DropShip wash-jeweling

Filth and sparkles

Just pin washing with the accompanying cleaning and blending would've been a bit of a quick subprocess to be described in a single post, so I'd also include jeweling and maybe some battle damage in one. Had I thought of the damage a bit earlier, I might have done something physical earlier.

Oil washing with cleanup

I made a mix of thin wash (Abteilung ABT002 Sepia) and concentrated on the panel lines and some stronger shadows, like the bottom of the DropShip. Just to add a bit more variety I also used it on the dip in the crown. Some more shadowing I attempted to include to the insets of the gun turrets.

I also remembered to wash the various hoses on the landing struts. The effect wasn't enormous but it was important anyway.

Cleaning up

After my miniature had been settling for a while I blended away the overflows and shadows to make them make more sense. I cleaned the engine nozzles a bit more, because I wanted the sandy colour to be visited while still being scorched by the fusion torches.

Maybe these photos revealed my trick: the landing gear doors were unoiled because I had been using them as fingerholds while spinning the space egg around. When everything else was done I coated the upper and lower doors with thinner and then applied my sepia wash on. This wet on wet -approach was aimed to get me a soft texture. We'd see that result later.

At this point I left my Overlord-C to dry in the sauna for two days. I didn't want to make a mess on my washes with fingerprints only because I was impatient.

Armament

The DropShip had a good amount of weapon hardpoints that didn't give any clue on what was what and why. According to Sarna it had 35 weapons:

• 6x ER PPC
• 3x ER LLas
• 3x LPLas
• 12x MPLas
• 6x UAC/5
• 2x UAC/20
• 3x LRM-20 Artemis IV

The miniature had 30 hardpoints modeled:

• 4x 5-lens blisters
• 2x 2-barreled down-facing turrets
• 2x 2-barreled up-facing turrets
• 2x 1-barrel up-facing turret

Perhaps the LRM launchers were behind some armoured panels, just like the good old Brotherhood of Nod SAM sites back in the nineties, so I concentrated on the energy weapons and Ultra AutoCannons. Still we had two modeled hardpoints missing compared to the specs. I decided somehow vaguely how to assing the weaponry.

Those four five-lens things would get ER PPCs in the centers. I could have an equal set of Medium Pulse Lasers if each blisters got three of them. So I had four energy weapons to be allocated on the blisters still, which could be 50/50 for both types of Large Lasers and I'd be left with one of each in excess. This would give me 2/3 of the hardware set, on top of the two lasers just mentioned I'd have all eight UACs and two ER PPCs left. Something had to be skipped, in addition to the unmodeled missile launchers.

I could get all of the UACs in if they used the twin-barreled turrets, they all looked the same but maybe the tubery of the navy was all in the same caliber but they just had different fire rate for different AutoCannon class? With that I had the single-barrel turrets left and they'd be some sort of blue no matter what the weapon type was. Being a known friend of PPCs I was probably going for them, not that the dot colours mattered in a game, I just wanted to follow my own rules.

Planning done out of the way I got to paint. Each weapon barrel got painted black to begin with and then I applied more AK Interactive's Ultra Matt Varnsih on all hatches and the crown of the DropShip. When that was dry I could spin the mini pretty freely in my hands.

This also meant that my UAC/5 and UAC/20 barrels were already completed. Quick and fun.

ER PPC

I used three shades for each of the six ER PPCs. The first one was a simple base of electric blue, the I made a slightly lighter one in the middle of it and finally in the core of that dot an even lighter and smaller dot. These were so sillily tiny that I didn't even try to do anything more fancy and difficult. Even with my tiniest and sharpest brushes the tinies dots was almost the size of the lens itself.

ER Large Laser / Large Pulse Laser

For my large-class lasers I used Magic Blue, also in three layers. For the simple fun of it I set the individual Large death rays on a different node in each of the blisters. I started with the top one, and then proceeded clockwise around the DropShip. Maybe this was a way to signal that at least in my mind these blisters could turn, spin, and rotate as needed?

Medium Pulse Laser

My Medium Pulse Lasers used up the rest of the slots in the blisters so I didn't get to play with their alignments. Basing my lasers on Escorpena Green as always, again doing three layers even if it wasn't that visible in the end.

Ultra matt layers

When the paints were dry I applied the ultra matt varnish over the whole miniature. On some spots it felt like it simply flowed off the glossy surface, so I had to cover some bits up a few times.

All in all the first coverage was good as a whole, a bit of fine-tuning was normal.

Chipping without rust

All this was still a bit clean so I added some battle damage and general bumpmarks in various places. I started this by doing some light grey (VMA 71276 USAF Light Grey) welts as long scars, as if they were carved by passing laser beams. After that I made some hit series mostly to pretend they were the walking bursts of some AutoCannons.

In addition to my artesanal wounds I sponged some chipmarks as well. I tried to stop myself in time to avoid going overboard. For that same reason I didn't even think of adding a rust wash because that would not fit the them at all.

Inside the light flakes and scars I used the often-used "a drop of red mixed with dark grey" stuff. It worked very, very nicely on a lightish grey base, also with the dark grey bare steel bits.

This left me just the scorching to be done, either with dark grey or black.

Carbonizing

Instead of flat black or the dark grey I made a mix to make it stand out from the unpainted metal. I drybrushed with a damp brush the engine nozzle area and the DropShip's bottom to see how it worked, and then worked my way up onto the battle damage on the more visible surfaces. While working on those I came up with the idea of darkening this way the 1700-2000 sector of the Galaxy emblem's planet. That simple thing made it look that much more like a planet than a white disc.

