Miniproject I/26

Mass-priming

Having all this freedom of choice was surprisingly bothersome. I didn't have the faintest clue of which BT miniature to poke next and nothing really jumped out as the next item. My cleverest idea was to just take the whole untouched mass and prime it all in a batch.

When the inspiration would strike, I could just take anything and start working on it. The latest minis I have painted recently had mostly been primed at some random calm moment, and that had made me happy. Now I'd just do that in a planned way.

VSP red

Surprisingly I still had a bit of the red primer left. I wanted to use it before it got too thick with age to go through my airbrush.

Mercenaries

I started with the most numerous of the lot, the default Company in the Mercenaries box.

Legendary MechWarriors II

Going on I had enough red primer to coat 66,666...% of the units in the Legendary MechWarriors II set. The SM1, the Devastator and the Charger got red, then I was out. It was a handy primer, and it lasted for years, and most importantly it remained perfectly good until the very last drop.

VSP black

When the red was done I switched to the large bottle of black primer and continued with the second Legends.

Legendary MechWarriors II

From this set just the Marauder - without its rooftop guns - and the Caesar went black.

Legendary MechWarriors III

Also the third Legend set's Marauder was primed without its dorsal gun options. I just didn't feel like fighting with them while priming rapidly. The Marauder was also the last one painted and was still a bit damp when I took the photo of the rest already in their storage blister. This was a nice set with a good amount of nice rides.

Clan Direct Fire Star

Probably I mentioned back in the day that the Rifleman IIC I knew first in MechWarrior II was the reason to pick this box. Not that the Highlander IIC was bad either. The rest just happened to be sideshows that I wasn't familiar with. Finding a home for them all was going to be an operation of its own.

Clan Ad Hoc Star

Pack Hunter had been painted a while earlier. The Kodiak was eager to get painted as a Ghost Bear, but I already had five of them.

Battlefield Support: Objectives

This photo showed the MASH truck's right side using the extended bit, whichever operating theatre module it was. There was just one of these modules, and it could be set on either of the sides - or left completely off.

Salvage: Battlefield Support: Vehicles

Galleon / Maxim. On the vehicles I was most concerned about the undersides, I didn't want unpainted plastic shown when taking photos from the ground level.

Salvage: Battlefield Support: Vehicles

Hetzer / Maxim. Same approach as with the previous duo, undersides first and foremost, the rest would be much easier.

Salvage: Visigoth

I didn't bother taking a separate photo of the bottom of the Visigoth.

Salvage: Blood Asp

Blood Asp could've been a good candidate for the Blood Spirits had I not already painted a full Star of them much earlier.

Salvage: Mercenaries: 'Mech

Dervish. No idea what to do with it yet.

Salvage: Savannah Master

For priming I set the tiny hovercraft on the hex base in a way that should, hopefully, maximize the underside coverage. Doing this with anything this size was a bit funny, but at least they stayed on the bases just by their pegs instead of flying away like autumn leaves. Or a five-ton hovercraft after taking a gauss slug into the side.

100mm Timber Wolf

This was the pretty and pretty large miniature. Great details.

Mass-operation operated

This all took three evenings. Somehow this made me more inspired, with all the bits and pieces being at least primed and I could just pick something up to work on it for real. Small things made a huge difference sometimes. Still, I felt like doing something else than miniatures for a change, even if it was just one scale modeling project.

Finished: Project VIII/25

Sharks of the black seas (2985–3100)

This Clan that had changed its name a couple of times during its history was a very merchant-minded, like the Lyrans. Politically these folks had been also visited both the Crusader and Warden camps, unlike my Jade Falcons. As an Invading Clan it got to my painting table despite being occasionally a softie.

Piranha

Piranha, a 20-tonner, was the only ClanTech BattleMech in this group. It was armed with an ER Medium Laser on each arm, an ER Small Laser in the middle of CT, and the side torsos were packed with 12 Machine Guns. If it wasn't anything but a very-close-up evildoer, it was doing it quite heat-efficiently.

Cougar B

My modified 30-ton Cougar was armed quite like the Puma, but looked so much cooler in my books. Both arms had an ER PPC, and the nose carried a single ER Medium Laser. To make it clear that this was a victorious Warrior, a shark mouth was painted below the cockpit.

  

Stormcrow Prime

Bringing the Star's average weight up was the first of the two 55-ton Stormcrows. This one was configured as the Prime variant, carrying two ER Large Lasers and three ER Medium Lasers. To help a bit with those, a dozen additional Double Heat Sinks were installed.

Stormcrow C

This C config was built around an LB-10X AutoCannon. To accompany this munitions-hungry tool there was a Large Pulse Laser and two Medium Pulse Lasers for medium and short range fighting.

Ice Ferret E

In the lower range of the Medium 'Mechs we had an Ice Ferret, from a newer end of the timeline, an E configuration. The Left Arm was replaced with an ATM-9 launcher I had never used in a game. To help with the expendables-reliance it carried an ER Medium Laser and a Small Pulse Laser.

