Kell Hounds

The Kell Hounds are supposedly the best known and most succesful mercenary unit in the Inner Sphere. They've taken part with their two regiments in all the biggest clashes since the Succession Wars and they've played pivotal roles in them. I chose them as my merc unit mostly because they're well-known. Maybe at some point I'll set up that very german Merc unit that works for the Lyran Alliance... We'll see how it goes and how much time I have for all these ideas of mine.

Federated Suns - 7th Crusis Lancers

7th Crucis Lancers is a unit that I chose to represent the Federated Suns mostly because of its paint scheme. I guess I should or could paint a few more of these. And in the heavier side of 'Mechs, again.
In any case: these 'Mechs look a lot better than all the different Davion Guards that look like walking french flags.

ComGuards - the Emerald Falconeers

The Third Army of ComGuards is best known as the opponents of Clan Jade Falcon in the Battle of Tukayiid. I don't intend to paint that many of these chaps because white 'Mechs are a bit boring in the end. Though I could paint another Lanceful just in case, but using a bit heavier 'Mechs in that one. Maybe.

Death Commandos

The Death Commandos are a very special unit in the Capellan Confederation Armed Forces and one of the most feared unit in the Inner Sphere. As opposed to all the other units in the CCAF, the Death Commandos don't have any other logos besides their own units' logo.
At this point I think I'm fine with a Lanceful of these but maybe I'll paint another Lance at some point. I'd just need to come up with three 'Mechs to go with a Raven.

Hellbringer Prime

Here's a set of pictures of the Hellbringer on the game background. That's it, there's nothing more special :P

Summoner Prime

I took a few pics with a gaming background just for the fun of it, of both the Summoner and Hellbringer. They look pretty nice if you ask me.
May the Summoner enjoy the spotlight alone today, the Hellbringer shall enjoy it its own turn tomorrow.

Both bases are filled and my Omnis look decent

This is how easily and nicely landscaping is done: apply some white glue on the base and then dip it in the handy Woodland Scenics Ballast. Ka-ching! Now they're a bit different from both the earlier plasticy Inner Sphere 'Mechs and the metallic OmniMechs I built and painted years ago. As we remember clearly, those got an equally simple surface of sand + foliage.

It doesn't make any difference, I just wanted to try and see how that Ballast stuff looks under the 'Mechs :)

After a short while of letting the glue dry I applied a couple of new spots of it on several ugly-looking holes. Then I pushed a tiny fleck of foliage to cover the points of failure. Plus a couple of fake bushes were added here and there over the bases to give them a bit more of a look.
Because of the vegetables and the general grey tone of the 'Mechs it didn't make any sense to go and paint the ballast coating gray like I did with the Imperial X-Wing project. This way these tin cans have some warmer colours around them, even though the war is cold, cruel and it never changes.

The following few weeks my posts will contain more or less revisits on already built things like the IS 'Mechs and whatnot, because I shall not be posting anything while I'm on my winter holidays.. And I'll post even less while we're moving.
There's always no time to build and paint but we'll get to it - in a new apartment, with a new calendar and new Projects 8)

Home made hex bases

The latest advances in this project have been small but at least they're home made. I had dug up one of the metal hex bases I have bought a bunch of years ago from my stash. That I used to draw an outline for two bases on a sheet of polystyrene and then I sliced them off.

After pondering a while I decided that a lonely flat base doesn't cut it so I measured six new slices for the raised edges and tried to trim them to shape a bit while gluing them on. For some weird reason the end result didn't look as awesome as I had thought :p In any case, I test fitted both Omnis on the base and I noticed that while the Summoner stood there nicely, Hellbringer didn't exactly sit well on its place. Maybe that's because of the different angles of the Omnis' feet and their own tiny bases, which makes their feet fit on just a tiny bit differently from each other.

Oh well. For the other base I cut slightly smaller edge pieces. They fit very nicely and looked better in general but they left small gaps in the edges. That's not a problem, it'll be easy to fix!

As anyone can see, my scratchbuilder's skills are very untrained and underused so all the edges were rough and bad-looking. I spent quite a moment filing all the outer edges flat(ter). This material is at least workable on so I didn't even need to swear while working. Or take out the Dremel.
This made them look slightly better, in my honest opinion.

To finish up nicely I painted the visible surfaces with Tamiya's Flat Brown. After it had dried up I glued the 'Mechs on the bases. I think they're just fine.
Next I'll fill the bases and finish the BattleTech IntroBox Project!

Logos and details

Despite my previous attempts being still fresh in my memory, I took yet another attempt at cockpit jeweling. As usual, I mixed a neutral orange and applied it in the windows. Then I added some yellow, mixed, reapplied covering a bit less. Repeated a couple of times. I still don't do this too well. A part of my failure may be because I practice on such small areas but most of the fault is because I just can't do it. There's no denying that ;)
Next target: those logos!

That's how I started the Clan logos. As the background I painted a small circle with grey-black, then I painted a blue x- over it. The shape is easier to do this way than trying manually to make the angles hold while painting six individual lines and making sure the center is kept clear. The center that's going to be painted over anyway.
Sadly the Hellbringer didn't have any prominent, large-ish area for the logo so I had to paint it on the top of the 'Mech, behind the head. Summoner on the other hand had a nice patch for it on the left shoulder. That was like planned for these things. I just couldn't try to paint these odd shapes on any more difficult surface. It's difficult enough already :)

Next I painted Stonewall Grey "arms" on the bars and later a Cold Grey blob that was supposed to be a bear's head's shape. On that I applied a couple of black dots to represent the facial details of a howling Ghost Bear. As usual, these things look a lot worse in photos and much nicer when viewed for real, with a naked eye.
Cameras are unforgiving.

