Devastators oiling and decorating

A sepia pin wash

I thinned down some brown oil wash (Abteilung ABT002 Sepia) and spread it over the bits, concentrating on panel edges and crevices. I also remembered to wash the dorsal gun options that I parked on pegs.

 

After about half an hour of waiting I cleaned the excess darknesses away. I concentrated mostly on the sun-kissed surfaces, the stronger shadows in the lower parts were not harmful.

As always, the difference between non-washed ones was incredible. What I hadn't planned in advance was the merc company decoration. These were, attitude-wise, very different from the Clan Warriors, Successor State armies, corporate troops, or the so-called serious mercenary companies. These were the troops that could have smiley faces, dice, Ace of Spades signs, catchphrases, skulls, graffiti, rainbows, unicorns, or whatever set out however. Of course in this scale any words would be unpaintable with my limited abilities, and I wasn't going to start decaling them either.

My main point with this pondering was that they should be decorated a bit differently from my usual approach. The other thought was that maybe I should've thought of it before doing the oil part? That could always be redone, but again I noticed that I had gone with my autopilot.

Lenses and panzer glasses

Aaaaanyway. I decided to do the energy weapon lenses and cockpit viewports now, because if I fumbled with them over any possible decorations, I would be cross. So black canvas, colours over. To compensate the sand yellow and green something blue would be good, maybe with a red tint. The mixture of blue/red was pretty low in brightness and didn't stand out as nicely as I had imagined. Redoing them all in blue was a solid plan b.

Devastator 1

The armament on the Devastators was very clear: the Gauss Rifles didn't need to be touched, the PPCs in the sides got the Electric Blue treatment and the four Medium Lasers got Escorpena Green on them. Plus the usual white-mixed layers, of course.

 

In this photo you could see that the viewport didn't really stand out.

Devastator 2

I worked on the Devastators in series, so the same descriptions applied here.

Both of their searchlights were painted with Fire Orange, and I used that on the targeting lasers on top of the Gauss Rifles as well.

Marauder 1

Not many weapon effects here: the Arm pods had PPCs and Medium Lasers. In the photo below I had the three-barreled version of an AC/5 installed.

A number of viewports were modeled on the Marauder model, I decided to use the lower and upper front viewports. The side ones and the one that looked like a skylight I skipped.

Marauder 2

Like the Devastators, I painted the Marauders in a series. Or more accurately I painted the weapons in the most numerous first -order (in this case Medium Lasers (12) -> PPCs (8) -> Large Lasers (2)) to supposedly save some time.

Group shot

Unique smudges

The stompers needed some individualism still. I had thought of random markings, graffiti, obscenities, or somesuch to be painted on these reckless mercs. But then I always remembered my subpar freehanding skills, so I didn't want to ruin my stuff just because.

Caution stripes 

At least I could do some kind of hazard stripes. I started that by painting some bits with Yellow Ochre, as the sections called my attention. I managed to find a good amount of space for them on the Marauder dorsal gun options, as well as their sides and ankles. The Devastators were a bit more boring and got stripes on their shoulders and Gauss Rifle sides. One of the Devastators had to take some hazard marks on its ankles when I noticed an underpainted area.

I tried to keep them in check instead of going overboard. 

Rank markings

Something gave me the idea that maybe these lucrewarriors could have their military ranks painted on their machines. I really wasn't up to speed on any military organizations, so I didn't know what kind of ranks the MechWarriors would generally have and my best idea came from the BT novels. Relying on the tried and tested Stetson-Harrison method the chief became a captain with a || painted on the Devastator's left shoulder. The next Devastator got a single | bar for a lieutenant. My Marauder pilots then got to be lower in rank than those, and the <<< and << were more visible than the silly bars. Probably in real world the chevron-folks were way too low in rank to be piloting things, but luckily I didn't need to care about that. Another option was that they all were ultra-admirals or something.

Numbers

Without too much pondering I painted numbers on the legs in black and white, or black grey and off-white. Maybe the different Lances would be using different colours to make them distinguishable? I had time to dwell on these little questions.

Shiny lenses

Now I iterated all the glasses with Vallejo's gloss varnish, the weapon lenses twice. IIRC Camospecs' B1BFlyer did at least three varnish layers on his energy weapons to get a nice convex shape on them.

 

Situation check

Next time I'd attack the hex bases. At that point maybe I should check the edges of the energy weapon barrels, so that the metallic surfaces didn't have a silly gloss on them.

 

Devastators first lance painting

The first four

It was a solemn moment, starting something completely new and all without any kind of pre-given specifications or even plans for a paint scheme. Even if I had played with this unit on the computer, the schemes always came from the game's patterns and therefore had their own limits. Now I had to come up with something that I could both implement and repeat in the real world. Phew.

Somehow shockingly the German three-tone camo was an overall style I had paints for in my stash, and that was nicely different from all the other BT paintjobs I had attempted so far. Then, from some weird depths of my brain I thought of the digicamo that I had once tried out and decided to be fun. So why not try it on something as tiny as these bits here?

