Diamond Shark jewels

Uniquenesses

This has been, for a good while, one of the most fun stages in my BT painting sessions. The bits that had been painted more or less the same way now got a bit of unique treatment and not everything was a conveyor belt anymore.

Cockpits and energy weapons

Again I decided to skip the deepest details in my descriptions, as we've gone through these many times. The most important choice was the cockpit viewport colour, which ended up being red, maybe unsurprisingly. I thought of using green, because it's been a nice and simple colour to shade, but I liked the contrast between red and blue more. I had used orange on the Ghost Bears, which also worked nicely, so red range was good for me.

Before getting further ahead of myself I wrote down a list of the weapon types and counts to support my foul memory. The queue contained a couple of red small lasers, a handful of green mediums, some lonely blue larges and PPCs. All remaining sensorlike things I decided to do in orange. I also decided to leave the gloss varnish in the very end.

 

This time I didn't do any kind of a glow effect on the ER PPC pair, but I was thinking if I ought to do that anyway. The effect had worked somehow nicely - or at least tolerably - in the earlier CGL Turkina and Warhawk.

 

My group photo would've been much more impressive had the Piranha with its mostly black hex base been more in line with its Starmates. 

Clearer silvering

I still wasn't too happy with the grey bits, the gentle lines were fine in a way but you couldnt' really see them anything but up close. So I spent almost an hour with my detail brush, adding greyish white lines and splotches. Maybe it was stronger an effect than what I absolutely needed, but it was my first go at this sort of stuff.

Shark teeth for them sharks

According to the specs a Warrior who had at least one confirmed kill, could have a shark mouth painted in an appropriate place. Implementing something like that by hand on these tiny pieces was suspicious to say the least, but I felt confident painting two of these. Cougar with its planelike CT was an easy choice.

I started by painting a disturbingly large black mouth. The nose cone was shaped so that two separate mouths would've looked a bit odd so I made one that wrapped around the hull.

To achieve a tongue I painted red blobs into both sides. This made the expression look quite goofy :D

 

Finally I painted tiny toothlike shapes all around the mouth, using the same greyish white as elsewhere. Maybe it looked like something from a decent distance.

The other 'Mech where I dared to add a set of teeth was Stormcrow C that had just a nice shape in the CT, for a tiny mouth. None of the others were large enough for me to try this trick. Unlike the Cougar, this one was going to have two separate mouths on either side of the CT.

Like earlier, I added tiny tongues into the small half-mouths.

Of the two the left one, in the second photo below, worked out much more nicely. It was a surprise, because the LBX-AutoCannon was constantly on the way with all the painting.

While looking at this last photo I was thinking that the AutoCannon might benefit from one more, brighter drybrushing. It wasn't bad now, but it could be kicked up a notch. Bam!