Lasers, Viewports and the Hex base

The fine-tuning stage with fine details

After the oily weathering sessions the Archer had been sitting in a dry and hopefully dustless place for a few days. Now I only had a couple of quick, easy but for an eager person very time-consuming details left. Being an amateur and otherwise quite unskilled painter, I wasn't going to spend hours on the lenses and their jeweling effects. The same method that I used on the Assault Star was going to suit this as well.

Lenses on the Lasers

I had four pieces of Diverse Optics type 18 Medium Lasers to paint. Two of them were in the Lower Arms, according to the lore there was supposed to be a turret-like thing over the head for the remaining two but the mini looked like they were in the backside, L/R Torso. I may have called them exhaust pipes a couple of posts ago.

These four ERLas cannons I painted the exact same way as the previous lasers: a green (VGA 72732 Escorpena Green) layer on the bottom. Then I mixed in a drop of white (VMA 71270 RAL9001 White) to get a lighter green, painted the lower right sector (if we were looking at a clock, it'd be something like the 1600-1900 area). Had these been larger, I'd done a third layer but nope. Instead I added a white drop to 1700 on each.

 At least they stood out nicely.

Cockpit canopy

I had chosen green as the cockpit colour for this unit some twelve years ago, so that's what I kept using. The viewports had already been painted dark grey, so I didn't need to worry about them anymore.

The base was a green (VGA 72730 Goblin Green) layer on both panes. Then I lightened my paint up a bit and added a slightly smaller area from the bottom right corners. Due to the smallness of the bits I only did three layers. Finally I painted a white dot into the top left corners. The dots could've been smaller, but such was life.

After that I painted the hex edges dark grey. Now they looked uniform and also fit in wonderfully with the caution stripes on the front edge.

I certainly wasn't going to become a shade or gradient master. If needed, I might still fix the armour edges with dark grey if the greens went annoyingly over.

The ground to stomp on

Now the hex base was the difficult one, as I hadn't decided it years or months ago. I didn't intend to do anything complicated, especially on a quick snack project.

Somehow I remembered that I had somewhere the years old Woodland Scenics stuff and when checking I found I had two bags of those (Ballast, Fine, Light Gray and Buff - the light gray was open so I used that). I covered the ground with white glue and let it cure a short moment.

On the base I sprinkled an amount of the light gray ballast and added a couple of shreds of their fake greenery (I had two types of that too: Coarse Turf, Medium Green and Foliage, Light Green). This was a generally functioning base, I have done these before.

I stopped to think if I should tint this pretty light-coloured ballast a bit? I could mix some sort of a brown oil wash, that'd bring the ground more to the earthy look, now it looked like sun-baked desert. While thinking of this option I left the mini to dry overnight.

Oiled earths

Luckily I had a six-tube weathering colours set, that was a great source. I started by making a brown wash (ABT093 Earth) and applied it just about all over the ballast ground.

Something made me think that I shouldn't leave it this way, monocoloured. The set also had two different mud colours, so I made a tiny amount of dark mud (ABT130) and dabbed it into some random spots.

For extra variety I made a bit of light mud wash (ABT125) and dabbed that into some other spots, including the 'Mech's feet.

Now the ground wasn't uniform or boringly monocoloured. While taking these photos the paint was still wet, so the actual end result was going to be visible the next day.

In addition to the paint drying time this miniature had nothing left, unless I spotted some tiny fixable spots, and applying the gloss varnish on the lenses and viewport panels. Of those I wasn't going to write a separate post anymore, for the next week I intended to get the final photos taken and gimped.

Oil painting

A slow-drying weathering operation

The story so far: I had painted the BattleMech in two short painting sessions on two consecutive evenings. After this I'd have to let my paintwork dry a bit longer, from a couple of days to up to a week, depending on how my calendar behaved.

Sepia

Preparing the wash for panel lines and gentle shadows was becoming familiar: a small dollop of paint (ABT002 Sepia) onto the palette, add drops of thinner until the result got thin enough. Now I didn't get too stressed about overapplying the wash somewhere, as I knew that it went away quickly and easily whenever I wanted.

Edge by edge, corner by corner I applied my wash on the panel lines and all the darkenable surfaces. On the LRM launchers the effect was quite nice, even though I hadn't drilled the individual missile ports open. When I had applied my wash thoroughly, I wiped off the excesses pretty soon after. I wanted to keep the flat surfaces, especially the topmost ones and the forearms, clean while the joints, corners, nooks and crannies were allowed to remain darker.

This was the state I left it, to dry in peace. The shininess would be mostly gone by the next day, but it wasn't going to be touch-dry anytime soon, but sooner than if I had applied thicker paint. In any case I decided to give it a few days to begin with.

Three days later the Archer's look was somewhat more subdued. Now it was ready for the next treatment or toning this effect up or down. I was pretty happy with the panels and the shadows, so I didn't give it a new treatment.

I had pondered if I should give this 'Mech a dot filter, but I was a bit worried about getting carried away and the effect not working that well in a small-scale item like this. A gentle lightening, on the other hand, sounded nice so I decided to go for it. Lightly.

Buffaliciousness

I chose a random, very small amount of spots where I applied a dot of paint (ABT035 Buff) with a toothpick. The colours and the sizes of the dots made this look almost symphatetic and something completely different from a warmachine from the future. It was almost a shame to not leave them be.

As instructed by smarter and better people, I blended the dots away with a rolling motion using my round-tipped blending brush. Then I left the mini to wait for a better day:

The effect was pretty strong when wet. For comparison purposes I took a quick set of photos a couple of days later. Of course I ruined any kind of comparability by taking these photos in a different lighting set, opposite corner of the apartment and at a very different time of day.

