Project II/23

Legendary but not the Legend Killer

My previous project was supposed to be a bit of a quick snack, but it did eat an amount of time after all. Now I wanted to do something even quicker to cleanse my palate, before jumping onto a larger-scale model again.

I rummaged through my Clan Invasion box and checked what the random boxes had, those unmarked ones living next to my two untouched Star boxes. From the list [Urbanmech, Stormcrow, Mongrel, Archer] I popped out Morgan Kell's modified Archer. The man may have been a legendary 'Mech jock, but the 'Mech itself was a bit boring compared to many others. Of course there were much uglier ones, so this was still ok.

My plan was just to paint one individual 'Mech without pondering on how it would fit into a larger collection. Of course I already had a Lanceful of those awful plastic -molded Kell Hounds from twelve years ago ([Clint, Spider, Panther, Hunchback]) so this wasn't going to be a complete loner. Then again, with one more I'd have five doggies and I'd need three more to fill up the second Lance.

Not every Merc unit needed to be fully equipped and army-sized, so I wasn't going to stress too much about it.

Randomly wandering thoughts

At this point my pre-made plans or thoughts about this project were such that the basic paintjob would be quickly done. Fine-tuning it shouldn't take awfully long, either. I'd spend at least twice as much time with the details (metallic parts either painted metallic or dark grey, right now I was leaning toward metallic paints; green cockpit windows; laser cannon lenses (4); individualizing as in the KH insignia and potential highlights).

Panel line and shadow washing with oils – and cleaning that all up again – would eat something over an hour, a potential dot filtering less than an hour, maybe some modulation would round it up to an hour. In practice the oils would require long drying times, but I wasn't counting them in in my project time even if I could.

The hex base would take two sessions: the surface textures first, then painting it. All in all it should be quick. If I chose to do some water/mud effects, it'd take a bit more time but most of this would be waiting again.

Maybe all this would be done within the hours of a normal workday. The fact was that my calendar had been challenging, to say the least, for a good while, so despite its apparent simplicity this might spread over something like two months. It'd be fun to see in the end how this guessing of mine has hit or missed.