To add more engine burn effect I concentrated my darkening efforts to the lower edges of the DropShip, as well as the lower ends of the armoured doors of the landing struts.

The bananas of the moment weren't feeling too photogenic so I used a nougat-filled egg shell for scale:

This ground-viewpoint was pretty fun, now I needed to achieve that conveniently in my light tent. I was pretty much done with the painting process, all I had left was touching up the final glossy bits that truly didn't want to become matt.

DropShip markings

Double marking

First thing I did was to measure the max width of the Clan emblem that I could fit nicely on the side of the Overlord-C. 35mm looked like it would sit in nicely, so I took the simplest of the Clan markings I could find to print with the b&w laser of ours. There wasn't quite as much to choose from for the Galaxy marking, so I used the official one. Like I said, I scaled the Clan one down to 35mm, and the Galaxy one to 30mm width. 

Preview was polite and offered the option to print the same image multiple times on the same A4 as long as I remembered to readjust the scaling back to 100%. Due to the complex shapes of the Clan emblem I printed that out nine times to give myself some space to fail, the Galaxy emblem I expected to be ok with just two layers so I went double to be safe.

The Galaxy insignia

Because the Gamma Galaxy marking could be achieved with two simple stencils, I started with it. I cut the planet off from one of the prints, using a fresh blade. Of another one I cut the bird out. The beak of Turkina would be painted by hand anyway, I really wasn't going to use a separate stencil for those tiny things.

This left me thinking how to achieve a nice result with the smartest - or laziest - approach. I'd start with the planet by painting it white, then doing some sort of a crescent or a C-shape with grey, depending on how my airbrush handling would be. My jade green wasn't from any of the Vallejo $foo Air series so I'd either have to thin it down by gues, or optionally I could blast some dark grey or black for the outline and then sponge the green on that. The latter option sounded pretty decent now that I thought of it.

A snow white world

I taped the first stencil onto a nice spot on the hull. The surroundings got covered by a hectare of masking tape to avoid any and all possible and impossible overspray. Unless I sneezed while airbrushing, that is.

To get a first planet shape done I based it with stonewall grey to get it completely done. I tried to keep my painting angle straight to avoid shooting paint under the edges.

Right after I blasted a bit of white to the right top corner, probably I'd been ok with a bit smaller surface for the effect.

Checking the results after peeling all the protection was quite a tense moment. It looked neat. Now I just needed to not make a mess of it with the second layer.

A Jade Falcon over a planet

Thinking of this whole thing I came up with the idea of painting the bird black to begin with to get the outlines done. This'd make it look more like the source material.

Instead of trying to thin down the VGC jade to pass through the airbrush I went with the sponging approach, to introduce some subtle surface texture on it as well.

Otherwise it was nice but there was some passthrough visible on the right wing.

I covered up the most visible mess with cold grey. I didn't use the last minutes of my painting time to try to fix the feather gaps, those were a task for the next session if I remembered and was bothered by them. Then I painted the beak with yellow ochre, and added the chest line and eyebrow with black, all the time comparing agaisnt the printout.

Clan insignia

The Jade Falcon emblem was a rather complex setup, so I started simplifying it straight away in an attempt to reduce the failure probability. I wasn't going to airbrush all of the little angles and tilts. This first part was going to be the dark violet thing that was also a colour I didn't possess and I had to mix one up before starting. RLM red and either Magic or Electric blue was the probable set for mixing, maybe darkening with dark grey if needed.

I chose a higher position on the opposite side to the Galaxy emblem for the new mask, and started taping. My paint mix was a pretty much 50/50 (RLM23, Magic Blue) that didn't require any darkening. And yes, I left a gap around the tail feathers and the katana on purpose, I did not forget to cut those.

Again, it worked surprisingly well. I was going to add the red line to follow the outer edges at some point, as that was in the source image.

Jade Falcon with a katana

As my second layer stencil I cut off the Falcon and the katana. Because I liked this idea on the other emblem, I blasted the background black now as well.

To make the Jade Falcons look alike I sponged some slightly thnned down jade green onto the opening. I could've gone further with the tail feathers but I was mostly interested in getting the texture and overall coverage done, not a 100% printed out quality which would've been absolutely unattainable.

Just to be sure of this I made a third mask only for the katana and the talons, I didn't trust my freehanding skills to get a nice enough straight line. This also gave me a much clearer placement idea for different pieces than what mere eyeballing provided.

I left the katana handle as it was, and painted the blade only starting with gunmetal. Then I did a bit of an attempt at the specific edge for the blade with steel. The beak and talons I painted with yellow ochre. From a bit further away it looked pretty fun, looking as close as the camera did I spotted more issues. One of the little things that bothered me was the grey area between the left underwing and the purple bit, somehow the masking had gone misaligned. Fixing that wasn't going to be super easy because I didn't trust my ability mix up a perfect match for the purple. Maybe I had to try anyway.

The final key detail was the red line on the purple thing. In this next photo I had two layers of RLM23 red, probably a third one was still needed.

One evening I mixed a new small batch of red and blue and filled what gaps I dared. Then I added another, final layer of red along the edge to make it stand out better. Now that had to be good enough.

Glossy

To save my progress so far I applied a good layer of gloss varnish (Vallejo 70510). In addition to a savepoint it was also good for the flow of the upcoming oils. If nothing else, I was going to do a pin wash for the panels.