I felt the efffect worked better with a bare eye, but I also didn't spend that much time setting up my photos. Hopefully they gave some sort of an idea anyway.

Project III/23

Running in the Death Star trench

The Autumn side Father's Day brought, in addition to the mumblings-unrelated things, some Lego! This has been a good theme for years and I was more than happy to build things.

It was an action diorama. I remembered seeing someone building (or upgrading) this one as an automata, but it could also have been a yet another fake memory of mine.

The trench

Building this set was quick and hassle-free, just perfect for a quick afternoon build. It only had almost 666 pieces so the expectation was "almost done".

With the first bag's baseplate done, the next couple were full of greebling at random places. My set was missing one light grey ingot (99563) from the center-middle, that I could complain about to the Danes and get a replacement. I just wasn't familiar with the process and wasn't sure if I wanted to bother.

With the floor of the trench done I moved on to the sidewall, that received a good amount of greeblies. In the middle you could see a couple of the claws that I had set 90° wrong, but I fixed that as soon as I noticed.

The completed sidewall sat sturdily on the baseplate and it got then impaled into it with two (for some reason of different length) studs. Undoing this might be interesting, but I didn't see that appearing into my calendar anytime soon.

Black squadron

In this scene Darth Vader was escorted by two wingpeople, both in TIE/ln starfighters. Unlike what the instructions said, I set the green laser blasts a bit offset for both of the firing units, because I just found it more visually appealing than the dual-firing ones.

To get the best-looking and most active scene I might have to fine-tune the angles of these a bit still.

Red 5

Then the baddie of the scene, flown by the Red five from the Red Squadron of the space terrorists, his Incom T-65C was a pretty decent representation in this scale. While building it I was wondering a bit why the spaceframe's front and back halves were only connected with two studs instead of all the four available, but maybe it looked better this way, greeblie-wise. The S-Foils were not adjustable: the split-wings were going to stay open so you couldn't use the fighter on a more calm scene just as it was.

Diorama

With the fighters built and installed only the Taim & Bak XX-9 heavy turbolaser turret was missing. It was a pleasantly poseable piece, even though it didn't have any green turbolaser blasts for the barrels. As befit the scene.

We were running seriously low on space on the shelves with these various Lego sets we had accumulated over the years :D

Shades and some previously ignored details

The actual paintjob

Now that my basework of the Archer's paintjob was done, I got to tweak it. It was somehow fun to notice that sometime earlier at this point I'd call my painting done all but for the weathering. Over the years I've slid further and further away from that and added more tweaking and finetuning layers. And I still haven't started doing chipping or somesuch time-consuming stuff.

Taking the black down a bit

Highlighting the upper arms, hips and thigs with dark grey (VMA 71055 Black Grey RLM66) over the flat black was interesting, but I tried to approach this so that the black worked as shadow and panel line decorator. I used the dark grey to cover most of the surfaces, concentrating on the topmost parts to try to follow the flow of natural light. The lower/bottom parts I mostly left alone. When the paint dried the effect was a bit clearer than when wet. All this looked like it worked decently with the naked eye, in the photos it seemed a bit stronger.

I think I reached my goal of highlighting the details of the black-painted parts from the flat darkness.

While I was playing with the dark grey I also painted some of the bits that I couldn't touch the last time as I ran out of paint. These included the insides of the missile bay doors, the lower arm laser cannon barrels, the random bits and greeblies in the Archer's backside. A couple of the nozzles looked like Jump Jets but were most likely heat sinks instead, as this was a steady groundpounder by the specs.

Metallic paint

The only place I used metallic paint (VMA 71072 Gunmetal) were the LRM launchers. I thought that as they were behind the armored doors, they'd stand out nicely from the insides of said doors. I'd wash them darker later so that they wouldn't stand out quite that strongly.

Red paneling

The dark grey panel effects worked pretty nicely on the black so I wanted to do something similar on the red bits as well. My problem was that my basic red was so bright that I didn't have much in storage to stand out, but I also didn't trust my mixing skills to be able to get a slightly brighter red that wasn't straight out pink.

Ultimately I borrowed some Ferrari Red (VMA 71085) from the Project Assistant I and that worked decently. The difference wasn't massive but you could tell. At this point I mostly worked on the upper parts and the protruding pieces like the forearms and the legs.

Detail work

The caution stripes have been my favourite decorations on 'Mechs and such. This time I managed to rein myself in and chose only a few spots to highlight: the inner edges of the missile bay doors, the heat sink edges on the rear side, and the front edge of the hex base.

Of course I encountered a problem with my yellow paint (VMA 71002 Medium Yellow), it was at best a half-wet lump inside its bottle. I plopped out a dollop onto my palette and with some tap water I managed to get something spreadableish. The fact that this paint wasn't smooth or provided even coverage was not a bad thing but was perfect for a worn and suffered surface.

My black paint was still out, and I used the dark grey again. In advance I was a bit concerned of my stripes becoming too faded, but the result was just fine.

Kell Hounds insignia

As Camospecs told us the doggies had their insignia on the 'Mech's Left Torso. The insignia was an inverted black-lined red triangle with a black hound's head, something that even I could approximate badly in freehand. I guess I could've gotten tighter triangle edges with a better hand-control or a thinner paintbrush.

This torso had few suitable spots where I would've dared to start painting something as simple as this. My own choice would've been in the middle of the top Center Torso, but as that wasn't according to the specs, I painted it onto the open missile bay door. And yes, I did remember to paint it upside down so it'd be the right way when the door got closed.

This was pretty much what I was going to do for decoration. During my short painting sessions I noticed a few spots here and there that I painted dark grey after I had originally considered myself ready. Now I was content, the red sections were broken down enough but not too distractingly.