Groundwork on the armor

Hands dirty

After a tiny bit of scratching and sanding off plastics I decided that I wasn't going to poke it anymore. Now it was time to paint.

Priming

Ok, so I had managed to completely ignore topping up my storage of primers, but luckily I had over a bottleful of red primer (VSP 70624 Pure Red). I blasted the miniature top to bottom, then bottom-up to get all the corners and angles covered.

Even the photos didn't immediately show any missed spots. Nice.
 

The red parts

If I had any of the gory red that I had used painting the previous Kell Hounds, it wasn't going to pass through my airbrush anymore. Lately I've relied on the RLM23 red (VMA 71003), as you may have noticed, so I was going to stick to it now as well.

I used the flip side of the Alpha Strike card's artwork as a quick reference of Morgan Kell's BattleMech. Based on the small pic I painted especially the lower legs, arms, and the torso from the hip up.

These shades of red differed from each other a bit but not strongly. If I didn't actually know I used different paints, I might not be able to tell it with my crappy eyes...

Blackness

After air-drying the red layers I decided I had a tiny problem with black paint (VMA 71057). My last bottle of black was so low that I barely got a thin layer of it painted to give me a guideline for the dark grey layers.

How did this happen? Black had been one of my main paints for ages. I realized it right away: I've moved without noticing away from the extreme colours also in the bits that are instructed to be painted as black/white, because they are somewhat unnatural-looking in these scales.

That wasn't too much of a problem, this black layer had the honour of working as a pathfinder and the base of shadows. Just about everything I painted black was going to be overpainted with dark grey (black grey or german grey), and maybe they would also get a slightly lighter grey over them.

These photos didn't show too well that the area between the side torso's armoured ridge and the shoulder was red. While painting the other bits I was thinking if that ought to be black too or would a dark wash be enough to differentiate it.

The past ISD made one sort of a decision for me by not buing more black paint, so at least today those bits remained red. Perhaps I'd practice making fake shadows with the oil paints, this could be a fantastic guinea pig for such a process.

A couple of red bits were shining through in the hips and on the antennae, so I had ran out of black a tiny bit too soon. This last photo showed how I had decided to paint narrow strips of the lower R/L Torso black, to break the monoblocks of red in the torso. It felt like a good breakpoint, especially from the viewpoint of a vehicle or an unfortunate foot soldier.

Next up

Next time I'd paint over the black parts with grey and go through the metallic parts (laser cannons, missile launchers, the insides of the missile bay doors, the hinges). I should also go over the cockpit canopy bits too, so that the green jewe effects would have convenient dark frames.