Painting a trash can

Priming

Like I've done a bunch of times in a row now, I primed the miniature with red primer VSP 70624 Pure Red). This time I didn't feel like setting up the airbrush, so I did this by hand.

 

For this projectful of posts I decided to tone down the "a pic from the front, another from the rear" photosets in each of the steps by gimping together a set of photos from the same step. This should make the posts a bit better contained and reduce the "I've seen this same pic with tiny changes six times already" effect I've had on occasion,

Choosing a theme

Originally I was a bit lost with what I would actually want to do with this Urbie, it wasn't going to join my Jade Falcon Cluster, and it also didn't have a clear suggestion in the box like last year's Archer. I also hadn't thought of what kind of a theme my yet-to-be-founded Merc unit, so undone work didn't really help here. Somehow the UrbanMech didn't lure me to paint it as a Kell Hound nor some other well-known Merc outfit.

Then I saw once again a pic that some more active social media users had been sharing pretty happily earlier, and that one struck a chord immediately:

(c) Eldoniusrex

Being a bit simple, I didn't want to make a green-grey unit like in the pic above, instead I wanted to celebrate the original Doomguy by keeping his bare arms in the show somehow.

 

Combat overalls

Thanks to the cats sleeping over my primary paint store, I chose from my dynamic level 1 cache a few bottles of paint. Of course I had no perfect green paint for this, so I had to mix up a new one to get where I wanted to go. To begin with I squirted some Soviet green (VMA 71281 3B Russian Green), and added two droplets of yellow ochre (VMA 71033). This I brushed on the overalls, and in my excitement a bit over the helmet as well.

As you could tell, it was a pretty dark shade of green. For some reason I tried to do some sort of a wet blending here, so I mixed in another drop of yellow and painted smaller surfaces set off upwards inside the first green layer. My idea was to leave the darkest layer as shadows. Finally I realized I had repeated this to get five consecutively brighter layers, leaving me quite a bit of a different shade than where I started from. Here's a couple of pics for those super interested in the progress of the layer-painting approach:

Yes, indeed, the mini was darker than the VGA-coloured corporate space marine. I planned using a bit more of a bright green as highlight when the basic painting was all done.

Bare arms and the sixpack window

Our Doomsday hero had bare upper arms and a pretty strange window in his shirt to show off his wounded abdominal muscles, so that's what I tried to imitate. Luckily the UrbanMech had four armour panels in a very convenient place in the middle of the Center Torso, so this worked nicely despite the Urbie doing a bit of a torso twist.

This trashcan had no actual arms, obviously, so I decided that I was just going to paint some bits in the gun pods attached the Upper Arm Actuators to get some kind of a skin theme going on. To start this I used a very generically named wood (VMA 71077 Wood) to block out the bare skin patches for later paintings. These I intended to highlight somehow, as soon as I had the areas defined first.

Now the downside of the red primer at this stage was that it made my mini look pretty damn weird. A red-yellow-green piece looked like a handful of fruit-flavoured candy, just much more foul-tasting.

Combat boots and the helmet

I thought that my cold grey (VGA 72750 Cold Grey) was just perfectly dark for this stuff, but nope, it most definitely was not. I had painted the legs from the knees down, and the head cupola to decide whether my colour-blocking worked or not.

The business part of the armament, those being the Autocannon (AC/10) and the flashlight's (SLas) tubes and related bits, the antennae, and the knee joints I painted with German Grey (VMA 71052 German Grey). Yeah, I was pleased with this method of marking metallic pieces without using metallic paints.

At this point the warm yellows and greens worked together just nicely, but the aptly named cold grey didn't match with them at all. I had to start reading about colour theory, or something, to find a recipe for a warmer grey to this miniature. Most likely a drop of (dark) red would take me far, but that had to be tested.

Towards the next step

In any case the basic paintjob was going to be as it was. Mostly I wanted to see if my idea made any sense or was it just an ugly mishmash. If we ignored the colour temperatures, I was happy with this scheme. Of course I had many opportunities for ruining it, but I didn't want to worry about that yet.

Setting up the scheme and blocking the colour surfaces took me about two hours in total, next I was going to fine-tune things. Would I get that done in two hours as well? I'd tell you the next time.