Three-Point hexery

Another simple mud base

Without any grand plans, especially with my Vallejo Still Water stuff having - again - dried up into its bottles after been untouched for some years, I just covered the ground with irregular lumps of brown mud (Vallejo DFX 26811 Brown Mud).

When the mud paste had cured I drybrushed both the muddy ground and the OmniMech feet with Vallejo's Dirt. After that I painted a few tiny and roundish lumps on the ground texture with Cold Grey to simulate rocks, and to bring a tiny bit of variance onto the terrain. Yes, the idea was exactly the same as on my rocket launcher diorama.

Hexed edges and that was it

I had painted the front edge of each of the bases with Jade Green ages ago, now I painted the dark grey stripes across it. While on the dark grey I also painted the rest of the edges, just like I've been doing these bits over the last couple of years now.

 

The last phone photos

I had taken quite a few WIP photos (121) with my phone through the duration of the project, so here were the last front/back views on the well-worn cutting mat. At this point I made a change to my BTTS to count how many of each of the minis I owned and from this triplet the counts were: Ebon Jaguar (2); Turkina (2); Warhawk (3), so not that many. Of course the total count of Ebon Jaguars was a bit high for Jade Falcons, but that was how life behaved and I also didn't take the BattleTech canon and RAT probabilities that seriously.

Launcher terrain base

A diorama idea

Now I had the launcher and five guys around it, what was I going to actually do with them? Just having them scattered around didn't sound like any sort of a solution. That made me think if I ought to make some kind of an imitation of map topography with pieces of styrene sheet, but that sounded pretty risky considering the expected squareness/rectangleness of the base itself.

I thought I had seen a piece of Finnfoam (XPS foam) left from my 2011's Imperial Incom T-65 prototype and its asteroid base. The leftover piece, if I still had it, would be stupidly shaped but might provide a solution.

The baseplate

Surprise of all surprises, I had it stored, and it was larger than what I needed. For an initial idea I dropped the dudes into firing position and marked the overall area with a pencil and a ruler.

Of course I didn't own anything that was perfect or even good for cutting this (or any other) thickness of XPS foam, and I surely wasn't going to start sawing it apart. I cut the thing with my well-used xacto knife instead. The result wasn't beautiful.

Ground shaping

The first step into locking my scene started with a 90° counterclockwise rotation of the launcher rack, in comparison to how it was in the previous photo. I drew a deep line along the front plank, and opened the foamboard a bit by twiggling the end of the ruler in it. Then I set the front edge in place, and marked the rear leg's place the same way and repeated the ruler-widening. The launcher sat nicely in place, so one potential crisis was nicely averted.

 

My groundforming started with shallow slices cut off from behind the launcher. Being limited with imagination I ended up making pretty much an arc, which I then tried to deform by chopping a radial groove into one part.

I also, obviously, tested out my space by plopping the guys in place with rockets and all. To counter the shallow decline on one side I drew a shape for a tiny bump on the opposite corner, which ended up looking like a nicely aligned arc. Exactly against what I should've done. At this point I was thinking if I wanted to turn this into a road of some sort, or even a cobblestone plaza. Especially that kind of a semiurban space didn't match my idea of where these were used in 1941, so they were going to be in the countryside with their howling cow.

A bit pointlessly I marked the things, and without any thinking in the same way we planned our Doom wads back in the day. These didn't stay visible for long, I just tried it out while I was poking around anyway.

To get my bump started I covered the corner with white glue and laid my random pieces to somehow fill the area.

For a moment I had a small rock in there, the same I used to press some random shapes all around the sheet. In case the Project Assistants weren't in the habit of saving cool-looking rocks for an army, I'd used a balled-up piece of kitchen foil instead for the shaping.

Preparing the surface

While my glue was curing I used the rest of my Mr White putty, and spread it along the outer edges and then also the upper surface. I let the white glue -covered surfaces to wait for the next day and an application of the new Tamiya Putty (Basic Type) I got some months ago.

At this point my plan was to cover this all with putty so I wouldn't maybe need to panic using oil paints to tweak the ground style. Abteilung's mud and industrial earth sounded like great names for this theme.

Puttying the final corner was its own operation, I applied excess lumps to places that looked like they would benefit from extra coverage or less sharp angles. Of course I could still later on cover the surface with thinned down white glue and sprinkle ballast on it to break the remaining flatness.

