An attempt at the pattern of the Omega Galaxy

To celebrate a Monday afternoon I attacked Hobby Point in my quest for plastic jewel-like things. They've been recommended in the CBT-forums as focusing crystals for energy weapons, mostly on the miniatures but I thought that I'd give them a try with these two models, should I manage to actually find something suitable. It's been said that they look better than flat pieces of plastic painted with different colours, even with skillful jeweling (that article talks about cockpit jeweling but obviously it works on other parts, too). After a bit of asking around, this is what I got:

Of course I had to try them out! I dropped one of the bigger blue pieces in the slot and to my amusement it fit like a napalm bombing in a forest. Excellent. Then I tried one of the medium sized red pieces in the smaller opening. That one fit snugly, too. Lucky me. With the primer that red jewel didn't really show too well so I tried with a green one instead. That one was a lot more visible.
The point with all this is that the energy weapons need a focusing lense, -crystal or something similar. Of course I could've just got something lense-shaped and smooth but for some reason I felt that a diamond cut would look a lot better. With the colours I could tell what kind of a weapons this model has. Obviously PPCs have blue crystals and different sorts of lasers have their own colours. So far I've just painted all my miniatures' laser nozzles plain red, without any regard for the size (Small, Medium or Large) nor the type (normal, ER or pulse). I've never thought that I'd make normal lasers and pulse lasers look any different, so I guess I could go with small = red, medium = yellowish, large = green. According to the specs this 'Mech has a pair of Medium Pulse Lasers so I'd use yellow/orange crystals in the gun pods.

It works.

Later I checked that yes, the red crystals are clearly visible as well, after the gun barrel was painted with Flat Aluminium.

Next I had to test if the Omega Galaxy's pattern would work or if it ended up looking awful. So I started with a couple of small pieces and painted them with Tamiya's Flat Aluminium:

After that had dried I washed it with an ancient (I bought that paint more than a decade ago) Citadel Green Wash:

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw that was a Spearming bubblegum... not good. I let it be overnight and washed over it with GW's Badab black and at least that part looked a bit better that way.

Next I went and painted the rest of the torso and arms with Flat Aluminium and greenwashed it later. While applying that green wash, I decided that some AutoCannon parts should be left plain metallic to give the whole 'Mech a bit more detail. To me it looked more stylish this way.

After all that had dried nicely I applied a layer of Badab black on the whole set. In addition to that I also applied another layer of GW's Devlan mud over the metallic pieces.

I'm afraid I have to file those insane seams a bit, they look bad. Should've done it earlier, but for some reason I didn't. Oh well, they won't offer much problems, I assume.
After that I shall start working on the legs, maybe basecoating them with either Oily Steel or Gunmetal, followed by a black wash to keep a bit more uniform look on the whole model.

Project 3/2011

Finally the Marauder and Warhammer that I had received in January, had gotten to the top of my FIFO-based TODO-list. Unlike mr. L, who attacked his Warhammer first, I went directly for the awesome Marauder that I've "always" wanted in one scale or another. Sadly the playable BT-scale Unseen Marauders are pretty difficult or impossible to obtain, so these'll do just fine at this point.

So, I started on Wednesday evening by opening the box and wondering, what it contains. Three spruefuls of pieces, an eight-step instruction sheet and a sheetful of waterslide transfers that I archived away immediately. This walking tank is not going to be a silly anime toy but the emperor of the 31st century battlefields: a Marauder IIC.

Firstly I snipped pieces off the sprues, cleaned them up and built what was to be built, just like the instructions told. While I was test-fitting the foot pieces I noticed that because they're movable, it wouldn't be a good idea to leave the insides like they are. I quickly painted just about all the insides of the white pieces black so that I wouldn't end up swearing my lungs out when I finally noticed that despite all the time spent painting this thing nicely, all I could see were the insides of the war machine, being white as fresh snow...

After a while I decided that finished arms, legs and the hip piece were enough for the first spring, so I documented my doings and packed my tools away. For the next round.

While I was tinkering around the next evening I noticed that the instructions suggested somewhat weird things with the wrist pieces. The gun pods would turn sideways and that'd leave them in a ridiculous angle when the guns point wherever. So I mengelified the nicely glued seams with my x-acto knife so I could pry the pieces off without causing heavy, permanent and irrepairable damage. With a bit of heavy swearing and support-taping I got the arms fixed the way I wanted them to be. In hindsight: I should've played with the pieces a bit more to see how they'll end up being to prevent this happening yet again.

While the arms were drying I attacked the Autocannon that's located on top of the torso. As the piece was a long one, it had to be taped to keep it tightly connected while the glue dried. I also decided against cutting the gun barrel open and I just left it as it was, I didn't see it worth the hassle.

I added the rest of those decorational and supporting pieces to the torso. I can't even guess what that spherical thing in the front was in the tv-show but in this model it'll be a sensor window or something. Or at least I'll try to make it represent one :P

Of course I had to test-fit them a bit, after the pieces had dried for a good while. Looking good, though the bottom could be a bit heavier to give some more balance to the model as a whole.

