Class 1 priority override

This may sound like a weird and a boring post, but who cares? A project is a project, this just happens to be in 1:1 scale for a change :)

One day not too far in the past we (the Berry and me) decided that those 3.14kea class items of kitchen furniture (two chairs and a table) would work better if they had some colour on them instead of being boringly unpainted. After a while of pondering and whatiffing we went to a hardware store and bought some junk. Basecoat, paintbrushes, surface paint and such.

As the first step the surfaces were sanded clean to remove the inevitable traces of being used for 4.5 years. The next obvious step was basecoating. Doing things like real professionals, weren't we?

As a dude who's very used to acrylic paints these oil-based things were a pain in the donkey: cleaning up the tools, the smell and the 24-hour drying period... sigh. I guess it's not that bad, we luckily had enough space to have our dinners somewhere else during the project.

The local habit of having the furniture mostly white/black/unpainted disturbs us, especially the Berry, so we decided to go with more colour (especially as the kitchens, too, tend to be white-walled):

That green is perhaps a bit brighter than what we originally had in mind, but it works anyway. I even had to take a photo of the completed and ready-to-use set because the table happened to be empty. For a change :D

To the bit sauna aka a pointless filler post

I've had a quite a busy set of two weeks, so I haven't got much painting or building done. As a compensation I'll post some nerdy silliness, also known as Minecraft stuff. Yay!

At some point I built a sauna. Now that there are more than one type of trees, I even have a birch "vihta", whatever those things are called in english. This is what I call progress.

I had also built a wooden submarine and quite a bit later I wanted to make a lifesize type VII U-Boot. The first one is on the foreground and looks more like a type II C ("Vesikko" style) boat. The other one is correctly 67m long, 6m wide and 9m tall with the tower and all that. Inside that thing I built two "row 4" piston engines that make a funny "puf-puf--phahh-phahh"-sound.

That's all this time, maybe I get to post something more reasonable next week :)

New Lances started

This time I started with the easier Lance, easier in the sense that "I could maybe, potentially, perhaps... be able to freehand that logo. Badly.". Didn't have a go with the shield + swords -unit logo, maybe later. This time it was enough I tried to paint the Lyran fist. Not all of the miniatures had an excellent place for the logo, that's why that Zeus is standing differently from the others.

After collecting some courage I took a deep breath and started with a Draconis Combine logo to each left side of the foure Sword of Light 'Mech. Of course the Assassin didn't have enough space for me so I stamped the logo on its forehead.
Later I noticed that I had failed, the Sword of Light units don't use the standard Combine logo but their own, in this case the Golden Dragon. I'll fix it later. It's a pity, because those black ones worked a lot better than the golden ones (Vallejo's Old Gold) on the right sides of each... Oh well.

Maybe they'll be just fine for playing, anyway. Oh, and I forgot! I had attached the correct number of antennae to the 'Mechs that need them, according to Sarna's pictures.

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On Monday evening I started painting the next eight BattleMechs with a good pace, I got inspired somehow. I chose the unit for the Capellan Confederation's 'Mechs to be the awesomely named Death Commandos. It sounds even cornier in finnish :D Anyway, I had thought that a black 'Mech with green trimmings would be a nice change and their logo isn't too difficult to do - somehow.

The Federated Suns Lance ended up belonging to the 7th Crusis Lancers, because their scheme is different enough from the other schemes and as a super bonus: it doesn't look like the french flag, unlike the traditional FedSuns parade units such as the Davion Guards. I had enough of that divided pattern with the Lyran Guard and the Davion Guards would've been almost the same but with two added red stripes. Meh.

The project was started with a puff of Gray Primer, as usual. After that had dried on the minis I airbrushed a coat of Grey Black (I decided that it'll look nicer than pure black) on the Death Commandos and the Lancers got a coat of Panzergrün. Nice and easy, especially as both basecoats were of a single colour and were found in my stash as a Model Air variety, too.

After the basecoats had dried I wondered for a while how the DCommando tins looked and then painted a bunch of semirandom armor panels with Sick Green. While they were drying I turned my attention to the Lancers. They all got a similar treatment with Bloody Red but this time I kept in mind that a symmetrical amount of panels would be painted blue. As I complained earlier, the only blue I have is the Magic Blue, but luckily it fit the other colours nicely without any adjustments, like an Alpha Strike to the heads of my enemies!
Erm. Right.

When all eight were in their proper schemes, I went through all the metal joints and gun barrels with some Oily Steel. Obviously I let it dry and then washed the Death Commando 'Mechs with Badab Black and then changed to Devlan Mud to wash the Lancers. I just thought that the Panzergrün would get a bit too dull under a black wash.

Today the sun was shining so nicely when I got home so I took out the paints and mixed a new set of orange to paint the cockpit windows. According to my mental image that'd be a good colour and it'd work nicely with both schemes. When I got to paint the window panels of the Quickdraw, I noticed that I had accidentally painted them green already because I hadn't been able to tell them apart from the rest of the paneling.
These IS tin cans are a bit stupid in that sense, if you ask me. Or these miniatures just suck arse. I'd bet on the second option.

Here's todays status of the pieces, starting with the Death Commandos

Cyclops:

CP-10-Z (90 tons)

 Enforcer:

ENF-4R (50 tons)

Quickdraw:

QKD-4G (60 tons)

Trebuchet:

TBT-5N (50 tons)

And then the 7th Crusis Lancers

Commando:

COM-2D (25 tons)

Hermes:

HER-1S (30 tons)

Whitworth:

WTH-1 (40 tons)

Jagermech:

JM6-S (65 tons)

They're ugly as a a bunch of cave trolls, but they're mine. There'll be more to come!

Simple cockpits

The topic of this round, as the title tells you, is the cockpits. Or to be more exact, their viewports, but it's all essentially the same as far as the game is concerned.

All the windows of the DCMS tins got a layer of not-so-bright green to begin with but the paint was so runny because of earlier dilutions (or time) that it didn't really stick too well or noticeably. So I let it dry out of the way and then covered those same areas with some Sick Green. In the end I think it looks pretty neat even without any jeweling. You can tell where the viewports are and that's what I aimed for.

Being the next ones the Lyran machines needed some sort of a custom orange to be mixed up. All the others have the same shade except the Atlas that needed a bit redder one because of the white head. This was to give a bit more contrast between the eyes and the skull.

My favourite cockpit of this set of eight is the Zeus and Catapult being a close second. Rest of the 'Mechs have so simple and plain cockpits that there's nothing really special to be said of them. Mostly they're just rectangles.
On the next round I'll have a go with the rest of the details, especially logos. I may have to gather some courage to try freehanding the logos because I've never tried them, unlike the Jade Falcon logos that I've painted many times already... If these end up being even half-recognizeable, I'll call them a success.

Those bases will be the last ones to be done. Maybe I'll even do all of them at the same time instead of four or eight at a time.