The rest of the details were a lot simpler. Those PPC lenses (the crystals didn't fit, sadly) I painted with a metallic paint, just like the searchlight's face. later I applied a bit of Citadel's ancient Blue Glaze on them. The searchlight and the cockpit windows each got a bit of equally ancient Yellow Glaze.

Then I took some German Yellow and fixed the caution stripes that I smudged up the last time. After that I chose a place on each 'Mech for the Galaxy logo and painted four lightning bolts to mark the place. I have to say that the lightning bolts were the only things that looked recognizeable. Later I painted a bear-like form with Cold Grey and on that some faint black lines to represent torso shadows. Supposedly.

Last week I was pondering on which Cluster I would put these in. Finally I ended up with the 73rd Battle Cluster ("the Lash") so that these don't get mixed with my friend's units. And it's a semihandy excuse for them looking so different from each other. For some reason neither Camospecs or sarna.net had a logo for the Cluster so I just painted a red 73 on each 'Mech's left knee to mark their Cluster. There has to be something, right?

While I was painting tiny numbers I decided to give these things their own unit numbers. I went with the numbering method I've "always" used: first there's the Trinary number, then the Star's number and finally the Point number. Nicely enough I came up with this when I had already built and painted two dozen 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster 'Mechs... These things happen.

The number of this Trinary (314th Battle Trinary) is 2, as sarna shows the Cluster's composition in 3058 and I - for some reason - didn't want to assign these to the Command Trinary. Because of the same reason I didn't assign either of these things as the #1 Point, Star Captain Hee Silva shall get his/her own 'Mech according to hard facts, not because of my randomness ;)

As the beautiful end I applied a dab of red on the lasers and green on those two somethings on Hellbringer's lower Right Torso and in the corner of the SRM-6 launcher. I decided that they're some sort of targeting thingamagicks, especially as TRO didn't say anything about the RT parts.

There's some touching up to be done, but mostly it's ready. As long as we're talking about the paintjob, that is. The same goes for the Summoner.

I feel that these tiny hex bases are a bit too small for the 'Mechs so I think I'll dig up a sheet of styrene and a real pewter hex base. So I'll craft a couple of better-sized bases for these units. It'll take a couple of evenings, maybe, no more.

Ahahaha. Aha. Ha. Hrm.

OmniPlastics

Naturally my current project-in-progress is this tiny subset of the introductory box: the two plastic OmniMechs. It's a distinct pleasure to work with them, especially after those other things. The basecoat was applied weeks and weeks ago, so I didn't need to worry about it at all. I painted some sort of two-tone camo on their surfaces with Stonewall Grey and Cold Grey. Next I touched up a couple of smallish pieces of the Summoner with Enchanted Blue, as Camospecs declares: Ghost Bear's Delta Galaxy's units are painted gray with light blue highlights.

Rather surprisingly the next thing that followed was the highlighting round of the Hellbringer. I tried to avoid going for too similar parts so these brother models wouldn't be identically highlighted. Just to add some variety.

The contrast between these two greys bothered me a bit, so I tried to apply a wash on one of Summoner's legs to see how it works. To me it looked just fine so I washed the rest of the mini and then continued on doing the same to the Hellbringer, too. I think it's a fine effect and it makes them look less like circus cars. And if I'm allowed to say so, more realistic.

With all my excitement I painted a bunch of narrow yellow stripes here and there around the torsos and arms. As usual, this was done to lay the groundwork for the caution stripes I like so much. When I later painted the black diagonal stripes to finish the patterns, I had used too big a brush and some of them got ruined. Caution stripes, not the brushes, of course. I'll be fixing them later. Grumble.

I finished the Summoner by painting the face of its LRM-15 launcher black. Maybe I'll apply some metallic paint on it and then wash that brown again. We'll see. As this session's last step I painted the missiles of Hellbringer's SRM-6 launcher white to make them stand out nicely. A while later I painted the tips red, so the SRMs are different from the usually smaller LRMs.

Next time I'll be working on Hellb's searchlight and I think I should try to use some of those tiny jewels I bought for the Marauderi on the PPCs. That could be a lot cooler than my earlier silver + blue glaze -approach. Cockpit windows may end up being orange, even though one sees the cyan+orange -combo quite a bit all around the world nowadays.
Oh, and I shall not forget the logos on these things.
I should dare to go for the Clan Ghost Bear's own logo, the Delta Galaxy's logo and maybe even the Cluster's logo, whichever Cluster I end up choosing... Years ago I painted a couple of Stars for our GM and he was going to assign them to either the 115th Striker Cluster (The Rolling Wave) or the 68th Striker (The Walking Panzers), so maybe neither of those.

But then again, walking panzers are pretty, pretty close to my heart, at least by the name...

Completed two dozen freebirth scum tin cans

This week's task was prettifying the bases. While I was digging up for my items I found out that I had a couple of different Woodland Scenics flocks instead of only one! Nice. I didn't waste time with them, though, but in the future...

I dropped a couple of pinchfuls to the sand jar I had for the basing and shook it a bit. Should something get stuck to the bases, good. If not, that's cool too. It'd stay there for the next time.

My method has always been simple: apply a layer of white glue on the base, dip the lower part of the mini in the jar, twist around a bit, shake the extra crap off. Repeat until done. This has worked decently in my opinion, of course some minis have gotten a lot more attention while others like these got done quickly and efficiently, without fuss. I just didn't see these worth any super-special work with all the remaining mould lines and all that.

In any case, I think they'll be just fine for a game or two ;)

Someday soon(ish) I'll turn my attention to the plastic OmniMechs! Yay!