This intermediate result of two different putties looked a bit funny, but I decided not to get stuck on that but would prime it all and then see how to proceed. Somehow it felt like staring at it wasn't going to help at all, but to make it even weirder.

Of course I had to dry-fit my bits again, with the assumption of getting some inspiration or a mental guideline. It looked much better now than a few days earlier.

With all the equipment I started thinking that the adjuster guy, who would be standing on the bump, could be standing on some disgusting and sloppy mud. The others could have a bit more dry, sandier ground. Perhaps I could even give a shot to the Vallejo snow effect as long as it wasn't dried up in its bottle/jar.

Side plates and more surface texturing

I managed to get annoyed with the sides of my Finnfoam pieces and that led to a decision of wasting some time in making side plates. To get them done I cut proper chunks off my thinnest styrene sheets, only one of them ended a bit short. These I glued onto the sides with white glue.

Straight plastic and not-straight edge required some gap-filling. Being lazy I taped the open edges with Tamiya's masking tape and used a number of days to slowly fill this up with white glue. After a couple of runs I trusted the solidity and cut the upper edges of the styrene sheets to follow the contours of the terrain. Based on these lines I resumed my silly filling operation.

Finally I used glue around the terrain and sprinkled ballast for texture. I didn't cover all of the ground as I was going to use some weathering mud to get variety onto the earth. Later we'd see if this made any sense in reality.

When I was happy, or at least content enough, I tore my tape off and glued pieces of L profile onto the corners to hide some of my crims. Luckily I had two sizes of that profile, as the smaller one I had thought of using was a bit too short.

 

This was an unplanned improvement. Now I could paint again.

Repainting

For the best coverage I airbrushed the bare side plates and all the ballast-covered parts with Vallejo's black primer. To get a bit of a lighter tone for the ground I mixed some sand yellow (VMA 71028) into the black and dusted it around.

For some reason I didn't want to leave the sides flat black. Maybe I thought it was too harsh, even though it was a perfectly reasonable way to separate the frame from the content. Still, I painted the edges and corner reinforcements with black grey (VMA 71056).

I drybrushed all the ballast-covered surfaces and the harder edges of my terrain, using a shade brighter colour from the one I airbrushed some moments ago. The difference wasn't huge, but I wasn't looking for a dramatic look. This quick dry-fit made it look like the guys were on a lava field. I expected the upcoming mud and snow to help a bit.

Panzer IV surface texture

Trying out uncle Night Shift's methods

The occasionally mentioned work Slack's miniature painting channel had a colleague asking about my T-34 turret, if I had made the cast texture using Night Shift's method and they said they'd used it on some concrete floor basing on WH40k bits and that the method was pretty simple.

That encouraged me to try out these two methods for creating the steel texture.

 

Method 1: liquid cement and a stiff brush

Because all new experiments and such should always be tried out in an invisible or easily hidden place, I started from the turret's left front corner. I had an old and mistreated brush that I was going to throw away. It had its chance to serve the last time before being released.

I used the brush to spread the Tamiya's thin cement like paint and left it for a short bit to do its thing to the plastic. Then I stabbed the plastic with the brush pretty randomly. Softened by the glue, the plastic deformed gently. This effect looked pretty neat so I continued around the turret's vertical bits.

From the turret I proceeded to the hull full of tools and did what the space allowed me. In the first photo the surface was just softened by the glue, in the second photo there were some markings caused by the brush-stabbings for comparison. I also processed the Panzerwanne's sides even if they really weren't going to be much seen in the final model.

Excitedly I also did this on the front- and rear armour plates. The vertical or vertical-ish surfaces like the decks I didn't touch.

This final photo showed some brown tint on the rear armour and that was caused by impurities on my ancient paintbrush that started affecting my operation only in the end. I thought that this'd dry mat after drying by the next day, but I was wrong. The glue-affected bits remained glossy which was a bit confuseing, but didn't affect the end result.

Method 2: putty diluted with liquid cement

I truly could've left it here and be happy, but while prototyping I wanted to try the next stage as well. As I didn't currently own any of Tamiya putty that mr. Kovac recommended, but Mr Hobby's Mr White Putty that I have never liked too much as it started kicking quickly and immediately after getting exposed to air. I trusted that diluting it with the thin cement the drying time would be somehow slower.

Using my old jar lid as a mixing palette I used some putty and quickly mixed glue into it. As the putty was so eager to kick, I used more glue than I expected to need, so I could get it into a paintlike consitency to be brush-appliable.

