Project IX/24

Blood Spirits

I had a fascinating selection of 'Mechs in my stack of ForcePack boxes. Some of these boxes I had bought only because of one mini, as all my favourites were naturally spread around the different sets. The 3rd Falcon Talon that I had been working slowly over the years pulled the heavier classes, and the lighter ones were just hanging around. I had to figure out a home for them, preferably a Star at a time so I didn't end up in the same situation as with the previously finished Ghost Bear Star: an easy dozen years between the first and last Points.

 

From these three boxes I semirandomly plucked five Mediums and Lights to painted somehow. At this point I didn't want to paint them as Falcons, and I didn't feel like making more Ghost Bears either. The thought of having a quintet of Wolves to be hunted interested me, and their pretty easily recognizeable scheme was the grey-tan of the Beta Galaxy. Also the Smoke Jaguar's Alpha and Beta Galaxies were just different greys, and I just didn't feel like painting more grey stuff right now. Something made me half-excited about the titular Clan Blood Spirit and their Alpha Galaxy that was a desert tan with red highlights. Here I could also use more of my quite nice sandy yellow I bought for the earlier Panzer IV model.

Miniproject VIII/24

Repaintings from start to finish

You may have noticed how I've pondered a bunch of times to repaint all of my old energy weapons. One of these afternoons, on a somehow annoying day, after the workday was done, I decided to do something enjoyable with the hour I had all for myself. Spoiler alert: after a bit of tinkering I felt good again.

I spent some time rummaging through my CGL boxes and my hunch was wrong: only the Clan box OmniMechs and the Shilone were unjeweled. I had truly been prepared to paint a good bunch more, but on this one afternoon it was a perfect amount. Of course I had a couple of dozen of IWM minis to be repainted, but that wasn't going to be done in one random hour.

Before getting any further I checked the specs from TRO and Sarna, so I'd get a correct amount of proper lenses per miniature. A bit later I realized that I had forgotten the Jump Jets, that I painted as the last item on the list, after also checking the specs before touching a drop of paint.

Grendel

The Grendel had a good amount of paintables for me: one large, three mediums and a small one. Sillily in the stock pose the miniature's Right Arm was pointing downwards which hid 40% of the lenses when looking at the mini from a gaming angle.

ER Small Laser

This set of minis only had one of the Extended Range flashlights and that lived in the Right Arm of this Grendel. Because it wasn't the large pipe, the only option was the bit above it. The bit that I had decided to act as the rangefinder of Grendel A's AC.

The red paint was, in addition to be reserved for the difficultly tiny ERSLas lens, a good paint for the viewports of the five OmniMechs, so I also repainted all of their cockpits. They'd show up on their photos in turn, as I didn't take separate cockpit painting photos. I actually took no work in progress photos of any of the subparts in this miniproject, now that I thought of it.

 

ER Medium Laser x3

This time I knew to paint the green lens on Grendel's forehead, to compensate for my ignorance (or lack of accuracy) two years ago, to compound with my stupidities starting with that ERSLas mentioned above. The whole ERMLas tripled got the exact same Escorpena Green treatment.

 

ER Large Laser

I've grumbled a lot about Grendel's pose, but I felt that despite that I managed decently with the Magical Blue lense and its anime effect. Sadly it wasn't visible on the tabletop.

 

Jump Jet

No surprises here: the JJ nozzles were a bit odd, and I guess I could've thinned my blues down a bit more for a smoother transitionset. They worked better seen from a more respectful distance, which was a good thing.

Puma

Not much to redo for the Puma, just the ERPPCs that I had earlier apparently left untouched. What could explain that? Maybe I had used a blue wash that just didn't show up too clearly after flashing.

ER PPC

Like I said, I had already painted the windows while working on Grendel's small laser jewel, so at least we had something else to show next to the Particle Projection Cannons. Unlike with the laser lenses, I tried to get a more central concentration for the glow effect. To my bare eyes they looked better than on the camera's viewpoint, but then again, what didn't?

Executioner

Again this fugly monstrosity was in my hands. While admiring the "before" photo, it was a perfect moment to praise a painting resource I encountered around the end of the summer: Camospecs Canon cockpit painting compendium, vol 1. That one showed me that the Executioner's cockpit windows weren't quite as Atlaslike as I had thought but the middle panel was a window as well, not armour.

