Devastators first lance painting

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.

Project III/26

ISD's Devastators

I've used ISD or a variation of it as my nickname for a quarter of a century in different services and games, so it was going to be fine for this Mercenary outfit as well. The same company name I used already in Harebrained Schemes' BATTLETECH and the newer Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. The stupid joke's reference maybe went by many people, but it amused me.

Thoughts about the org

The military organizations, let it be real or imagined ones, was always something I had to triple check because the squads, battallions, regiments, platoons, divisions, regiments and whatnot just did not get stuck in my brain. I simply did not care. The only exception was the Clan's five-based chart, because it was simple and consistent enough even for me.

So the smallest practical BattleMech org unit was a Lance for four 'Mechs. Apparently that was close enough to be a 1:1 match to a platoon of foot soldiers, which translated to something like 20-40 people. Some very vague memories from Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis' mission editor said that this was somehow connected to the amount of personell inside a tank squad/team/platoon. That was despite the fact that almost all 'Mechs had only one pilot inside. Maybe it included the support personell in this number?

A company then consisted of three Lances, sometimes with some more folks as support. The support could be scouts, indirect fire (yay!), or tanks or special Lances. Some outfits had a Command Lance on this level already. Then you could use three companies (12 'Mechs each if without a CL) to build a battallion and three to five of those would give you a regiment. Each additional step up in names piled more and more extra stuff and support gear to the noticeable pile of requirements and practical demands. At this point all this was just thinking out loud based on what I read, my named unit was going to be a company alone, meaning ~12 BattleMechs and an HQ truck.

First Lance

As a whole the Mercenaries box didn't entice me to use that 1:1 as the body of my merc unit. I got a stupid idea with a Devastator being the heaviest of the units, and another one of those hiding in one of the Legends boxes. Two Devastators - ISD's Devastators literally and figuratively, but it wasn't going to lead to a Cochraine's Goliaths 2.0. I also really liked Marauders, so I took both of mine to join the fun.

Miniproject I/26

Mass-priming

Having all this freedom of choice was surprisingly bothersome. I didn't have the faintest clue of which BT miniature to poke next and nothing really jumped out as the next item. My cleverest idea was to just take the whole untouched mass and prime it all in a batch.

When the inspiration would strike, I could just take anything and start working on it. The latest minis I have painted recently had mostly been primed at some random calm moment, and that had made me happy. Now I'd just do that in a planned way.

VSP red

Surprisingly I still had a bit of the red primer left. I wanted to use it before it got too thick with age to go through my airbrush.

Mercenaries

I started with the most numerous of the lot, the default Company in the Mercenaries box.

Legendary MechWarriors II

Going on I had enough red primer to coat 66,666...% of the units in the Legendary MechWarriors II set. The SM1, the Devastator and the Charger got red, then I was out. It was a handy primer, and it lasted for years, and most importantly it remained perfectly good until the very last drop.

VSP black

When the red was done I switched to the large bottle of black primer and continued with the second Legends.

Legendary MechWarriors II

From this set just the Marauder - without its rooftop guns - and the Caesar went black.

Legendary MechWarriors III

Also the third Legend set's Marauder was primed without its dorsal gun options. I just didn't feel like fighting with them while priming rapidly. The Marauder was also the last one painted and was still a bit damp when I took the photo of the rest already in their storage blister. This was a nice set with a good amount of nice rides.

Clan Direct Fire Star

Probably I mentioned back in the day that the Rifleman IIC I knew first in MechWarrior II was the reason to pick this box. Not that the Highlander IIC was bad either. The rest just happened to be sideshows that I wasn't familiar with. Finding a home for them all was going to be an operation of its own.

Clan Ad Hoc Star

Pack Hunter had been painted a while earlier. The Kodiak was eager to get painted as a Ghost Bear, but I already had five of them.

Battlefield Support: Objectives

This photo showed the MASH truck's right side using the extended bit, whichever operating theatre module it was. There was just one of these modules, and it could be set on either of the sides - or left completely off.

Salvage: Battlefield Support: Vehicles

Galleon / Maxim. On the vehicles I was most concerned about the undersides, I didn't want unpainted plastic shown when taking photos from the ground level.

Salvage: Battlefield Support: Vehicles

Hetzer / Maxim. Same approach as with the previous duo, undersides first and foremost, the rest would be much easier.

Salvage: Visigoth

I didn't bother taking a separate photo of the bottom of the Visigoth.

Salvage: Blood Asp

Blood Asp could've been a good candidate for the Blood Spirits had I not already painted a full Star of them much earlier.

