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.

Fire Mandrill's Mattila-Carrol paint scheme

Kindraa Mattila-Carrol

Spoiled by the heading, I chose the paint scheme with very little thinking: I wanted it to be a clearly and easily recognizeable paintjob. Considering they were Fire Mandrills I expected it to be flashy, so yellow with something else. Based on some flicking through Camospecs and UCS I was flip-flopping between Kindraa Kline (yellow base, red and green highlights) and Kindraa Mattila-Carrol (yellow base, red and/or black highlights). I chose the latter because it looked a bit less like Winter Solstice decorations.

Sandy yellow base

Had I started just painting these five with something brightly yellow, the result would've very likely been something bad. For starters I coated them all with Sand Yellow (VMA71278 Sand Yellow RLM79) that I had really liked so far.

Especially on the black-primed Howler I let the shadows remain, with the IWM gang I paid more attention on coverage to keep their previous Clan Jade Falcon ownership less obvious. I didn't really care now where I was going to add the red highlights to, I didn't think skipping those would've made much of a difference.

Lemon yellow

Luckily I found some bright yellow (VMC 70952 Lemon Yellow) from deep in my collection. I started drybrushing it on over the pieces, concentrating on the upper and more prominent surfaces. The shadows, like always, could remain in relative peace.

 

The difference to the previous step was noticeable. After taking this photo I poked a few of the metallic parts with black grey (VMA 71056) just to see how that stood out. The actual metal painting was in turn sometime later.

 

Hull red highlight areas

With the walking armoured lemons looking this fine I started searching for the highlightable parts. For the highlights I wanted to follow a similar approach of "very dark base first, then a cautious application of the brighter shade over it", because tweaking a bright red with white turned that into pink, which was something I definitely did not want.

For the reds I started with hull red (VMC 70985 Hull Red) that looked quite a lot like dried blood. Once again I wanted asymmetric decorations, especially with three physically identical 'Mechs in a row.

Howler

Fire Moth

Kit Fox 1/3

Kit Fox 2/3

Kit Fox 3/3

They looked quite weird with the dark red-browns. The process was to be trusted.

Highlighting the highlights with bright red

The next evening I painted some RLM23 red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23) over the hull red parts.

The bright reds worked nicely. The first layer was pretty good, but I was left thinking if I ought to highlight the upper surfaces and edges a bit more with drybrushing or more specific edge highlighting.

Metal \,,/

I had taken an early start with the bare metal parts and now I concentrated on them purposefully. All the usual bits like the gun barrels, missile launcher fronts, grilles and joints were, well, the usual targets. This Star had an unusual amount of Hands on the 'Mechs and I painted them all grey for the uniform style.

While painting dark greys and drybrushing them, I also painted all the gun openings and cockpit canopies in flat black.

They are going to be fun.

Project V/26

Monkey business

The Mercenaries KS included a box, Clan Ad Hoc Star, that had a definite Clan Fire Mandrill 'Mech in it. This started sounding dangerously like my collection getting another Home Clan unit in a short timeframe, instead of going on with my Invading Clan stuff.

Howler needed four friends but nothing screamed Fire Mandrill to me. One of these weeks I encountered a post in the BT forums that listed different units for them, and this post lit up the idea lamp. I had a bunch of old Light/Medium minis that I had tagged REPAINT when I updated my BTTracker during last summer.

I had then one of my two older Fire Moths, and all three Kit Foxes on the table. Each of them were metallic IWM miniatures so it would be quite a lot like the earlier Diamond Shark operation.

 

A Star in its home world

All four OmniMechs were non-customized and therefore in their Prime configuration. The Fire Moth was just standing boringly, most likely just built straight up. Even those had to stop sometimes. At least the three Kit Foxes had a bit of a variety in their poses, so they weren't complete copies of each other.

Tacticoolly I skipped taking individual photos of these all, and instead just went for my dynamic painting station. Maybe I had a front pose of the unpainted Howler sometime earlier, of the Isorla-quartet I had probably never even shared photos as I had painted them before starting a blog.

Howler

A light one, this thing, armed with three LRM-5 launchers in one single frame. No Jump Jets. 

