Three-Point metals and jades

Endosteel and jade

At this point I'd paint the last conveyor beltable main parts that were pretty much similar in all the three miniatures. Of course I could've smashed all this into the previous post, but I had to respect paint drying times.

Bare metal

For my unpainted metal I thinned down some dark grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) and applied it on all the relevant parts. Unsurprisingly my approach was now the same as it had been for a couple of years now: gun barrels, front-facing plates, grilles, and the joints that looked like they got any and all paint scratched off them. In plain English I followed my gut feeling.

I thinned my paint a bit more than normally so it was like a pretty thick wash. This way the earlier greyscale basic basecoat gave details on the darker surfaces too. On the guns of the Turkina and Ebon Jaguar this worked fantastically, so in hindsight I could've done the same on Warhawk to gain this visual variance. Complaining over a splilled coffee didn't make anything better, nor would it affect the end result.

 

This started to look like actual progress.

Before moving on I gently drybrushed the metal surfaces that were conveniently available, using Cold Grey. In practice this meant that I added some more texture on the guns and a couple of rear leg parts.

 

This wasn't yet the moment for blacking out the barrel openings or viewports. I also wanted to doublecheck what each of them had as their Prime loadouts, somehow I had no issues remembering what Warhawk Prime carried but the others and their variants were a bit more obscure in my books.

Cluster highlights

If metals were painted by the seat of my pants, it was even more true with the jade highlights:

Yeah, this was a good moment to stop. Next I'd start ruining my paintjobs with the freehanded stuff.

Three-Point greens

The green camo part

The camouflage as a term was a term that sounded a bit too planned in this case. Each of my Points or their components had their own style and sometimes even shades. All I ever intended was a shape-breaking with the mess(es) I made.

Taping first and foremost

I spent a single evening (about 40 minutes) playing with masking tape. This was quite simple, I just set a length of it on the cutting mat and started slashing different shreds and triangles out of it. None of this had any specific plan or a thought-out goal, until I got the idea of the Warhawk having a flamelike thing in the top CT.

My partner was half-observing this nonsense from the next seat while doing her own stuff, and after a while said that she'd thrown all of this into the wall after mere moments, as it was so frustrating to see. I, on the other hand, found it incredibly relaxing because it required enough concentration to drive all work-related things from my mind.

Then the colour

Again I was forced to realize that I simply didn't own any medium or light green Vallejo * Air series paint, but the darker ones I had a bunch. Instead of airbrushing I then returned to the overbrushing mode. The green I used (VMC 70942 Light Green) was a bit thicker than the Model Airs so I thinned it down a bit with Vallejo's acrylic thinner before anything else.

Over this layer I also drybrushed with a lighter mix. On my jam jar lid the difference between shades was clear but it didn't show that much on the miniatures.

 

Tapelessness

Actually finding and then peeling off the tinies of tape fractions took almost as much time as cutting and placing them, or painting the greens. That was quite a bit of tinkering. Of course I also missed a few and found them on my wip photos afterwards.

 

 

Next up: bare steel surfaces!

Three-Point greyness

For the grey stripes

My overall approach to these Gamma Galaxy miniatures had been pretty much unchanged for a while. First they got the grey basecoat, then a lighter drybrushing, then the camo pattern was painted on with greens, with or without masking. I even checked from my older posts, how did I do this the last time and thought of ways to improve on it.

Cold Grey

This time I didn't want to go for a 100% coverage with grey paint, I let the black primer to show in the panel lines and darkest shadows. On the first quick round I left the arms alone, so I wouldn't slap my sausage fingers onto wet paint. When I was done with the first cycle, I painted the missing bits out of the way.

Overbrushing was the general name of this method, and I used VGA 72750 Cold Grey as a trusted shade of grey:

Warhawk

Ebon Jaguar

Turkina

Stonewall greybrushing

At some point last Autumn I encountered some discussion about drybrushing and there some folks were enthusiastic about the differences between wet-brush and dry-brush drybrushing. The claim was that a water-moistened brush made the results [a bit] smoother, so I thought I'd give it a shot just out of curiosity with the one semibad drybrushing brush I owned. For this I used, predictably, my go-to highlighter VGA 72749 Stonewall Grey.

Warhawk

Before I got any further I took a comparison shot between a drybrushed and the not-airbrushed surface:

A Warhawk was always a fantastic view, especially from the viewpoint of infantry.

Ebon Jaguar

 

Turkina

On these three only the Warhawk's ER PPCs were modeled so that I could just leave them alone at this point. Both the Ebon Jaguar and the Turkina had structures in their hands that I wanted to have painted, so the barrels also got painted, even as they were going to be repainted dark grey not much later on.

Next I should come up with a plan for the camo pattern I would do. Maybe I'd do wavy lines like the previous time.

Had I been smarter, I'd done all this now for my Elementals as well, as I had an assigned Star of them waiting in a box.

Project II/25

More Points for Jade Falcons

After a long stint with the diorama, I wanted something simpler to spice up my life, so I checked my Operation:REVIVAL minis. I only had about two Binaries unpainted so I took the most fitting ones for the 9th Falcon Talon Cluster, and the remaining, less prominent Points would become some enemy troops or other.

Every once in a while the enginerd inspiration struck and I improved my BattleTechTracker, which I originally set up just to get rid of my A4 paper with the Point numbers and have something more updateable. As you might imagine, that got out of hand quickly and repeatedly. While writing this post, my setup had 8 sheets of which was dedicated to following the state of the 9th Talon Cluster: there was the overall painting status based on the completed minis; the positions of individual Points in the org with their variants, numbers and weight classes; and a table for the weight distribution through the Cluster. This one made me drop almost a Binaryful of 'Mechs from my original setup, which included a pair of Cougars and Fire Moths each, for example.

 

I wasn't staring at tables when I picked which minis to paint, no worries. From the Clan Heavy Battle Star box I got a Turkina and an Ebon Jaguar, and from the Clan Fire Star box I took only the Warhawk.

Partially primed init();

During some evenings last Autumn I had primed a Binary of miniatures, the other Binary or the last two untouched boxes were still waiting. So this project started with 33,333...% of the initialization already done out of the way.

Like I said, the Warhawk had been primed several months ago, mostly likely while waiting for some other paintjob to dry.