Fire Mandrill jewels and oils

Project's second and last stage?

Having the viewports prepared in black the last time, it was a quick start this time. But. The IWM miniatures, especially the Kit Foxes had incredibly tiny lens spaces. I would be taking this jewel stuff much easier than earlier.

Jeweling effects

I decided to use only two layers on the energy weapons: first with the actual type colour, then a single white-grey dot for the effect itself.

The canopies I thought to paint in blue, as it would stand out nicely. This time I didn't start mixing shades myself but used two blues instead. Over the black I painted a layer of Magic Blue (VGA 72721), then a smaller more or less L or crescent-shaped effect on each panel with AMT-7 (VMA 71318 Greyish Blue AMT-7), and then in the inner and opposing corrners off-white (VMA 71119 White Grey) fake reflections, just like in the energy weapon lenses.

Howler was a piece of cake, it only had viewports and they were decently sized for my talents. I also prepared its hex base to be able to tell the toes and random paint smudges apart from each other.

Fire Moth had a tight viewport area, but I got some kind of an effect painted on with enough spinning around. Its Left Arm's ERMLas pair was tiny in diameter but at least you could see them. I spent a moment thinking of the SRM tips because I wanted to keep using my old idea of two-tone caps. First I painted the peeking missile tips greyish white, then I touched their very tips with some black grey. Even if these were of an acceptable size to paint, it was still a bit funky to paint them half-cross-eyed. 

Kit Foxes were each treated identically. Their viewports were even narrower than the Fire Moth's but I did my best. Those two lasers in the Left Arm were ridiculous to paint to say the least. Those shapes I declared the lenses of the Small Pulse Lasers I painted red, then the identical bits next to them, ER Large Lasers, I painted with Magic Blue. Finally I attempted to paint the even tinier grey white dots into them. On their foreheads they had those huge sensors, which I painted Fire Orange, again with the off-white reflection.

On the Right Arm's pod they had a Streak SRM-6 launcher riding next to an LB-5X, this version apparently blasted out the full set of one single tube. I painted them the same exact way I painted the Fire Moth's SRMs.

A group photo:

There was a detail I was thinking of was the pretty simple Point rank marking that the Fire Mandrills had. A red triangle standing on its tip with one to five golden semihorizontal lines behind it. I just couldn't paint them acceptably in this scale on those tiny armour plates, so I didn't do it.

Oil washing and cleaning

My usual approach to this was the familiar Abteilung's Sepia oil paint (ABT002 Sepia) thinned down to a wash. I let the wash settle in for about twenty minutes.

Then I cleaned up the excesses and let the minis to cure overnight.

Before going further I was thinking if I should highlight the upper red and yellow parts after the oil wash had toned them all down a bit. Of course this wasn't my own idea, I had seen it in a bunch of places already, so I gave it a shot and returned some brightness to the minis.

Howler's hex base

Being the only one with an unprepared the base, the Howler required some terrain for it. Maybe I'd use Vallejo's Mud goo and then apply some Woodland Scenics' Ballast and Foliage as the others had something similar?

When the glue holding the ballast was dry, I thinned down some Abteilung's Industrial Earth (ABT090) and used that on each of the five minis and feet. This unified them somewhat more, despite the age difference.

Now I only needed to remember to superglue some greenery in there...

Front edges

For the hex edges I thought I'd do them yellow the same way I painted the yellow parts of the 'Mechs. first the sand yellow, then lemon yellow. That then gave me the idea of making them somehow unique: I'd paint the Point marking in there, because the symbol was pretty simple. As the starting point I painted the down-facing triangles with hull red, and then added the 1-5 slashes as the space allowed.

I outsourced the Point ranking to Project Assistant II: Howler was #4, Fire Moth #5 and the Kit Foxes in order #1, #3, #2. You could tell that in this scale painting anything more than three tiny lines was overdifficult for me.

With the ranks decided I painted, just for the simple fun of it, the marks into the bottoms as well. It was a complete waste of time but I happened to have some idle time, I did it anyway. 

With these done I redid the rest of the hex edges with black grey, and started feeling like this pack of monkeys was ready. Except that I had forgotten to use the gloss varnish on the glossy bits. After a quick varnish-applying moment, and gluing that cursed tuft in place, I was actually done.