Filth and sparkles
Just pin washing with the accompanying cleaning and blending would've been a bit of a quick subprocess to be described in a single post, so I'd also include jeweling and maybe some battle damage in one. Had I thought of the damage a bit earlier, I might have done something physical earlier.
Oil washing with cleanup
I made a mix of thin wash (Abteilung ABT002 Sepia) and concentrated on the panel lines and some stronger shadows, like the bottom of the DropShip. Just to add a bit more variety I also used it on the dip in the crown. Some more shadowing I attempted to include to the insets of the gun turrets.
I also remembered to wash the various hoses on the landing struts. The effect wasn't enormous but it was important anyway.
Cleaning up
After my miniature had been settling for a while I blended away the overflows and shadows to make them make more sense. I cleaned the engine nozzles a bit more, because I wanted the sandy colour to be visited while still being scorched by the fusion torches.
Maybe these photos revealed my trick: the landing gear doors were unoiled because I had been using them as fingerholds while spinning the space egg around. When everything else was done I coated the upper and lower doors with thinner and then applied my sepia wash on. This wet on wet -approach was aimed to get me a soft texture. We'd see that result later.
At this point I left my Overlord-C to dry in the sauna for two days. I didn't want to make a mess on my washes with fingerprints only because I was impatient.
Armament
The DropShip had a good amount of weapon hardpoints that didn't give any clue on what was what and why. According to Sarna it had 35 weapons:
- 6x ER PPC
- 3x ER LLas
- 3x LPLas
- 12x MPLas
- 6x UAC/5
- 2x UAC/20
- 3x LRM-20 Artemis IV
The miniature had 30 hardpoints modeled:
- 4x 5-lens blisters
- 2x 2-barreled down-facing turrets
- 2x 2-barreled up-facing turrets
- 2x 1-barrel up-facing turret
Perhaps the LRM launchers were behind some armoured panels, just like the good old Brotherhood of Nod SAM sites back in the nineties, so I concentrated on the energy weapons and Ultra AutoCannons. Still we had two modeled hardpoints missing compared to the specs. I decided somehow vaguely how to assing the weaponry.
Those four five-lens things would get ER PPCs in the centers. I could have an equal set of Medium Pulse Lasers if each blisters got three of them. So I had four energy weapons to be allocated on the blisters still, which could be 50/50 for both types of Large Lasers and I'd be left with one of each in excess. This would give me 2/3 of the hardware set, on top of the two lasers just mentioned I'd have all eight UACs and two ER PPCs left. Something had to be skipped, in addition to the unmodeled missile launchers.
I could get all of the UACs in if they used the twin-barreled turrets, they all looked the same but maybe the tubery of the navy was all in the same caliber but they just had different fire rate for different AutoCannon class? With that I had the single-barrel turrets left and they'd be some sort of blue no matter what the weapon type was. Being a known friend of PPCs I was probably going for them, not that the dot colours mattered in a game, I just wanted to follow my own rules.
Planning done out of the way I got to paint. Each weapon barrel got painted black to begin with and then I applied more AK Interactive's Ultra Matt Varnsih on all hatches and the crown of the DropShip. When that was dry I could spin the mini pretty freely in my hands.
This also meant that my UAC/5 and UAC/20 barrels were already completed. Quick and fun.
ER PPC
I used three shades for each of the six ER PPCs. The first one was a simple base of electric blue, the I made a slightly lighter one in the middle of it and finally in the core of that dot an even lighter and smaller dot. These were so sillily tiny that I didn't even try to do anything more fancy and difficult. Even with my tiniest and sharpest brushes the tinies dots was almost the size of the lens itself.
ER Large Laser / Large Pulse Laser
For my large-class lasers I used Magic Blue, also in three layers. For the simple fun of it I set the individual Large death rays on a different node in each of the blisters. I started with the top one, and then proceeded clockwise around the DropShip. Maybe this was a way to signal that at least in my mind these blisters could turn, spin, and rotate as needed?
Medium Pulse Laser
My Medium Pulse Lasers used up the rest of the slots in the blisters so I didn't get to play with their alignments. Basing my lasers on Escorpena Green as always, again doing three layers even if it wasn't that visible in the end.
Ultra matt layers
When the paints were dry I applied the ultra matt varnish over the whole miniature. On some spots it felt like it simply flowed off the glossy surface, so I had to cover some bits up a few times.
All in all the first coverage was good as a whole, a bit of fine-tuning was normal.
Chipping without rust
All this was still a bit clean so I added some battle damage and general bumpmarks in various places. I started this by doing some light grey (VMA 71276 USAF Light Grey) welts as long scars, as if they were carved by passing laser beams. After that I made some hit series mostly to pretend they were the walking bursts of some AutoCannons.
In addition to my artesanal wounds I sponged some chipmarks as well. I tried to stop myself in time to avoid going overboard. For that same reason I didn't even think of adding a rust wash because that would not fit the them at all.
Inside the light flakes and scars I used the often-used "a drop of red mixed with dark grey" stuff. It worked very, very nicely on a lightish grey base, also with the dark grey bare steel bits.
This left me just the scorching to be done, either with dark grey or black.
Carbonizing
Instead of flat black or the dark grey I made a mix to make it stand out from the unpainted metal. I drybrushed with a damp brush the engine nozzle area and the DropShip's bottom to see how it worked, and then worked my way up onto the battle damage on the more visible surfaces. While working on those I came up with the idea of darkening this way the 1700-2000 sector of the Galaxy emblem's planet. That simple thing made it look that much more like a planet than a white disc.
To add more engine burn effect I concentrated my darkening efforts to the lower edges of the DropShip, as well as the lower ends of the armoured doors of the landing struts.
The bananas of the moment weren't feeling too photogenic so I used a nougat-filled egg shell for scale:
This ground-viewpoint was pretty fun, now I needed to achieve that conveniently in my light tent. I was pretty much done with the painting process, all I had left was touching up the final glossy bits that truly didn't want to become matt.