Diamond Shark terrain

Sharks on dry land

Piranha's hex texture

Being done nearly twenty years ago the other four Points had their bases shaped, and I shockingly didn't have the original stuff left anywhere anymore. I used what I actually had and made a bit of surface texturing with Vallejo's Mud.

 

When the mud dried they all had some sort of a terrain under their feet, if non-matching at this point. I thought I'd use oil paints to unify the bases, which was something I hadn't done in a short bit. In the name of unification I might need to fish out some foliage fluff for the Piranha, otherwise it'd be easily finished.

Star's battleground

To counter the lightish paintjob I wanted a bit darker and earthier set of bases for the Star. I coated the terrain with a slightly thinned down Dark Brick Red (ABT220) and applied some even thinner Industrial Earth (ABT090) in splotches.

 

After a night in the sauna I painted the front hex edges with greyish blue (the AMT-7 kind) and drybrushed the terrain a bit with Buff (ABT035). I used that also gently on the tops of the minis which accidentally made the Piranha a bit dirty. Maybe it had just fallen down in battle?

At this point I used gloss varnish on the viewports and energy weapon lenses.

For the absolute fun of it I painted some effect on the Cougar B's ER PPC barrels. It didn't stand out that specially from this blue/grey scheme, unlike in the earlier Jade Falcon. But I did it anyway.

Now I was left with some little finishing touches anymore, those being cleaning up the hex edges, drybrushing black on the Stormcrow C's LB-X, and perhaps adding that still missing fluff to the feet of the Piranha. Without veggies it was the only one in the Star and that wasn't cool.

Final finishings

From ponderings to doings. I fixed the missing things on a calm evening. In addition to sooting the Stormcrow C I also did that on the Ice Ferret E's ATM launcher.

Our cats were again blocking the long-term storage so the plants for Piranha had to wait for another day. Otherwise this was about done now, maybe the front edges should get the hazard striping still. Speaking of caution stripes, I completely forgot to add any on the 'Mechs!

With the cats being distracted I got some foliage and superglued it in place for the Piranha. Then I added the caution stripes that I had been pondering about many times. Ready.

Diamond Shark jewels

Uniquenesses

This has been, for a good while, one of the most fun stages in my BT painting sessions. The bits that had been painted more or less the same way now got a bit of unique treatment and not everything was a conveyor belt anymore.

Cockpits and energy weapons

Again I decided to skip the deepest details in my descriptions, as we've gone through these many times. The most important choice was the cockpit viewport colour, which ended up being red, maybe unsurprisingly. I thought of using green, because it's been a nice and simple colour to shade, but I liked the contrast between red and blue more. I had used orange on the Ghost Bears, which also worked nicely, so red range was good for me.

Before getting further ahead of myself I wrote down a list of the weapon types and counts to support my foul memory. The queue contained a couple of red small lasers, a handful of green mediums, some lonely blue larges and PPCs. All remaining sensorlike things I decided to do in orange. I also decided to leave the gloss varnish in the very end.

 

This time I didn't do any kind of a glow effect on the ER PPC pair, but I was thinking if I ought to do that anyway. The effect had worked somehow nicely - or at least tolerably - in the earlier CGL Turkina and Warhawk.

 

My group photo would've been much more impressive had the Piranha with its mostly black hex base been more in line with its Starmates. 

Clearer silvering

I still wasn't too happy with the grey bits, the gentle lines were fine in a way but you couldnt' really see them anything but up close. So I spent almost an hour with my detail brush, adding greyish white lines and splotches. Maybe it was stronger an effect than what I absolutely needed, but it was my first go at this sort of stuff.

Shark teeth for them sharks

According to the specs a Warrior who had at least one confirmed kill, could have a shark mouth painted in an appropriate place. Implementing something like that by hand on these tiny pieces was suspicious to say the least, but I felt confident painting two of these. Cougar with its planelike CT was an easy choice.

I started by painting a disturbingly large black mouth. The nose cone was shaped so that two separate mouths would've looked a bit odd so I made one that wrapped around the hull.

To achieve a tongue I painted red blobs into both sides. This made the expression look quite goofy :D

 

Finally I painted tiny toothlike shapes all around the mouth, using the same greyish white as elsewhere. Maybe it looked like something from a decent distance.

The other 'Mech where I dared to add a set of teeth was Stormcrow C that had just a nice shape in the CT, for a tiny mouth. None of the others were large enough for me to try this trick. Unlike the Cougar, this one was going to have two separate mouths on either side of the CT.

Like earlier, I added tiny tongues into the small half-mouths.

Of the two the left one, in the second photo below, worked out much more nicely. It was a surprise, because the LBX-AutoCannon was constantly on the way with all the painting.

While looking at this last photo I was thinking that the AutoCannon might benefit from one more, brighter drybrushing. It wasn't bad now, but it could be kicked up a notch. Bam!