Salvage: Mercenaries: 'Mech

Dervish. No idea what to do with it yet.

Salvage: Savannah Master

For priming I set the tiny hovercraft on the hex base in a way that should, hopefully, maximize the underside coverage. Doing this with anything this size was a bit funny, but at least they stayed on the bases just by their pegs instead of flying away like autumn leaves. Or a five-ton hovercraft after taking a gauss slug into the side.

100mm Timber Wolf

This was the pretty and pretty large miniature. Great details.

Mass-operation operated

This all took three evenings. Somehow this made me more inspired, with all the bits and pieces being at least primed and I could just pick something up to work on it for real. Small things made a huge difference sometimes. Still, I felt like doing something else than miniatures for a change, even if it was just one scale modeling project.

Finished: Project VIII/25

Sharks of the black seas (2985–3100)

This Clan that had changed its name a couple of times during its history was a very merchant-minded, like the Lyrans. Politically these folks had been also visited both the Crusader and Warden camps, unlike my Jade Falcons. As an Invading Clan it got to my painting table despite being occasionally a softie.

Piranha

Piranha, a 20-tonner, was the only ClanTech BattleMech in this group. It was armed with an ER Medium Laser on each arm, an ER Small Laser in the middle of CT, and the side torsos were packed with 12 Machine Guns. If it wasn't anything but a very-close-up evildoer, it was doing it quite heat-efficiently.

Cougar B

My modified 30-ton Cougar was armed quite like the Puma, but looked so much cooler in my books. Both arms had an ER PPC, and the nose carried a single ER Medium Laser. To make it clear that this was a victorious Warrior, a shark mouth was painted below the cockpit.

  

Stormcrow Prime

Bringing the Star's average weight up was the first of the two 55-ton Stormcrows. This one was configured as the Prime variant, carrying two ER Large Lasers and three ER Medium Lasers. To help a bit with those, a dozen additional Double Heat Sinks were installed.

Stormcrow C

This C config was built around an LB-10X AutoCannon. To accompany this munitions-hungry tool there was a Large Pulse Laser and two Medium Pulse Lasers for medium and short range fighting.

Ice Ferret E

In the lower range of the Medium 'Mechs we had an Ice Ferret, from a newer end of the timeline, an E configuration. The Left Arm was replaced with an ATM-9 launcher I had never used in a game. To help with the expendables-reliance it carried an ER Medium Laser and a Small Pulse Laser.

Diamond Shark terrain

Sharks on dry land

Piranha's hex texture

Being done nearly twenty years ago the other four Points had their bases shaped, and I shockingly didn't have the original stuff left anywhere anymore. I used what I actually had and made a bit of surface texturing with Vallejo's Mud.

 

When the mud dried they all had some sort of a terrain under their feet, if non-matching at this point. I thought I'd use oil paints to unify the bases, which was something I hadn't done in a short bit. In the name of unification I might need to fish out some foliage fluff for the Piranha, otherwise it'd be easily finished.

Star's battleground

To counter the lightish paintjob I wanted a bit darker and earthier set of bases for the Star. I coated the terrain with a slightly thinned down Dark Brick Red (ABT220) and applied some even thinner Industrial Earth (ABT090) in splotches.

 

After a night in the sauna I painted the front hex edges with greyish blue (the AMT-7 kind) and drybrushed the terrain a bit with Buff (ABT035). I used that also gently on the tops of the minis which accidentally made the Piranha a bit dirty. Maybe it had just fallen down in battle?

At this point I used gloss varnish on the viewports and energy weapon lenses.

For the absolute fun of it I painted some effect on the Cougar B's ER PPC barrels. It didn't stand out that specially from this blue/grey scheme, unlike in the earlier Jade Falcon. But I did it anyway.

Now I was left with some little finishing touches anymore, those being cleaning up the hex edges, drybrushing black on the Stormcrow C's LB-X, and perhaps adding that still missing fluff to the feet of the Piranha. Without veggies it was the only one in the Star and that wasn't cool.

Final finishings

From ponderings to doings. I fixed the missing things on a calm evening. In addition to sooting the Stormcrow C I also did that on the Ice Ferret E's ATM launcher.

Our cats were again blocking the long-term storage so the plants for Piranha had to wait for another day. Otherwise this was about done now, maybe the front edges should get the hazard striping still. Speaking of caution stripes, I completely forgot to add any on the 'Mechs!

With the cats being distracted I got some foliage and superglued it in place for the Piranha. Then I added the caution stripes that I had been pondering about many times. Ready.