 

What went wrong were the tiny grey UAC insignia I painted on the grey areas. Somehow I thought that the cold tones would've stood out like a sore thumb from the warm-tinted tones, but it didn't work that clearly. I ought to have painted black outlines for the logos.

My happiness factor was noticeably increased especially by the laser lenses, that were pretty successful in my opinion. During the last year I've been trying out some different new methods, like the oil paints and lens effects. What insanity or methods I had earlier ignored as being too difficult I should try out next?

todoList.append("buy that damn tripod")

Time wastage

Again, I didn't really follow my time usage this time either, so this was just an estimate of "a couple of handfuls of hours" was used on active project time. I had expected this to be a very quick gig, as the mini was small and the idea was crystal clear from the beginning. The brightness of this idea dimmed a bit when I had to decide which bits were to be which colour, but I just went with my gut feeling as usual. So if I declared that this used about a full workday, I wouldn't at least be underestimating the time spent, maybe I wasn't also underestimating this awfully mcuh, either.

The time spent on gimping the photos or writing up all this nonsense was most definitely not included in the values here, which is what I meant with the active project time 🙃

A trash can on Mars

Martian ground

Of course the Doomguy-themed UrbanMech needed a Doom-themed hex base. I wasn't any kind of a terrain maker, so I didn't have much to use. The crackling ground -type technical paint by Citadel that I have used twice already was hard as a rock so I didn't even need to consider that as an option.

Some folks had said that my Archer's base was neat, and all it had was just some Woodland Scenics' ballast painted with a couple of oil washes. I thought I could do that, but for variety I felt like gluing a piece of rock or two. Had I been more enthusiastic, I could've built a bit of a non-flat ground shape with acrylic muds or consecutive layers of white glue.

Gravel piece

There was a ridiculous amount of gravel that got carried home in the shoes during the slippery winter. A couple of those pieces had hidden into the corner of the airlock, and why would I go outside to look for stones if I didn't actually need to go outside for stones? I tried out three pieces, and I superglued the smallest of the lot just below the UrbanMech's proverbial nose.

Yes, the gravel piece was enormous!

Glue and ballast

This was a simple approach for a simple person: I covered the hex base with white glue. Then I poured a healthy amount of ballast over the wet glue. Excesses were shaken back into the weathering box (IIRC it was a Basilisk's box, based on the size and the Imperial Aquila). A good while later I brushed off the excess crap from the Urbie's feet, the rest waited for the glue to cure.

Instead of individual pics I just gimped my doings into a non-moving montage.

That was that, I left the miniature in its box overnight so it had time to think of what it had done. The next evening I was looking for red paints, thought that maybe I could do this with oil washes like the last time. The main colour could be the brick red, then one or two other paints blended in. I didn't want to make this too complicated or colourful, that was a recipe for bleeding eyes.

Marsification with paints

Before starting I spent even more time thinking of my paints. Ultimately I settled with the "not too many" and took my three unused oil paints to be tested. The rusts I was going to skip now, maybe completely.

For the ground painting I made a thinnish wash with each of these paints. Like planned, I started with the Dark Brick Red (ABT220) that was a bit darker than I expected, at least when wet. See the first frame of the tetraptych below.

Without wasting time I added the new rustlike paint (ABT260 Oxide Patina) to highlight some of the more light-touched parts like the edge areas of the hex base and the top parts of the rock. This was, obviously, visible in the second frame.

Then I almost changed my mind with the earthy one (ABT090 Industrial Earth) but ended up using it mostly for making up shadows, under the edges of the rock and generally under the UrbanMech itself. Finally I spread some of my oil washes onto the Urbie's feet with the blending brush. The still wet result was shown in the last two frames.

The next day I checked the look between some meetings. The sun was shining, so the lighting conditions were noticeably different compared to the previous evening's.

It was quite red, this Mars ground of mine, but not flat, so I fel that there was some method to my madness. Perhaps the rock itself could benefit from some other kind of red-ish tone, so I was thinking of digging out the rust paint. Maybe the light rust, so the rock would look clearly different.

