An attempt at the pattern of the Omega Galaxy

To celebrate a Monday afternoon I attacked Hobby Point in my quest for plastic jewel-like things. They've been recommended in the CBT-forums as focusing crystals for energy weapons, mostly on the miniatures but I thought that I'd give them a try with these two models, should I manage to actually find something suitable. It's been said that they look better than flat pieces of plastic painted with different colours, even with skillful jeweling (that article talks about cockpit jeweling but obviously it works on other parts, too). After a bit of asking around, this is what I got:

Of course I had to try them out! I dropped one of the bigger blue pieces in the slot and to my amusement it fit like a napalm bombing in a forest. Excellent. Then I tried one of the medium sized red pieces in the smaller opening. That one fit snugly, too. Lucky me. With the primer that red jewel didn't really show too well so I tried with a green one instead. That one was a lot more visible.
The point with all this is that the energy weapons need a focusing lense, -crystal or something similar. Of course I could've just got something lense-shaped and smooth but for some reason I felt that a diamond cut would look a lot better. With the colours I could tell what kind of a weapons this model has. Obviously PPCs have blue crystals and different sorts of lasers have their own colours. So far I've just painted all my miniatures' laser nozzles plain red, without any regard for the size (Small, Medium or Large) nor the type (normal, ER or pulse). I've never thought that I'd make normal lasers and pulse lasers look any different, so I guess I could go with small = red, medium = yellowish, large = green. According to the specs this 'Mech has a pair of Medium Pulse Lasers so I'd use yellow/orange crystals in the gun pods.

It works.

Later I checked that yes, the red crystals are clearly visible as well, after the gun barrel was painted with Flat Aluminium.

Next I had to test if the Omega Galaxy's pattern would work or if it ended up looking awful. So I started with a couple of small pieces and painted them with Tamiya's Flat Aluminium:

After that had dried I washed it with an ancient (I bought that paint more than a decade ago) Citadel Green Wash:

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw that was a Spearming bubblegum... not good. I let it be overnight and washed over it with GW's Badab black and at least that part looked a bit better that way.

Next I went and painted the rest of the torso and arms with Flat Aluminium and greenwashed it later. While applying that green wash, I decided that some AutoCannon parts should be left plain metallic to give the whole 'Mech a bit more detail. To me it looked more stylish this way.

After all that had dried nicely I applied a layer of Badab black on the whole set. In addition to that I also applied another layer of GW's Devlan mud over the metallic pieces.

I'm afraid I have to file those insane seams a bit, they look bad. Should've done it earlier, but for some reason I didn't. Oh well, they won't offer much problems, I assume.
After that I shall start working on the legs, maybe basecoating them with either Oily Steel or Gunmetal, followed by a black wash to keep a bit more uniform look on the whole model.