Diamond Shark paintjob

A black foundation for a new year

Piranha was a clear bit to prime with the base and all. And it was a tiny miniature.

The IWM minis I just brushed black again, I didn't poke the terrain other than by accident. Maybe they also should be primed and then recoated somehow later. At this point I concentrated on the 'Mechs.

Lambda Spina

I checked the Diamond Shark schemes in Camospecs and UCC, the Lambda Spina's blue with silver and optional shark mouths sounded neatest and the most doable. Something in the deep archives of my memory suggested that the only other Finn I know to own some BT minis also had painted his 'Mechs for Starstrike. This made me think I had to check if I found anything in old messages to verify this?

While pondering on that I checked what Sarna said about the Lambda Spina Galaxy so I could give them a more accurate unit. The 11th Strike ("Depth Charge") contained the convenient weight classes even if they were, technically, in different Trinaries.

Blue basecoat

There weren't that many blues in my selection of paints so I chose one that I expected to get nicely highlighted or otherwise mixed up. Even the name, UK Mediterranean Blue (VMA 71111) was properly sea-themed.

I used my familiar overbrushing method that left the lower shadows in place. Sometimes the shadows were left a bit large, but that was how life went. I concentrated on the armoured parts and ignored the bare metals as far as they were avoidable.

When the mediterranean blue was dry, I drybrushed again with the damp brush some highlighting with depressing soviet AMT-7 (VMA 71318 Greyish Blue). It looked different enough in the bottle to bring up the highlights and would also fit nicely with the base blue.

My metallic miniatures took the drybrushing more eagerly with their sharper edges than what the roundish plastic Piranha. This'd work just nicely.

Silvery fanciness

I didn't think of using actual metal pigment paint for the silvers because I didn't take the description literally. For the decorations I picked a few bits and painted them grey (VMA 71120 USAF Medium Grey) to begin with, and to find the best and most sensemaking areas.

Next I took a shot at drybrushing with a plain Stonewall Grey (VGA 72749) that really wasn't light enough for highlighting, so I mixed in some lighter tone (VMA 71119 White Grey). This mix stood out a bit more. I just had to be careful with the drybrushing to protect the blues, so I used my detail brush to paint some edges up (line highlighting that the warhammerers have been using pretty actively). My thought was that maybe this worked somehow decently in my quest for silver.

This next photo showed that I got excited with the drybrushing and worked on the LB-10X already instead of going through the dark grey route first. Hopefully my eagerness was forgivable.

My first run didn't give much of a silvery feeling. I also didn't think I would try to do any NMM witchcraft especially as I had never tried that, nor did I have skills. If I gave the edges a bit stronger highlight with just that greyish white without shading it down at all?

Unpainted metal

I pondered on the metallics after all, if I should do them with actual metals or not. Without using silver paint for the silver pieces, I ought to stick to using non-metals on the bare metals as well. On the Piranha I metallified the fists, the lasers, and all those machine guns. In addition I picked out the joints that were nicely doable.

 

Cougar B had a couple of weapons and the shoulder grilles I forgot until I saw this photo. Then there was a set of shoulder and hip joints as well.

The old sculpt of the Stormcrow had offensively tiny arms, as I complained before, but the shoulder-hip-ankles were much easier and clearer. The over-the-head grille or missile launcher slot was also a nice target for bareness.

I got further along with the Stormcrow C and its visible bits, but there was an amount of joints and tubes to decorate.

Ice Ferret E's ATM launcher got me thinking what to actually do with its facade. Perhaps the divided doors could be bicolored: another half in bare metal and the other silver? Or they could just remain bare. I had to think on that.

The infinite void of blackness

Before getting to the next actual stage I prepared the canopies and gun ports in black. There were no Jump Jets at all so I had no fusion nozzles to paint.

 

This was a nice moment to stop for a bit, I had to take a breather before just jumping into the next thing. If I wasn't any more sure on what I felt like, I most likely was going to do the jeweling out of the way. Doing that might bring up some ideas. We'd see that next year.