Rust rust rust rust

Well, I didn't think long, I just doublechecked the Marsiness feeling from my partner and their judment was "too red" as well. I applied a few spots of Dark Rust (ABT070) to shadowed areas, and light rust (ABT060) to the better-lit areas. I blended them around with my round brush and left the setup to dry once again.

It felt better this way. The ground-dirtied effect on the feet might require some bringing down, or I'd just look from further afar the next day to decide if that was needed.

It worked just fine.

And the sides of the hex base

To wrap the basing business up I painted the edges with German Dark Grey. The front edge, marked by where the Center Torso was looking, I decided to mark with caution stripes. Had I got some actual skills in me, I'd tried to implement something from Doom's textures, but as I wasn't skilled, I wasn't going to try anything that mad.

The caution stripes (or hazard stripes) I painted by first covering the full edge with yellow ochre, and when that had dried, I painted the angled stripes with dark grey. This way I guaranteed that the caution stripe existed only in the front sector.

While I remembered, I covered a couple of the bits showing hull red in front of the AC/10's targeting laser with yellow ochre, as those only showed in the photos and I truly had difficulties in spotting them with my own eyes from the mini itself. And as I was fixing the last things that annoyed me in the photos, I also mixed a bit of red-tinted stonewall grey and painted over some blue overflow from the double viewport in the front of the Urbie's head. The new mix wasn't an exact match with the previous highlight tone, but it worked better than the electric blue.

Finally I needed some gloss varnish (Vallejo 70510) on the lenses and the viewports. On the laser lenses I used two drops with a day of curing time between layers, the viewports only got a single coating because they wouldn't have benefited from a convex surface.

Ultimately I decided to pull down the Marsiness of the feet a bit. Now it was good enough for my liking.

Now the UrbanMech felt like it was completed, at long last. This had taken a surprisingly long time, especially if you compared the project time to the Archer. This was a much smaller miniature, a lot weirded painting scheme (and my own weird layering ideas) and a couple of silly mistakes like the colour temperatures between cold and warm tones.

A laser trash can with windows

Now it was the time to decide if my painting order was good or useless. So far I had left these funky effects last, and hadn't had to suffer from it, so I was confident.

Viewports

Maybe someone who read the post from two weeks ago noticed that I had been looking at the colour wheel, and even read a tiny bit amount of text about the theory behind all that. Not that I was trying to be artistic or to follow a certain direction, this was just out of curiosity and also to find out useful colours.

So, I had looked at the colour wheel with the idea of finding the viewport colour that would stand out nicely but not stupidly from the yellow/green pattern. On the opposing side of yellow and green was some violet/lilac, but that would've required some colour mixing again and I didn't just feel like it. The PPC blue was close enough on the arc (and if I wanted to force it towards red, I could always apply a Druchii Violet wash unless it had followed the Citadel's paint and pot quality of this millennium and dried up completely).

 

Because there were so many of these tiny vision slits, I didn't stop to take photos between each blue layer. They were also annoyingly narrow, so making the effect was a bit far-fetched with my skills.  In this fantastic triptych above we had a four layer effect: bottommost layer was plain blue (VGC 72023 Electric Blue), then the next layers were aligned top-left with a constantly increasing padding with a paint with a bit more white (VMA 71279 RAL9001 White) mixed in. For this photoset I hadn't yet added the whiteish dot per viewport, as I didn't trust my eyes not being crossed after a surprisingly long stint.

Small Laser and the targeting beamer

The next step was much more pleasant, there was nothing to think about with the Small Laser's lens colour as I had decided my energy weapon colours and was sticking to them. The bigger problem now was, just like earlier. what was I going to do with the lenses that were not weapons? So far I had used the same or lighter reds than with Small Lasers, but for consistency a specific "not a shooter" lens colour would be better. I was thinking of a yellow-orange or violet, but didn't really have a strong gut feeling about any of this.

