Fire Mandrill's Mattila-Carrol paint scheme

Kindraa Mattila-Carrol

Spoiled by the heading, I chose the paint scheme with very little thinking: I wanted it to be a clearly and easily recognizeable paintjob. Considering they were Fire Mandrills I expected it to be flashy, so yellow with something else. Based on some flicking through Camospecs and UCS I was flip-flopping between Kindraa Kline (yellow base, red and green highlights) and Kindraa Mattila-Carrol (yellow base, red and/or black highlights). I chose the latter because it looked a bit less like Winter Solstice decorations.

Sandy yellow base

Had I started just painting these five with something brightly yellow, the result would've very likely been something bad. For starters I coated them all with Sand Yellow (VMA71278 Sand Yellow RLM79) that I had really liked so far.

Especially on the black-primed Howler I let the shadows remain, with the IWM gang I paid more attention on coverage to keep their previous Clan Jade Falcon ownership less obvious. I didn't really care now where I was going to add the red highlights to, I didn't think skipping those would've made much of a difference.

Lemon yellow

Luckily I found some bright yellow (VMC 70952 Lemon Yellow) from deep in my collection. I started drybrushing it on over the pieces, concentrating on the upper and more prominent surfaces. The shadows, like always, could remain in relative peace.

 

The difference to the previous step was noticeable. After taking this photo I poked a few of the metallic parts with black grey (VMA 71056) just to see how that stood out. The actual metal painting was in turn sometime later.

 

Hull red highlight areas

With the walking armoured lemons looking this fine I started searching for the highlightable parts. For the highlights I wanted to follow a similar approach of "very dark base first, then a cautious application of the brighter shade over it", because tweaking a bright red with white turned that into pink, which was something I definitely did not want.

For the reds I started with hull red (VMC 70985 Hull Red) that looked quite a lot like dried blood. Once again I wanted asymmetric decorations, especially with three physically identical 'Mechs in a row.

Howler

Fire Moth

Kit Fox 1/3

Kit Fox 2/3

Kit Fox 3/3

They looked quite weird with the dark red-browns. The process was to be trusted.

Highlighting the highlights with bright red

The next evening I painted some RLM23 red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23) over the hull red parts.

The bright reds worked nicely. The first layer was pretty good, but I was left thinking if I ought to highlight the upper surfaces and edges a bit more with drybrushing or more specific edge highlighting.

Metal \,,/

I had taken an early start with the bare metal parts and now I concentrated on them purposefully. All the usual bits like the gun barrels, missile launcher fronts, grilles and joints were, well, the usual targets. This Star had an unusual amount of Hands on the 'Mechs and I painted them all grey for the uniform style.

While painting dark greys and drybrushing them, I also painted all the gun openings and cockpit canopies in flat black.

They we going to be fun.