Masking tape madness

Camo design

So far I had always painted my OmniMech camo patterns by hand, this time I felt like trying out a sharper edge to the shapes by using masking tape. For a short while I pondered on testing a pixel camo, but what worked fantastically in a 1:35 rocket launcher might not work as well in 1:285. Maybe I could put that idea into use for a different unit, and keep the 3rd Talon in more or less uniform pattern.

I pulled a lenght of masking tape onto my cutting mat, sliced off different triangles and pointy bits, and started laying them all around the Dire Wolf.

 

Somehow it felt like it could've been better some other way. So for the next two Points I wanted lines or stripes instead of splinters. I took another length of tape and cut it into low sinewave -like shape. These wavelets I wrapped around the Summoner and Mad Dog, cutting the longer wavelets into shorter ones where and when needed.

At this point my warmachines looked like half-peeled mummies.

When I got to masking the Gargoyle I decided to make a bit different pattern again, and made mostly different triangles, larger ones than what I did on the Dire Wolf. I thought that a machine this ugly I should also make a bulky splinter camo.

 

A hindsight moment: at this point I managed to forget that on my second session I didn't get more than one lower leg masked from the Hellbringer.

A grey start

A grey basecoat

I spent a fleeting moment pondering in which order I would paint the camo pattern. I decided to start with grey, because the green tone would recuire lots of fine-tuning and on the other hand, painting green over grey would be simpler than getting this kind of a medium grey over a darkish green. So I covered the miniatures with Vallejo's grey (Cold Grey).

Light grey drybrushing

To make my stuff easier I drybrushed the minis from all angles with a lighter grey (Stonewall Grey). This way all the grey bits of my camo pattern would already by somehow highlighted.

At this point I pretty much skipped the barrels of guns, because they've been traditionally metallic and not camouflaged.

Priming white

Brushing to victory

My first idea was to airbrush the primer on, but I didn't want to prime these bright red because these weren't 1:35 tanks. I had a bottle of white primer, but I had thinned it down somehow weirdly before so I didn't feel comfortable blasting it through the airbrush. Instead, I brushed the paint on.

Project I/23

BattleTeching

After a somewhat intensive and involving scale model I wanted to do something quicker and simpler to pass some time. My media sources had had a surprising amount of material about Mechwarrior 5: Mercs mods and getting that on the Steam Deck started intriguing me more and more. The Humble BattleTech book bundle this Spring didn't help much either, as I now had a good pile of CBT era eBooks on top of the ones from the Clan Invasion Kickstarter.

So how to scratch an itch that already has a lot of material available? By picking up the unpainted bits and choosing what looked most fitting for the mood, of course.

A pretty heavy Star

It's been a known fact that my heart has beaten most for the 'Mechs in Mechwarrior II, because that's how I got my first dose of BattleTech. As my 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster wasn't complete, I was going to keep at it and I picked the 'Mechs from the heavier end of the scale.

The Kickstarter delivery didn't have all the essential Clanner units, or not enough of them in some cases, I had ordered two more Stars from CGL. At least last year they had any sets available for very short times in their store, they seemed to sell like bread at a circus). Of course the Omnis that I wanted in my collection were spread out to different ForcePacks, because why not. My to obtain -list contained Summoners, Hellbringers, Mad Dogs and at least a Dire Wolf and a Warhawk. The pack that contained the Warhawk I didn't order yet, a copy of each was findable from two Packs: Clan Command Star and Clan Heavy Striker Star.

From these two boxes I chose the next five Points to form this little Project:

• Dire Wolf (Clan Command Star)
  
• Gargoyle (Clan Heavy Striker Star)
  
• Summoner (Clan Command Star)
  
• Hellbringer (Clan Heavy Striker Star)
• Mad Dog (Clan Heavy Striker Star) 

Generally I called this project a Command Star, even though I had preallocated them into Trinary Beta in my unit list. Somehow I had to keep track of them while all was in progress, quiaff?