ER Large Laser

Here my jeweling looked clearly better than in the photo right above, especially as these nicely warned of the weapon's class. Also the missing viewport was painted correctly and I could sleep my nights better.

Jump Jet

The mere thought of an Assault like this jumping around, even if for short distances, was disturbing.

Timber Wolf

I was positively looking forward to work on the Timber Wolf, even if I still wasn't going to put my hands into the wrong-looking LRM warhead caps.

ER Large Laser x2

Looking at these photos the Timber Wolf's ER Large Lasers were otherwise great, but especially on the RA edge had some old red stains ruining the full image. Maybe I'd poke them with a mix of dark grey + red, and turn the messy paintjob into a fresh and totally purposeful chipping.

ER Medium Laser x2, Medium Pulse Laser

The medium-class laser's brighter shade wasn't that much different from my base, unlike what I expected. That meant that the jewel effect ended up being a bit gentler than I intended. The barrels were also quite small, so there wasn't that much space for my sausages to fine-control a tiny brush.

Nova

The tubery that resurfaced vivid memories of Marko's "ALPHA STRIKE!" exclamations looked a bit intimidating, but it was just two sets of six each, so how much time could they require? Especially considering my painting skills.

ER Medium Laser x12

A dozen laser lenses were jeweled much quicker than what I feared. Waiting for the next red-hot and semi-suicidal alpha strike...

Jump Jet

My third and last jump-capable 'Mech was pretty easily nozzled up. I liked to paint this shape of JJ nozzles than the ones on Grendel, for example, even if those kinda looked more like the part.

Shilone SL-17

When I started I only intended to paint the three lasers, as I had been content with the cockpit. I actually had to search for the LL for a bit and I had to admit that I needed to check its location from Sarna to get the correct piece painted.

Large Laser

The laser lived comfortably between the sensorsets, right next to the cockpit. The nub for the laser was pretty small, and a bit difficult to paint comfortably, but now it looked more like a lense than before.

Medium Laser x2, cockpit

Did you guess already? My original canopy set was just plain green, so while I was already painting jeweling on the Medium Lasers in the wings, I also did the three viewport panels. That round one on top was like a big lens, so I just followed my usual jewel method. Those rectangular ones got a more or less L-shaped things on them, where the brightest reflections were aligned with the centerline of the frame.

 

The lower front pane immediately reminded me of a Lego computer and that was always a good thing. I wish I knew how to do something like that on purpose instead of accident...

Group photo

I took a quick shot of the bits standing abreast facing this way and that way. The cockpits looked generally improved, and I really liked that the energy weapons were clearer and they also brought a tiny bit of variation into the camo-schemed miniatures.

Individual photos

I did shoot a set of these photos of the sextet, while I was taking the final photos of V/24 in the same run. One of each, here ya go:

Finished: Project VI/24

Twinkle twinkle little Star

This always rolled off the tongue like nothing: one of the Stars in the Clan Ghost Bear Delta Galaxy's 73rd Battle Cluster's 314th Battle Trinary now had the missing two Points ready to join their comrades in their quest in freeing the barbaric Inner Sphere, bringing Kerensky's vision to life. On my timeline the Bears were tightly on the Crusader camp and any kind of what-iffing about Wardening was just delusional nonsense.

Stormcrow Prime #211

55-ton Medium Stormcrow, Ryoken for the freebirths of the Inner Sphere. A quick beast with both long- and medium range weaponry and also a neat dozen extra Double Heat Sinks to help out. A symmetrical loadout had an ER Large Laser and an ER Medium Laser in both Arms, and a third ERMLas in the head. Perhaps that one was located there in case the pilot lost both Arms in some weird situation.

Viper Prime #215

In the neighbour Point the 40-ton Viper was quick - which probably gave the Inner Sphere name of Dragonfly to it - but somewhat lightly armed compared to other 40-tonners. There were two Machine Guns in the torso (the fact that they were called MGs didn't mean that they were directly comparable to the ones infantryfolks carried around), an SRM-4 in the Left Arm, and twin Medium Pulse Lasers in the Right Arm.

Shooting the stars

Here we were, a full quinted was acquired. The fact that I had an untouced Kodiak in one of the boxes made me think if I was going to need a Binary of Ghost Bears, but then again, other Clans also had few Kodiaks. A funny thing about its name was that in Finnish I was about to call it simply with another nickname for a bear, but those (Karhu, Kontio) were already used for actual 'Mechs so I had to be more careful with my nicknaming than usual.

