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.

Three-Point oiling and jeweling

A tight set of steps

I managed to use two consecutive evenings to work on some pretty visibile subtasks of this project. The pin wash bound the paintjob together a bit, and after that I did the glassware. While I was on it I did all this in one good stint with the extra drybrushings that I felt they should be shared in this one post instead of splitting them apart.

Sepia wash

Nothing fancy here. I made my thin oil wash, applied it all over my 'Mechs to make them look disgusting. After a bit of drying time I cleaned up the worst, moving the shadows into corners, pits, and other naturally darker parts of the hulls. Then I left them to dry for some more time, to have them ready to accept some more acrylics.

 

Jeweling and jump jets

Before I started painting I doublechecked what kind of gear they were supposed to have. I only remembered Warhawk's loadout and I didn't want to rely on my memory or uneducated guesses based on the shapes of the miniatures.

Turkina:

• 2x LB-5X @LA
• 2x ER PPC @RA
• 3x JJ @LT;CT;RT
  

Ebon Jaguar:

• LB-5X @LA
• ERMLas @LT
• LRM-10 @LT
• SRM-2 @RT
• Gauss @RA
  

Warhawk:

• 2x ER PPC @LA
• LRM-10 @LA
• 2x ER PPC @RA

Stage one: lenses and cockpits

Turkina's Right Arm ER PPCs I painted with the Electric Blue and its lighter shades as I've been doing lately. Unlike on lasers, I aimed to get the brightest points towards the center of the barrel. This time I also painted some gently thinned EB to the tiny slits in the barrel for a bit of a glow. I used the same shades on the Jump Jets while I was twisting the mini in my hands.

Again no surprises were coming, the cockpit viewport bits got painted red. My lighter shade could've been a bit darker but maybe it looked weirdest at this short distance.

The Ebon Jaguar only had one energy weapon, so it was pretty quickly done. The ER Medium Laser's green felt like it was a bit difficult to get nice this time, they had been the best ones before.

Warhawk was pretty simple with only four barrels to paint in the same way, and just three easy-shaped and -positioned viewport parts. Encouraged by the Turkina's ER PPC glows I thought I'd do it here too, using only the simple Electric Blue. I was most definitely not insane enough to fool myself into thinking there'd be time and space for me to do any shading into these slits.

Stage two: coverups

I didn't quite get all done in one sitting, so the next evening I fine-tuned my previous work. I had also guessed the Ebon Jaguar's Center Torso or Head wrong so after another doublecheck later, this time it was the cockpit painting guide, I painted the rest of the viewports on it.

The little round things in Turkina's LRM launchers were something that I wanted to add a lens to, in a yellowish shade to make it clear they weren't lasers, and I also wanted to add some tiny tiny sensoring to Warhawk's chin. From afar the Ebon Jaguar's SRM setup looked like it had a place for a targeting system's sensor lens, but a closer look revealed that it wasn't the case, being divided in two.

Weathering

Having reached the cruising speed I wanted to wrap up the weapon weathering effects I had been thinking of. I still wanted to give another shot at the Gauss Gun's heat distortion effect on this dark grey base, now I'd try a slightly different approach. Should this approach fail to produce neat results, I'd paint the next GG in metallics straight away. Each of the AC barrels needed to be darkened to give them a sooty look.

To achieve the gentle darkening I just drybrushed them with black, again with a pre-moistened brush. I hadn't A/B tested the dry/damp brush approach and their results myself, I just went with one approach. Turkina's LB-X AutoCannons and LRM launcher's leading edges were the first ones I worked on.

The Warhawk was almost skipped, until I remembered that yes, it indeed had an LRM rack on the roof to keep the alpha strikes at bay.

Ebon Jaguar's LB-X and its two types of missile launchers each got the same black drybrushing. I was again lamenting that the SRM tips were so tiny I didn't simply dare to paint them red with white tips, the way I had been doing happily on my IWM miniatures.

Now I had the best moment to paint the cockpit canopy I had misread earlier. While checking the reference, I also noticed how I had misread the shape of Turkina's center-middle glass piece. Fixing that one at this point would've made it look a bit weirded so I left it as it was, making the decision mere moments before the paintbrush would've touched the plastic.

For the heat distortion I followed the three-colour-band dabbing approach with curing times in between. It was better than the last one, but only at a very close range.

Now all I had left was the nastification of the hex bases. The victory was near..

Three-Point detailing

Absolutely unique identifiers

Now that the so-called common elements were all painted, I had the stuff that didn't fit in my brain as a serializable taskset. The caution stripes, unit numbers, and the different emblems all behaved in their own way on each miniature.

