The first four
It was a solemn moment, starting something completely new and all without any kind of pre-given specifications or even plans for a paint scheme. Even if I had played with this unit on the computer, the schemes always came from the game's patterns and therefore had their own limits. Now I had to come up with something that I could both implement and repeat in the real world. Phew.
Somehow shockingly the German three-tone camo was an overall style I had paints for in my stash, and that was nicely different from all the other BT paintjobs I had attempted so far. Then, from some weird depths of my brain I thought of the digicamo that I had once tried out and decided to be fun. So why not try it on something as tiny as these bits here?
A sand yellow base
I decided to start with the lightest shade, so I airbrushed all the miniatures with a Sand Yellow (VMA 71278). This was a nice, quick basecoat.
Another and completely opposite approach would've been to do green or brown, then cover some of that with masking tape, then paint with the other colour, mask even more, and then finish with the tiniest surface area of sand yellow. My memory told me I did this in a slightly inconvenient way the last time so maybe this was a better order of busines. Or I misremembered misremembering and accidentally did the exact same thing I did the last time.
Masking
The last time I made painting masks for minis I made tiny triangles and some sort of waveshapes. Now I'd do the same but only using squares or as squarelike things I could manage with an exacto knife. First I laid down about a 10cm straight run of Tamiya's 10mm masking tape and started cutting it into squares along the cutting mat's lines. Then I cut them in two horizontally and a few times vertically. Now I had a good number of about 2,5mm pieces to get started.
During the first hours I got one Devastator and one Marauder mostly masked.
At that point I needed more tape squares so I did pretty much the same but cut a number of them into even smaller pieces which gave me 1,25mm squares for smaller surfaces. Even if I had two Assault- and Heavy -class 'Mechs, these tiniest tape bits were pretty large considering the scale. Imagine these on a truly tiny miniature like a Locust or a Flea.
After a second evening of painstaking sticker-placement I had a mummified Lance. No one else, were they an innocent bystander or a colleague who heard my description, considered this stuff calming and almost meditative behaviour. I just sat and applied pieces of masking tape to where they felt they wanted to settle on, a bit like if Bob Ross was applying them instead of painting.
Camouflage: Soviet green
Judging my pre-selected medium greens I also tested how they compared. Of the three options I had at hand the Soviet Protective Green 4BO (VMA 71017) looked like it worked best with my current mood. That decided I loaded up my airbrush and blasted away.
This process wasn't planned carefully for a three-tone scheme, because the paint covered the masking tapes really, really well. From this state adding more tape to protect the green layer didn't work too well because I'd been doing it blind.
Of course I could've just added some random pixels and leave multi-edged gaps and get an acceptable result. I just wanted to see and know better what I was doing, instead of doing a luck-based third layer. I pulled of all the tape pieces and declared being done with it at least three times, and still found some well-hidden tiny ones after that :D
Demasking
Of course I was taking photos at all sorts of stages, these photos here were after the second camo layer. The funniest thing was that the masking tape bits didn't catch my bare and bad eyes while being painfully obvious on screen, even on the phone. This set of four photos showed you immediately at least 8 mask pieces.
All in all they looked neat with the first attempt at a small-scale digicamo. Of course the planned brown would've given more variety, but even a two-colour effect was quite fun.
Metallic surfaces
On the bare metal parts I was following my very familiar dark grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) path. Devastators had lots of obvious barrels, also they had some in their heads and backs that I might've not recognized. In addition to those I painted the various grilles and vents that looked approrpiate. Of their arms I painted the elbow actuators differently on each 'Mech: one got the whole complex in raw metal, the other just got the smaller and more hingelike part metallified.
My Marauders sadly had fewer clearly unpainted parts. I did the ankles, the rear hull's vents and whatever caught my eye. On a touchup round I also did the intakes by the cockpits, they just felt like it even if I had camouflaged them earlier.
Then I drybrushed the dark greys with cold grey for a bit of metallic sheen. That gave me the idea of testing a light drybrushing over the light-catching surfaces of one of the Marauders, and that worked nicely. I proceeded to do that on the rest. Finally I took some more photos and still found more tape pieces!
At this point I still wasn't sure if I wanted to add a few Panzerbraun pixels in some random spots or not. I had been flipflopping between yes and no quite heavily depending on the viewing angles and the lighting conditions.
Marauder dorsal guns
Having ignored them for long, I had to start painting the four dorsal guns. I really should've done them along with the minis themselves but I hadn't taken them out for painting and they were, like I said, simply ignored. My fault for being dumb.
Instead of starting with the Sand Yellow I just painted them mostly Black Grey. The sandy parts got done in a couple of brushed-on layers, because I didn't feel like setting up the airbrushing stuff for eight puffs of paint, even if that would've guaranteed a much nicer coating.
So yeah, I was thinking that the dorsal guns would be mostly bare metal and only the breech area would be hull-like. Over a basic brushjob I'd drybrush for highlights to get them to the same state with the hulls.
Window bases
In preparation for the jeweling I painted the viewports and gun ports black.
Panzer browning after all
Like I had written earlier, I had been going back and forth about the brown pixels. Finally I decided to add a few per 'Mech. I outlined a handful of various shapes onto each of them:
Instead of airbrushing or paintbrushing I went with the sponge ( VMC 70826 German Camo Brown) to fill the outlined pixels. After a bit of flashing time I removed the tapes, and while taking these off I still found individuals I had not encountered on the previous three, four times!
This was a very good place for a break.
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