Second Line basecoat

Clan Jade Wolf 14.12.3057 - 2.1.3058

You may have been able to guess already, that I spent a ridiculous time pondering on the Wolf Galaxy selection from different angles, and how I checked Camospecs, UCC, and Sarna. Delta Galaxy was on top of my list as it was anything but Beta Galaxy but it was still visually related so it was easy for even me to recognize as Wolf. The problem with both Beta and Delta in this case was that they were Frontline Galaxies loaded with Omnis, and therefore had no IIC units.

Of course no one forced me to follow the canon, or to even care about things like unit lists, as one could paint everything however they liked, or skip painting altogether. My internal and quieted nerd just didn't want to accept any sort of changes to somehow set guidelines.

Then it struck me, while scrolling through The Falcon and the Wolf sourcebook. Those Crusader Wolves who survived the Refusal War got enrolled into the very briefly serving ilKhan Crichell's Clan Jade Wolf. Somehow there was next to nothing about the Touman of the Jade Wolves, so I could poke these pretty much as I pleased.

Fan art, src: MWLL forum

Alpha Galaxy

Despite my efforts I didn't find any kind of a definition for a paint scheme for any of their three Galaxies (Alpha, Epsilon, Tau). Not that their Clusters were that far defined, either, most likely caused by the less than three week lifespan of this silly Galaxy, mixed in with the real life (FASA) issues with communication.

So I decided that while gathering the surviving Wolves they had grouped them however it made sense, where it made sense. This fivelet was grouped from the remnants of different Galaxies of the Clan that lost the Refusal War and whatever their 'Mechs had painted on before got painted over with something that made it look like a same group at least until someone got to decide what the new Galaxies would eventually parade in. Until the damn thing got rebranded again and the Freeborn Techs got whipped due to wrong-painted units - and made to repaint some more.

This silly idea just pulled a rug from under my other idea where I'd tried out the freshly replaced armour panels painting them with either a boring grey or the basecoat after doing all the battle damage and such. Maybe I'd get to try that one on a future set of 'Mechs.

Back to the topic at hand: I did check the lists that I assigned my BattleMechs into a Cluster and a Trinary where they could at least technically have been in. There were a number of Novas available, but I didn't want to waste my few Elementals on this group. This Star ended up in the 103rd Striker Cluster's ("Red Thunder") Command Trinary's second Assault Star, so in the end of the queue.

Grey pants

Quite predictably I started overbrushing the lower torso with Cold Grey (VMA 72750). This time I gave coverage a higher priority than the preservation of panel lines and shadows. I also covered the future-metallic parts instead of paranoidly protecting them from any paint. I expected this to make my process a bit smoother than in the previous project.

Light tan top

With this amount of minis in progress it was pretty convenient that when the last one was painted from that cycle, the first one was ready for the next iteration. I had originally thought of painting the tops with Dunkelgelb but before I got that far in my paint stash the Panzer Aces Camouflage Set (Vallejo 70179) that the Yule Goat brought caught my eye. The set contained some neat-looking colours for this stuff and Tan Earth (VMC 70874) sounded the most accurate for this stuff.

 

My painting process was the same as with the grey, a damp brush and overbrushing. This paint was a degree thicker than the VMA series stuff, so I had to redampen my brush every once in a while to maintain the flow. I was left with some touch-ups to do, but they wouldn't be much of an issue in the early stages of the next process step.

Posing

If this wasn't screaming Wolf to you, I didn't know what was. Luckily they were not going to stay like this, maybe even the next evening I could add some jade highlights for the glory of the Falcons, and some metallic paints for the first time in a long while now. I was thinking of the different weapons here, and that I was pondering on the metallic paint on the next Gauss Gun I was going to meet, and here we had two of those to begin with. In this scheme the "dark grey as unpainted metal" approach I have favoured would work fantastically well, but maybe for a unified look I would opt for a metallic paint for everything instead of just the Gauss Guns. The Sepia wash would help bringing any excess shininess down a notch, anyway.