Caution stripes

Being a huge fan of hazard striping I started by painting thin sandy yellow lines into places where my non-artistic brain felt they belonged to. These three minis had a surprisingly small amount of bits that looked like it, so I didn't force myself to add them into places where I felt they could feel a bit off.

On Turkina's backside I added those above the Jump Jets, as well as behind the ER PPCs and LB-5Xs.

The LB-5X on Ebon Jaguar definitely wanted a cautionary marking, as well as the backside of its LRM-10 launcher, and some bits near some heat sinks in the back torso.

Somehow Warhawk was the most difficult one this time. I applied symmetrical warnings to the back torso, just above the hip. The larger surfaces just didn't feel right to me.

Numbers

On these three I chose to paint the unit numbers in a low-visibility style, using just black. I may have been able to come up with excuses until the sun collapsed on itself, but the main reason was that these were already tiny and I didn't want to mess them up more.

Of course I recorded my chosen numbers into my tracker that now also checked that there were no duplicates. Ebon Jaguar #214; Turkina #224; Warhawk #225.

Clan insignia

Both Turkina and Warhawk had somehow enough space on top of their torsos for me to make a crappy attempt at the Clan Jade Falcon insignia, but I just couldn't find a good enough place on Ebon Jaguar. I decided to skip it instead of pushing it and ending up with a mess.

Gamma and Talon roundels

For the Galaxy and Cluster emblems I had the same approach as I had for ages: a light grey roundish thingie, over which I painted either a jade green bird shape or sword parts. Once or twice I had tried to paint the described shadowing on the planets but that had failed so miserably that I didn't try it anymore.

The triplet a step or two closer to being completed:

 

These had pretty decent panel lines already, but I was expecting the pin washing to make them even better.

Three-Point metals and jades

Endosteel and jade

At this point I'd paint the last conveyor beltable main parts that were pretty much similar in all the three miniatures. Of course I could've smashed all this into the previous post, but I had to respect paint drying times.

Bare metal

For my unpainted metal I thinned down some dark grey (VMA 71056 Black Grey) and applied it on all the relevant parts. Unsurprisingly my approach was now the same as it had been for a couple of years now: gun barrels, front-facing plates, grilles, and the joints that looked like they got any and all paint scratched off them. In plain English I followed my gut feeling.

I thinned my paint a bit more than normally so it was like a pretty thick wash. This way the earlier greyscale basic basecoat gave details on the darker surfaces too. On the guns of the Turkina and Ebon Jaguar this worked fantastically, so in hindsight I could've done the same on Warhawk to gain this visual variance. Complaining over a splilled coffee didn't make anything better, nor would it affect the end result.

 

This started to look like actual progress.

Before moving on I gently drybrushed the metal surfaces that were conveniently available, using Cold Grey. In practice this meant that I added some more texture on the guns and a couple of rear leg parts.

 

This wasn't yet the moment for blacking out the barrel openings or viewports. I also wanted to doublecheck what each of them had as their Prime loadouts, somehow I had no issues remembering what Warhawk Prime carried but the others and their variants were a bit more obscure in my books.

Cluster highlights

If metals were painted by the seat of my pants, it was even more true with the jade highlights:

Yeah, this was a good moment to stop. Next I'd start ruining my paintjobs with the freehanded stuff.

Three-Point greens

The green camo part

The camouflage as a term was a term that sounded a bit too planned in this case. Each of my Points or their components had their own style and sometimes even shades. All I ever intended was a shape-breaking with the mess(es) I made.

Taping first and foremost

I spent a single evening (about 40 minutes) playing with masking tape. This was quite simple, I just set a length of it on the cutting mat and started slashing different shreds and triangles out of it. None of this had any specific plan or a thought-out goal, until I got the idea of the Warhawk having a flamelike thing in the top CT.

My partner was half-observing this nonsense from the next seat while doing her own stuff, and after a while said that she'd thrown all of this into the wall after mere moments, as it was so frustrating to see. I, on the other hand, found it incredibly relaxing because it required enough concentration to drive all work-related things from my mind.

Then the colour

Again I was forced to realize that I simply didn't own any medium or light green Vallejo * Air series paint, but the darker ones I had a bunch. Instead of airbrushing I then returned to the overbrushing mode. The green I used (VMC 70942 Light Green) was a bit thicker than the Model Airs so I thinned it down a bit with Vallejo's acrylic thinner before anything else.

Over this layer I also drybrushed with a lighter mix. On my jam jar lid the difference between shades was clear but it didn't show that much on the miniatures.

 

Tapelessness

Actually finding and then peeling off the tinies of tape fractions took almost as much time as cutting and placing them, or painting the greens. That was quite a bit of tinkering. Of course I also missed a few and found them on my wip photos afterwards.

 

 

Next up: bare steel surfaces!