Hex bases and gentle edge highlighting
Simplest steps first: I painted the hex bases flat black.
In my previous project I attempted to highlight my King Tiger's edges after the washing, but I realized that using the exact same camouflage colour didn't bring out much in that model (and paints/washes used). This time I tried using different paints altogether: I drybrushed the green corners with a lighter green (VMC 70942 Light Green) and it had a noticeable effect, but nothing to jump out annoyingly. Now I skipped using a lighter grey, for a reason I couldn't remember when typing this stuff up.
While in the process of drybrushing I also applied some trusty dirty brown (VMA 71133 Dirt) on every 'Mech's legs. I concentrated mostly below the knee, again playing it by the ear.
Unique identifiers
Finally I got to talk about the actual main subject of this post, the Point numbers. To prepare all this I started with a very simple Google Sheets workbook, which obviously got immediately out of hand. Those surprised could be counted with the remaining fingers of an alcoholic circular saw operator.
Now that I had a convenient set of tables with all the frame types with their variants, miniature manufacturers and paintjob statuses, I could attach them to the named Stars of the Trinaries in my Cluster (at this point this was just mock data, to see how it worked). This way I could tell how my megaprocess was progressing and what was missing. My old notes about this were most likely on some A4s that had been recycled a decade ago already.
As the photo above showed, I gave the Invasion box's OmniMechs simply the running numbers 201-205 without caring where and how (and if) they would be located into the Cluster. I had never had any kind of a real plan behind the numbering of the original IWM miniatures, they were done mostly based on my head's unrandom number generator and the actual physical space I had available for number painting.
Black shadows below
My greatest and most noticeable problem with these hand-painted microscale numbers has always been that no matter the tool, my own skill of doing nice and readable tiny numbers has been awful. This wasn't a typical military font. I just made some numbers to provide the shadows, in black, and didn't worry too much about the shapes because they'd be mostly painted over soon.
Light numbers
After the pre-shadows had dried, I painted over them, offset a bit towards top-left (or that's what I tried to do). Earlier I had used even yellow, but most often just white. Now I wanted to tone the contrast down a bit, so I used light grey (VGA 72749 Stonewall Grey), a colour I had always used as a highlight for the cold grey I used for the camouflage itself.
None of these were going to win any beauty prices. The most important thing was that they were readable. Ish.
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