Finished: Project V/26

Fiery monkeys in the Kerensky Cluster

Apparently I got excited about this stuff as the project practically flew from start to finish. This also happened with the recent Diamond Sharks so maybe new and different was a good motivator for me. Of course I was boosted by my decision of not attempting to do roundels or any such difficult things.

Point 5 - Fire Moth Prime

As we have seen these before, the somewhat speedy Fire Moth with its normal top speed of 160km/h, not to mention the MASCed 200+km/h rapidity was also the lightest of the lights with its mere twenty tons of mass. At least it had a bit more varied weapon than its Starmate Howler: two ERMLas in one arm, a SRM-6 in the other, and a SRM-4 on one shoulder. Being the Point number five it was the Star's commander and quite likely the MechWarrior in question was also ranked a Star Commander.

Point 4 - Howler

The only actual BattleMech of the Star was a totem 'Mech of the Fire Mandrills, or one of them at least. This twenty-tonner ran almost 120km/h on good terrain and as a stroke of genious had a triple of LRM-5 launchers installed on the right shoulder, along with three tons worth of long range missiles. Yes, the Howler sported fists, too, but Truborns abhorred barbaric melee fighting so they didn't count as actual weapons.

Kit Fox Prime

Each of the three Kit Foxes were super boringly configured the same exact way, so the only way the visually differed from each other was by their highlights. These three were both heavier and slower than the two more senior Points and they didn't quite reach three-digit speeds. In the Right Arm the Kit Fox had an LB-5X AutoCannon and a Streak SRM-4 launcher. The opposite arm had, in addition to a fist, an ER Large Laser right next to a Small Pulse Laser.

Of course I could claim, had I painted the lasers differently, that some of them were B configs where the LB-5X was actually an UAC/10 and the SSRM-4 an SRM-6, while the ERLLas was downgraded to ERMLas and the SPLas to an ERSLas. But I had not thought of this that far.

Point 3

Point 2

Point 1

The Star's Point 1 was the unit's lowest-ranking Warrior. Maybe this was also depicted with the Kit Fox looking like it was about to fall. Or maybe it was just taking a nickel-ferrous Gauss slug or a PPC blast into its front left corner. That could happen to anyone, regardless of rank and experience level.

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.

Fire Mandrill's Mattila-Carrol paint scheme

Kindraa Mattila-Carrol

Spoiled by the heading, I chose the paint scheme with very little thinking: I wanted it to be a clearly and easily recognizeable paintjob. Considering they were Fire Mandrills I expected it to be flashy, so yellow with something else. Based on some flicking through Camospecs and UCS I was flip-flopping between Kindraa Kline (yellow base, red and green highlights) and Kindraa Mattila-Carrol (yellow base, red and/or black highlights). I chose the latter because it looked a bit less like Winter Solstice decorations.

Sandy yellow base

Had I started just painting these five with something brightly yellow, the result would've very likely been something bad. For starters I coated them all with Sand Yellow (VMA71278 Sand Yellow RLM79) that I had really liked so far.

Especially on the black-primed Howler I let the shadows remain, with the IWM gang I paid more attention on coverage to keep their previous Clan Jade Falcon ownership less obvious. I didn't really care now where I was going to add the red highlights to, I didn't think skipping those would've made much of a difference.

Lemon yellow

Luckily I found some bright yellow (VMC 70952 Lemon Yellow) from deep in my collection. I started drybrushing it on over the pieces, concentrating on the upper and more prominent surfaces. The shadows, like always, could remain in relative peace.

 

The difference to the previous step was noticeable. After taking this photo I poked a few of the metallic parts with black grey (VMA 71056) just to see how that stood out. The actual metal painting was in turn sometime later.

 

Hull red highlight areas

With the walking armoured lemons looking this fine I started searching for the highlightable parts. For the highlights I wanted to follow a similar approach of "very dark base first, then a cautious application of the brighter shade over it", because tweaking a bright red with white turned that into pink, which was something I definitely did not want.

For the reds I started with hull red (VMC 70985 Hull Red) that looked quite a lot like dried blood. Once again I wanted asymmetric decorations, especially with three physically identical 'Mechs in a row.

Howler

Fire Moth

Kit Fox 1/3

Kit Fox 2/3

Kit Fox 3/3

They looked quite weird with the dark red-browns. The process was to be trusted.

Highlighting the highlights with bright red

The next evening I painted some RLM23 red (VMA 71003 Red RLM23) over the hull red parts.

The bright reds worked nicely. The first layer was pretty good, but I was left thinking if I ought to highlight the upper surfaces and edges a bit more with drybrushing or more specific edge highlighting.

Metal \,,/

I had taken an early start with the bare metal parts and now I concentrated on them purposefully. All the usual bits like the gun barrels, missile launcher fronts, grilles and joints were, well, the usual targets. This Star had an unusual amount of Hands on the 'Mechs and I painted them all grey for the uniform style.

While painting dark greys and drybrushing them, I also painted all the gun openings and cockpit canopies in flat black.

They are going to be fun.