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.