Project VIII/25

The merchant-minded Clanners for a new year

The one Operation:REVIVAL Salvage box from my Mercenaries loot gave me a Piranha that half-surprisingly inspired me to paint it as a Diamond Shark. It required four friends to go with, preferably around the same weight class. I started by checking what my BTTracker said and indeed a selection of Light/Medium 'Mechs tagged REPAINT caught my attention. There were more of those available than what I needed this time, so I let the randomizing song play a couple of cycles.

Star's Points

Not counting the fresh Piranha the other four Poitns were isorla from Jade Falcons and also metallic IWM minis from 10-20 years ago. The metal ones had to be reprimed to begin with.

Piranha

Cougar B

Like all these four minis, the B config of the Cougar was older than the Project Mumblings so I had no memory of where I got the laser under the cockpit, but the ER PPCs were donated by a Warhawk C that didn't need the lower pair of the cannons as they were swapped with Large Pulse Lasers. No artesanal crafting and modding was visible in my doings and I didn't think I had improved over the years.

  

Stormcrow C

This Stormcrow config with an LB-10X and lasers was customized by slapping on a Gargoyle's arm, if my vague memory served me correctly. I really had no recollection of how I ended up with this piece when making my IWM order, and there was no documentation of any sort before the verbose days of this silly blog.

Stormcrow

In case you, dear reader or peruser of photos, wondered why and how this Stormcrow was so different from the one above, the reason was simple: this was an earlier sculpt I had mistakenly ordered at some point. The other Stormcrow was the new sculpt. The differences weren't that massive, I was mostly bothered by the tininess of the lasers in those arms and how tedious painting those was.

Ice Ferret E

How did I have an Ice Ferret, and such a "new" config as E if I hadn't even heard of the chassis back in the day? No clue. It was a funky version with an ATM-9 in the Left Arm and the weapons were painted however.

If nothing else, these old minis showed how I had consistently painted all energy weapons with just red dots. These cockpits had been repainted at some point in red, because I distinctly remember doing them in black for the longest of time.

Finished: Project VII/25

Overlord-C CJF Quatrefoil

Clan Jade Falcon's Gamma Galaxy had about ten Clusters, and each of them required transport capability to get to and from places. Attached to "my" Cluster was CJF Quatrefoil that Sarna's wiki declared to be a plain Overlord or maybe a Command variant. I didn't care about that, I modeled mine as the C version.

My five-Trinary Cluster would fully fit in an Overlord-C, and its mothership, an Aegis-class Battle Cruiser CJF Scabbard could then carry four DropShips in its docking rings. No worries, I wasn't going to go that far and also implement AeroTech.

Weaponry

I mumbled quite a bit about this while painting. Not all was modeled religiously so there was space for just for storytelling. All in all I found a place for six ER PPCs, two ER Large Lasers, two Large Pulse Lasers, and trusted that the rest of the long-range fury was provided by cleverly hidden triplet of LRM-20 launchers with the Artemis IV Fire Control System. The closer-range punch was provided by a dozen Medium Pulse Lasers divided into four rotating turrets, and also turret-installed UAC/5 and UAC/20 sets.

Despite being modeled in vastly different scales the OmniMechs and the Overlord-C looked neat posing next to each other. I didn't fish out my maps for these photos, that stuff had to wait a bit. 

Using the white background cloth with a light grey target was me begging for problems in the photo editing stage, so I skipped the swearing part and didn't even try to flatten the background. This was easier with the blue background but I still needed to improve on my process quite a bit. While cleaning up the photos I was thinking that if I had a couple of A3 sheets it'd be simpler, as long as I managed to keep them smooth and crinkle-free. The fabric background left plenty of artifacs in the jpegs at least in this scale, the normal 1:35 scale models were much easier.

These insignia made me unspeakably happy in general, and I was also surprisingly happy with something as simple as painting an oversized Kinder egg grey :D