While I was on it I dropped the minis on a hex map that I had used under the light tent's canvas for ground support:

As my 25th Anniversary Box was open, I plucked a Lanceful of scouting Steiner's BattleMechs for target practice. This sort of a 5 vs 4 wasn't according to any Honor Rules, even if I suspected the mass advantage was more on the side of the freebirths.

Final mumblings

This excitedly painted duo took a moment less than three hours (2h 55mins). Painting just one of them wouldn't have been mentionably quicker, that's how efficient I happened to be.

I'd remain in the BattleTech universe, but I wasn't entirely sure how. The Jade Falcons were calling me after a while, and I had been pondering on and off for a couple of years if I should take a couple of the IIC 'Mechs and set up a Solahma Star just for the fun and variety.

Stormcrow and Viper basing

Last fifteen minutes

Nothing special remained anymore, especially the bases were done in a flash. Had I not a simple example of the original two Points to follow, I'd done something else but still nothing too complicated.

Glasses

Each of the lenses and all of the cockpit canopy panes got a coating of Vallejo's gloss varnish.

Hexes

This was a very simple base: a layer of white glue on the ground, then Woodland Scenics' Ballast was sprinkled on, and left to flash. This time I added no vegetation on the bases.

Timekeeping

All in all this was a fifteen minute show. Total time spent was about 2h 55mins. Getting the final photos with all the digging for the other three Points, setting up the light tent, the proper camera, and fooling with gimp was going to take an hour easily, but that I never included in my actual time spent on the model/mini.

Stormcrow and Viper jewelification

Painting the jewel effect on the lenses, even if badly, has been a lot of fun, so I was actually excited to get my two minis to this stage already. Some pretty day I needed to sit down and start working on the about 145 earlier painted minis that only had a red dot or a blue wash on a metallic base.

Energy weaponizing

I spied from TRO 3050 how the weapons were officially located, so I'd paint the correct lenses the correct way. This time there were no flashlights or PPCs so for the mediums I used the green (VGA 72732 Escorpena Green) and larges I got blue (VGA 72721 Magic Blue). For mixing I used off-white (VMA 71270 White RAL9001).

Stormcrow

Here we had five rayguns to paint. Both arms had a medium and a large one, and somewhere in the head I was supposed to fit a third ERMLas. The head's lens was something I had probably missed on each of my earlier IWM minis, but all that could be fixed one by one.

Something had to be the first and this time I started with the green ERMLas lenses. In the laser barrels I painted the base layer of bright green. For the next dollop I mixed a drop of white and aimed to the 17:00-19:00 sector as well as I could with a tiny paintbrush onto a tiny target. Lastly I mixed another white drop in and attempted to do the tiny brightest dots with the even tinier opposing reflections.

This exact same was done for the ERLLasers but in blue and onto a bit larger target. The sizing alone made this somewhat easier.

I had managed better results before, but they worked fine by me.

 

Viper

I expected even less work from the Viper and its twin ERMPLasers. As long as I remembered to check that the RT-mounted double machine guns were barreled properly, everything was going to be fine. Again I was thinking that if the CGL's SRM-4 launchers had tips for the missiles like in many of the IWM minis, I'd be supremely happy to paint those as well.

These jewelings had gone better on earlier minis. Still, this was a vast improvement over my old approach of "lasers red".

 

Jump Jets

My Stormcrow was doomed to roam the ground on wherever it was deployed, so only the Viper got glowing JJ nozzles. To keep up with my earlier decisions and to remain somewhat constant, I got the same blue I used for the PPCs (VGC 72023 Electric Blue) and edited it with the same RAL white as all the jewelings. For a hopefully more gentle transitions I added a drop of tap water into my paint when I started.

According to the TRO the Jump Jet layout was LT/RT with 2 each, also LL/LR so eight nozzles for eight-hex leaps.

Hm. These looked nicer than the ones I painted previously into the butt-side of Grendel A. Maybe one day I'd get all these funny details into such a state where I was equally pleased with each of them.

My time usage crawled up to 2h 40mins. This last set of pics handily told me that I had accidentally skipped a caution stripe set from the LL.