Nothing sounded like a clear, immediate solution, so I went with a red lens for the not-laser gun as well. The method was exactly the same as before: a red base (VGA 72710 Bloody Red), then a bottom-right -positioned lighter (again toned up with RAL9001) paint, and while I had the space I made another brighter layer and painted in the top left sector of the previous one, as far as I could control my paints in these tiny spaces. As the sugar in my cappucino I also added the whiteish dots to the top left area. From this viewpoint the lasers looked pretty good, even if I said so myself.

Looking at that photo I felt that I had to paint the cannon's bottom black again. Dark grey worked fantastically everywhere else, but it just looked a bit funky when staring straight down the barrel.

I wasn't overflowing with joy with the glowiness of the viewports, but they were tight and that made them damn difficult for my skills. Maybe adding the glow dot would help, I just wasn't sure if I dared to try in the tiny square ones, or would I just fill them with white...

Well, I did dare and while I was at it, I also blackened the bottom of the Autocannon's barrel. Now it was good enough for me.

No oil into the trash can!

There it was, basics were painted, so now it was time to drop all the oil paints and thinners onto the palette.

Panel lines and shadows

My sepia wash was always a bit too thick - or my paintbrush was a bit large. Or my wash would flow better if I actually did the satin/gloss varnishing before, as recommended. I aimed the was into all of the lines, grooves and shadowed places and didn't even think of just slathering the oil wash all around and then remove the excesses. Being this small the mini was a bit difficult to work with sometimes.

As usual, I left the thinner-powered cleanup for the next evening. I purposefully left the ejection port area of the AC/10 a bit crappier than what I might usually have gone for.

That being done I left it to dry for a couple of days, so that the shadows got properly set before my grass green test. If I had to redo the panel lines again, I would do it in the final stages with the other fixes.

My triplet of supposed UAC logos I might still poke by painting the triangle light grey (Stonewall...) to cover up the rubbish results with the masking. If that got done before any other oil work, the result should be tolerable.

Testing the greenery

Looking a few months back, Santa's colleagues brought among other things four Abteilung tubes ([ABT220 Dark Brick Red, ABT260 Oxide Patina, ABT090 Industrial Earth, ABT094 Green Grass]) and the brightish green felt like a good fit on my green parts, if I only knew how to use it properly. Maybe it would work a bit like the buff I used in the previous 'Mechs but more adjusted for the underlying colour. The UrbanMech didn't have a medium laser, so I didn't need to go insane trying to implement a jewel effect with oils at this point in life.

Following my previous methods I poked a few dots of green paint, then blended it around with the round-tipped blending brush. Perhaps it left a gentle green layer, I just couldn't tell quickly with my eyes and without setting some before/after pics next to each other.

Apparently I didn't ruin my earlier washing with this green operation, so I didn't see any need for a second sepia wash round. It was a tiny victory, but a victory nonetheless.

Fine-tuning the trash can's paintjob

Tweakage

Right. First I had to fix the lower legs and the head, because their cold colour didn't work together with the other, warm tones. The cold grey was also a step or two lighter than what I looked for, so I started by squirting some cold grey on my palette stand-in. To that I mixed two drops of German Grey and two drops of red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23). This looked more like what I was looking for already on the old jam jar's lid, so I tried it out on one of the knees right next to a green area. The difference between these two greys on the mini wasn't huge, but the effect on the mini, when comparing two slightly different knees with their surroundings was incredible.

The last time I was pondering a bit if the boots/feet ought to have been toned towards green to follow the sprite's look a bit more, but I didn't want to make this too complicated for myself. So I decided to use the same customized grey on both the legs and the head.

While those were drying I took some black (VMA 71057 Black) to paint the viewports, the bottom of the AC/10 and the lenses of different lasers. After that I highlighted the various valves, vents and whatnots with German Grey to highlight them a bit before the upcoming oil washes.