Dried glue-putty effect

Sanded-down glue-putty effect

In the front of the tank I did my best to avoid going over the edges, so the result was more cautious than what a bit more experienced user would've achieved. Had I been more eager and daring, I might have used this on the radio operator's machine gun mount and more on the driver's periscope shield. On the first try I thought it was better to take it easy.

Working on the right side of the tank I was cautious of the antenna system and trusted in the method 1's texturing worked nicely enough on its own.

The left side had lots of junk attached, so I mostly concentrated on the areas where applying the glue-putty goo was safe.

None of these showed that after a bit of a break to let the stuff cure I sanded down all of these freshly textured sufaces with a sanding sponge. As it was now it looked pretty weird, but I had confidence in the power of paint making this make sense.

In the search of configuration A

Starting point

What we had was two ERMLasers in the Left Arm, another one in the forehead, and the Right Arm was practically an ERLLas (*) and not much else. On the Right Torso we also had an SSRM-6 launcher. None of this would stay in place.

According to the official paperwork nothing was going to remain in the Left Arm beyond the arm-hand bits themselves. On the Right Arm I would need to get a couple of different-sized lasers. From the head, just above the cockpit, I needed to chop off a bit more than a millimeter of tubing. On the shoulder side replacing the SSRM launcher and nothing with LRM-15 launchers wouldn't otherwise be a problem of any sort, except that the working area was so tiny that even my pin vise was way too large to get fifteen decently enough spaced holes drilled in, no matter what. Instead, I could cheat and glue on armoured doors, a bit like the ones in Catapults.

At least the Jump Jet count was the same (for the 7 hex leaps) as in Prime, so the danger of making the backside ugly as well was lesssened.

Chop chop

In my quest of making the pose nicer I rotated the Right Arm upward to make my mini look like it was aiming at something instead of just posing around. Then I chopped off the tip of the head laser and filed the resulting mess down a bit. The worst remaining offenders would melt away or at least get toned down with a drop of liquid cement.

When I cut off the RA double lasers, there wasn't that much meat left on the Arm itself, so I thought at least I was supposed to scratch some kind of panel lines there. Thanks to the torque applied by the snippers the arm had gotten quite loose, so I just plucked it off for easier handling.

From the Right Arm I just cruelly cut the Laser's barrel. I didn't start mutilating the arm any more than that, so all the little subcontainers and whatnots remained. Without any of the original details the new arm would've been a sad sight.

For my replacement parts I spent a bit of time in my bits boxes for things that looked potentially useful as laser cannons. The scale was a bit of a challenge, and the pieces I considered minuscule (like a 1:72 Apache's wing pod, or a same-scale Werfer-Granate 21) weren't that small next to the miniature but enormous. In the end I glued a fire extinguisher from a 1:35 Panzer as the ERSLas and used a short piece of a qtip to stand in as the MPLas. How would I get the jeweling painted in these? Badly, most likely.

To attach my LRM launcher doors on I had filed the Grenmongrel's shoulders a bit and cut ridiculously small pieces of 0,5mm styrene sheet into tinier rectangles until they fit decently for gluing. Of the cutoffs I cut even tinier bits to glue as greeblies onto the leading edges of the doors. Similarly I added tiny strips to stand in as hinges. There may be some tweaking in their future, but overall I accepted them.

My original guesses of the missile launcher surface area had been off by millimeters, so I had some excess styrene flakes on the cutting mat. I decided to use them in different shapes to add some three-dimensionality onto the mistreated left forearm.

While gluing these tiny bits Adam Savage's hint was worth its weight in chocolate: they were sillily easy to pick and set in place using the hobby knife's tip alone.

(*) Of course I forgot that the Right Arm also had an ERSlas that I didn't snip off earlier, most likely I was stuck in my previous mindset of UrbanMech's AC/10 non-weapon targeting laser living on top of the bigger weapon. Smarter people must have noticed my brainfart many photos earlier.

The important thing was that I fixed my mistake and now there was a correct amount of death rays and related objects. Did they look anything plausible, acceptable or tolerable? That was a different discussion altogheter and I ignored it to retain my sanity. To help me paint the lenses I used some Vallejo Water Texture (VWE:WT 26235 Still Water) in the custom-made barrels, expecting a concave and smooth plug near the end of each hole.