Fire Moth, Prime

Light and especially with the MASC a rapid bugger. It has two ERMLas in one arm, and an SRM-6 launcher in the oher, and on the same side's shoulder an SRM-4 launcher to top it up. Again, no Jump Jets.

Kit Fox, Prime, 3x

Heavier than the other two, but still a lightweight machine. Each had an LB-5X with an SSRM-4 launcher in the Right Arm, and an ERLLas next to a SPLas in the Left Arm. None of these were Jump-capable.

Finished: Project IV/26

Panzerfeldhaubitze 18M auf Geschützwagen III/IV (Sf) Hummel, Sd.Kfz. 165

♬ Gimme dat gimme dat gimme dat shell now ♬ sang the artillerymen at some point in history. This post was very clearly missing the singing red-collared dudes, even if they were on their way to fame and glory for a few days.

Building process with surface texturing

The model was a guaranteed Tamiya kit, no problems except when my own limited spacetime awareness caused them. The first fork-up came from the racks of the spare road wheels that I installed the wrong way and they ended up being just extra stepladders for the crew. Another forkup was easier to hide and concerned the little bars that kept the gun's shield in place. The third and most irrelevant of them was that at some point I managed to get the gun glued in place and the neat elevation mechanisms became useless. That wasn't a problem because I wasn't going to use it for much more than posing for some photos, and with the scrapped diorama would've been for a store loading, not a firing mission.

This time I remembered to poke the armour plates with the thin glue and an old dedicated paintbrush. Surface texturing does work, this approach didn't show up that strongly as in the DAK Panzer IV either because I was cautious, or my painting, or for some other reason. Of course it wasn't supposed to stand out like a clown nose so maybe this was good.

Failed diorama attempt, snapping tracks

In the actual post I didn't complain that much but in the real world I did grumble quite a lot and worked on it much longer than what one might assume by the photos and texts. I was pretty close to falling into the trap of sunk cost fallacy but managed to drop the triplet into a guillotine after a few fixing attempts.

This was my third Panzerwerk Design aftermarket tracks project, and my fourth articulated AM tracks -using project ever. The first was the Panzer IV that went without a hitch, the second was the StuG III that had one track link breaking in some transfer operation, and this was the third one where both of the tracks simply snapped when closing the loops. Maybe if I had added a link per side more this could've been avoided, but my predictive weathering had made them stiffer earlier and I had been a bit concerned about their flexibility. My worries turned out to be realistic and I had to fix my stupidities later. Still, I was very happy with them and would get more in future projects. Next I'd have to try some other hull than a Pz III/IV like a Tiger or a Panther, or something not-German even if that was heretical.

The joy of camouflage and oil paints

My airbrushed camo pattern was an example of underperformance, and I could blame no one else but myself. Instead of tweaking the shapes I added the Hinterhalt-Tarnung dots. I wanted to find real life examples of that pattern on an actual Hummel but I went with my feeling, and it wasn't a hyperserious paintjob anyway. Again, this was for my own amusement and enjoyment, and especially after the waste of time and effort with the figures I found the dot painting immensely nice and relaxing.

Time consumption

To get any kind of a clue for time used I checked my photo naming convention and even if I knew that it wasn't accurately tracking 45min hobby sessions but it gave me an idea. Just using the grouping this would've been a 21h project, but I had compressed some sessions together, a full 24h day was a plausible amount of time spent all around. An amount of that was lost with the figure failure but I had been spending lots of time on small things again. I couldn't remember if I had marked this much time on any other project so far, but we were quite high in the list in any case.

Captured photons

My photos ended up pretty neat this time, even as I didn't spend an our in Krita to turn the backgrounds to #FFFFFF. Instead I left the A4 backgrounds as they were.

Continuation thoughts

Interestingly 75% of my last four German vehicles were build on the Panzer IV hull. What would be the next one? From the Flakpanzer series the Wirbelwind has always been interesting, mainly for its looks, but a Kugelblitz or a Coelian would've worked, or even a funky-looking Möbelwagen. Just the Ostwind didn't catch my interest.

Of course it was possible that the next tracked vehicle had to wait, as I had now a ridiculous idea of going for a larger scale (1:32) flying machine soon. This smelled like a 109, 262, or a Stuka depending on what the nearest shelves had available when the time came. I had had some discussions earlier, and neither Salamander nor Komet were being made in that scale these days.