Highlighting greens

Just to try something out I mixed the soviet-style 3B green with a couple of drops of brighter green (VGA 72730 Goblin Green) and did a stronger edge-based highlighting on the upper, more sun-kissed green surfaces of the mini. Just like I highlighted the Archer's red armour panels with Ferrari Red, but here the effect could've been a bit stronger, even.

The next evening I continued with my highlighting activities with slightly stronger (brighter) colours. First I fixed what mis- or underpainted bits, then painted thin lines along the various edge with yellow ochre.

To emphasize the greens I did similar thin lines on the edges and upper ends of the panels. This time I didn't mix up paints but used the Goblin Green straight from the bottle.

Skin and metal fixes

On the skinny parts I repainted the biggest gaps that I saw with the Vallejo's wood colour, then did some yellow ochre highlights on the upper edges of the panels. Or wherever the light was supposed to mostly hit.

Lastly I fixed a couple of the metallic bits (the nozzles of the Jump Jets, for example) and as a simple detail I painted the cockpit hatch hinge with German Grey. Maybe the dark grey bits could benefit from a similar edge highlighting as the rest of the parts, a cold grey with a drop of red might be just the thing. Skipping the German Grey from that would keep it bright enough, but hopefully not too bright.

Grey boots and the helmet

Again I mixed a new wonder paint: a random squirtful of German Grey got two drops of RLM red mixed in. That ended up being a bit too red, so I added a bit of Stonewall Grey (VGA 72749) into it. Using this mixture I painted some highlights using my bestest of skills (*snicker*).

Perhaps that did something good for the mini. I used this same paint to highlight the german grey bits too, to get their details a bit more visible.

Uniqueness

To avoid this one to suffer the same fate as my previous one (the mine-clearing T-34/76), I decided to add insignia right now, before washes or weatherings. As the paintjob's inspiration came from Doom and some kind of a unit was to be conjured up, I felt it was obvious: Union Aerospace Corporation. That fit the corporate world of BattleTech like a berserk punch into someone's spleen.

These four samples told me what I needed, I had enough freedom for the insignia. I thought I'd implement this with tiny triangle-shaped masking tape pieces and two grey circles. Depending on my feeling at the moment, I'd either do them with one shade or like the blue one in the bottom, using two greys. Attempting to paint the UAC characters wasn't something I thought I could do in this scale, so the corporate logo had to be enough.

For the masking I just cut a tiny triangle-shaped piece off a slice of masking tape. This triangle was about three times too large, so I only used the tip of it. The tiny piece got pressed on a visible place on the top left leg. I decided to try to do smaller ones in the shins, so I cut two tiny triangles from the edges of the original one. There was some cautious optimism here, despite me knowing that my skills at painting freehand circles with paintbrushes were at absolute zero.

In my hubris I thought for a moment if I should paint them in different greys, so I started with cold grey. As the first circle became a shapeless blob I just did a couple of dots next to each other, positioning them over the three masks.

After removing the masking tape pieces I had no cause for celebration, but that was to be expected. I was still disappoinged with my inability to paint these simple, tiny things: especially the top left leg's main one was foul. On the shins the left one was a bit more tolerable. Still, a crappy idea and I shouldn't have tried this in a tiny mini and scale.

Maybe the Urbie could be saved with some oils. The mini wasn't going to be stared at at these distances, the painting mistakes didn't glare at me when looking at the mini in person, but they did stand out shamefully in the closeups.

Painting a trash can

Priming

Like I've done a bunch of times in a row now, I primed the miniature with red primer VSP 70624 Pure Red). This time I didn't feel like setting up the airbrush, so I did this by hand.

 

For this projectful of posts I decided to tone down the "a pic from the front, another from the rear" photosets in each of the steps by gimping together a set of photos from the same step. This should make the posts a bit better contained and reduce the "I've seen this same pic with tiny changes six times already" effect I've had on occasion,

Choosing a theme

Originally I was a bit lost with what I would actually want to do with this Urbie, it wasn't going to join my Jade Falcon Cluster, and it also didn't have a clear suggestion in the box like last year's Archer. I also hadn't thought of what kind of a theme my yet-to-be-founded Merc unit, so undone work didn't really help here. Somehow the UrbanMech didn't lure me to paint it as a Kell Hound nor some other well-known Merc outfit.