A sand yellow base

I decided to start with the lightest shade, so I airbrushed all the miniatures with a Sand Yellow (VMA 71278). This was a nice, quick basecoat.

Another and completely opposite approach would've been to do green or brown, then cover some of that with masking tape, then paint with the other colour, mask even more, and then finish with the tiniest surface area of sand yellow. My memory told me I did this in a slightly inconvenient way the last time so maybe this was a better order of busines. Or I misremembered misremembering and accidentally did the exact same thing I did the last time.

Masking

The last time I made painting masks for minis I made tiny triangles and some sort of waveshapes. Now I'd do the same but only using squares or as squarelike things I could manage with an exacto knife. First I laid down about a 10cm straight run of Tamiya's 10mm masking tape and started cutting it into squares along the cutting mat's lines. Then I cut them in two horizontally and a few times vertically. Now I had a good number of about 2,5mm pieces to get started.

During the first hours I got one Devastator and one Marauder mostly masked.

At that point I needed more tape squares so I did pretty much the same but cut a number of them into even smaller pieces which gave me 1,25mm squares for smaller surfaces. Even if I had two Assault- and Heavy -class 'Mechs, these tiniest tape bits were pretty large considering the scale. Imagine these on a truly tiny miniature like a Locust or a Flea.

After a second evening of painstaking sticker-placement I had a mummified Lance. No one else, were they an innocent bystander or a colleague who heard my description, considered this stuff calming and almost meditative behaviour. I just sat and applied pieces of masking tape to where they felt they wanted to settle on, a bit like if Bob Ross was applying them instead of painting.

 

Camouflage: Soviet green

Judging my pre-selected medium greens I also tested how they compared. Of the three options I had at hand the Soviet Protective Green 4BO (VMA 71017) looked like it worked best with my current mood. That decided I loaded up my airbrush and blasted away.

 

This process wasn't planned carefully for a three-tone scheme, because the paint covered the masking tapes really, really well. From this state adding more tape to protect the green layer didn't work too well because I'd been doing it blind.

Of course I could've just added some random pixels and leave multi-edged gaps and get an acceptable result. I just wanted to see and know better what I was doing, instead of doing a luck-based third layer. I pulled of all the tape pieces and declared being done with it at least three times, and still found some well-hidden tiny ones after that :D

Demasking

Of course I was taking photos at all sorts of stages, these photos here were after the second camo layer. The funniest thing was that the masking tape bits didn't catch my bare and bad eyes while being painfully obvious on screen, even on the phone. This set of four photos showed you immediately at least 8 mask pieces.

 

All in all they looked neat with the first attempt at a small-scale digicamo. Of course the planned brown would've given more variety, but even a two-colour effect was quite fun.

Metallic surfaces 

On the bare metal parts I was following my very familiar dark grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) path. Devastators had lots of obvious barrels, also they had some in their heads and backs that I might've not recognized. In addition to those I painted the various grilles and vents that looked approrpiate. Of their arms I painted the elbow actuators differently on each 'Mech: one got the whole complex in raw metal, the other just got the smaller and more hingelike part metallified.

My Marauders sadly had fewer clearly unpainted parts. I did the ankles, the rear hull's vents and whatever caught my eye. On a touchup round I also did the intakes by the cockpits, they just felt like it even if I had camouflaged them earlier.

Then I drybrushed the dark greys with cold grey for a bit of metallic sheen. That gave me the idea of testing a light drybrushing over the light-catching surfaces of one of the Marauders, and that worked nicely. I proceeded to do that on the rest. Finally I took some more photos and still found more tape pieces!

At this point I still wasn't sure if I wanted to add a few Panzerbraun pixels in some random spots or not. I had been flipflopping between yes and no quite heavily depending on the viewing angles and the lighting conditions.

Marauder dorsal guns

Having ignored them for long, I had to start painting the four dorsal guns. I really should've done them along with the minis themselves but I hadn't taken them out for painting and they were, like I said, simply ignored. My fault for being dumb.

 

Instead of starting with the Sand Yellow I just painted them mostly Black Grey. The sandy parts got done in a couple of brushed-on layers, because I didn't feel like setting up the airbrushing stuff for eight puffs of paint, even if that would've guaranteed a much nicer coating.

So yeah, I was thinking that the dorsal guns would be mostly bare metal and only the breech area would be hull-like. Over a basic brushjob I'd drybrush for highlights to get them to the same state with the hulls.

Window bases

In preparation for the jeweling I painted the viewports and gun ports black.

Panzer browning after all

Like I had written earlier, I had been going back and forth about the brown pixels. Finally I decided to add a few per 'Mech. I outlined a handful of various shapes onto each of them:

Instead of airbrushing or paintbrushing I went with the sponge ( VMC 70826  German Camo Brown) to fill the outlined pixels. After a bit of flashing time I removed the tapes, and while taking these off I still found individuals I had not encountered on the previous three, four times!

This was a very good place for a break.