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.