Then I saw once again a pic that some more active social media users had been sharing pretty happily earlier, and that one struck a chord immediately:

(c) Eldoniusrex

Being a bit simple, I didn't want to make a green-grey unit like in the pic above, instead I wanted to celebrate the original Doomguy by keeping his bare arms in the show somehow.

 

Combat overalls

Thanks to the cats sleeping over my primary paint store, I chose from my dynamic level 1 cache a few bottles of paint. Of course I had no perfect green paint for this, so I had to mix up a new one to get where I wanted to go. To begin with I squirted some Soviet green (VMA 71281 3B Russian Green), and added two droplets of yellow ochre (VMA 71033). This I brushed on the overalls, and in my excitement a bit over the helmet as well.

As you could tell, it was a pretty dark shade of green. For some reason I tried to do some sort of a wet blending here, so I mixed in another drop of yellow and painted smaller surfaces set off upwards inside the first green layer. My idea was to leave the darkest layer as shadows. Finally I realized I had repeated this to get five consecutively brighter layers, leaving me quite a bit of a different shade than where I started from. Here's a couple of pics for those super interested in the progress of the layer-painting approach:

Yes, indeed, the mini was darker than the VGA-coloured corporate space marine. I planned using a bit more of a bright green as highlight when the basic painting was all done.

Bare arms and the sixpack window

Our Doomsday hero had bare upper arms and a pretty strange window in his shirt to show off his wounded abdominal muscles, so that's what I tried to imitate. Luckily the UrbanMech had four armour panels in a very convenient place in the middle of the Center Torso, so this worked nicely despite the Urbie doing a bit of a torso twist.

This trashcan had no actual arms, obviously, so I decided that I was just going to paint some bits in the gun pods attached the Upper Arm Actuators to get some kind of a skin theme going on. To start this I used a very generically named wood (VMA 71077 Wood) to block out the bare skin patches for later paintings. These I intended to highlight somehow, as soon as I had the areas defined first.

Now the downside of the red primer at this stage was that it made my mini look pretty damn weird. A red-yellow-green piece looked like a handful of fruit-flavoured candy, just much more foul-tasting.

Combat boots and the helmet

I thought that my cold grey (VGA 72750 Cold Grey) was just perfectly dark for this stuff, but nope, it most definitely was not. I had painted the legs from the knees down, and the head cupola to decide whether my colour-blocking worked or not.

The business part of the armament, those being the Autocannon (AC/10) and the flashlight's (SLas) tubes and related bits, the antennae, and the knee joints I painted with German Grey (VMA 71052 German Grey). Yeah, I was pleased with this method of marking metallic pieces without using metallic paints.

At this point the warm yellows and greens worked together just nicely, but the aptly named cold grey didn't match with them at all. I had to start reading about colour theory, or something, to find a recipe for a warmer grey to this miniature. Most likely a drop of (dark) red would take me far, but that had to be tested.

Towards the next step

In any case the basic paintjob was going to be as it was. Mostly I wanted to see if my idea made any sense or was it just an ugly mishmash. If we ignored the colour temperatures, I was happy with this scheme. Of course I had many opportunities for ruining it, but I didn't want to worry about that yet.

Setting up the scheme and blocking the colour surfaces took me about two hours in total, next I was going to fine-tune things. Would I get that done in two hours as well? I'd tell you the next time.

Project I/24

A trash can

I had those three untouched Salvage boxes from the Clan kickstarter, I now was flitting between the UrbanMech and the Mongrel/Grendel A. This time the UrbanMech won, because it could be done straight out of the box.

That's all that was to it. When I had the time, I'd clean up whatever bothered me and then the thing would get primed as always. It might get gently customized by adding whip-antennas.