Because there were so few pieces missing from the torso, I decided to add them too. All that was missing was a couple of antennae and the Jump Jet pieces. After this all the building was done, nothing was missing from anywhere anymore, the arms and legs don't need to be glued to the torso at all.

Today I eagerly started basecoating the pieces - while waiting for the Duke Nukem Forever demo to be downloaded. They all were done nicely in two sets: first the top and sides, and after a few minutes for the paint to dry, the last surfaces. After yet another paint drying break I tested if the pieces still fit together. It still looks nice. Himmel, I haven't met many models that are this quick to build! Though, as we remember from earlier Spring and the experiences with the Imperial X-Wing, it doesn't matter how quickly it's built - it'll take a while to paint it anyway. But that time is really nicely spent :)

Now I really have to ponder what to do with this thing. Personally I'm such a fanatic Jade Falcon supporter that I was going to paint these in my "own" unit's colours. That's Gamma Galaxy's 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster, but my game master Viiru said that "I don't approve of old junk to be painted in the colours of a Frontline Cluster :)" and he's actually quite right with that. He suggested painting these in the Star League Defence Forces pattern, but after consulting a couple of sources I have to say that the SLDF pattern is a bit boring and as I said, my Crusader heart beats for the Clan Jade Falcon.
To my joy I found a reference that lists the Jade Falcon Touman after the Battle of Tukayyid, if I remember correctly. For a while I searched for a proper unit for both of my 1:100 'Mechs and then I found it: Omega Galaxy - 8th Falcon Regulars
, apparently a Second Line Cluster. It's more than likely that their view of Clan politics isn't something I'd tolerate but I'll worry about that a bit later. This way I'd get both of these tin cans in the same Cluster, Trinary and even the same Star(the Talon Star of the Trinary Charlie). Not bad.

The most important thing to find out right now, is what colour they'd be, if I chose this Galaxy and Cluster. According to Camospecs the pattern would be a "metallic emerald green on top and a steel finish on the lower halves of their equipment. This symbolizes Jade Falcon`s superiority over Steel Viper. Red paint is splattered on the feet and shins of their 'Mechs to indicate their intentions with the Viper Clan". I may have to browse a site or a couple, not to mention several pdf's before this is settled. But right now it sounds decent.

These are very, very important details.

One more build is now completed

Not much was left to do. I washed the rest of the weapons and a couple of items just to bring out some details and give some variety to the guys. Oh, and I remembered to add the missing rank "buttons" on Herr Leutnant's shoulder thingamagicks. To keep the acquired level of insanity I went and painted the Deutsche Afrika Korps insignia to the boxes on the sides of the halftrack and scribbled the unit markings both to the front and the rear of the vehicle. The latter looks more like a doodling of a five-year old kid, but that's the best I could do now.

Those waterslide transfers are cheating.
Oh, and I didn't add the register plates. They'll survive without just fine.

View from the left

The right side

Nose

The rear end

It doesn't quite look like in the picture...

That's it. Those photos are somewhat weak because I took them quickly with my n900, but maybe I'll get to take a bit better ones with the real camera and update again. But now I have my mind set to the next project already! Where in the world am I going to find all the tiny extra pieces I think I'll need?

Detailing my tiny desert übermensch

I kept painting my poor miniature men without any real break. The coats looked a bit dull as they were so I drybrushed them with a bit of Iraqui Sand that I used to paint the trousers. With a single flat colour those things end up boring so drybrushing brings out the highlights pretty nicely. But why am I rambling about these things? Back to business!

The last time I left the skin areas of my mininazis chocolate brown, now I painted them liberally with Vallejo's Medium Skin Tone so that the deepest recesses still had some chocobrown to give a sense of shadows. Then, after a while of drying, I highlighted parts like noses, chins, cheekbones, ears and fingers with Vallejo Dark Skin. For some cosmical reason that dark skin is actually lighter than medium skin tone.. but I guess they're just from a slightly different palette. In any case, they finally started looking like people.

The next evening I spent with the coats and accessories. My main theme was painting belts, bayonettes and other decorative elements. Belts got a Chocolate Brown coating, except the straps for the water bottle and ... whatever that small box is on the back of two guys. Those got a grey-black strap, just to give some kind of a variety to the setup. All the belt- and strap buckles I highlighted with metal colour and later I'll wash them a bit to tune the shininess down a bit. Then I painted the shoulder flaps with green, as these are plain old infantry. Those things got a thin white lining and the man holding the binoculars got a dot on the thingie, he was supposed to be a Fährnrich (a second lieutenant), but I made it to a wrong place... should've checked before doing. Guess I'll paint another and give him a promotion to a lieutenant, so he'll be accurate again.

Somehow I also dared to have a go at the eyeballs and irises of these tiny people. Thanks to a paintbrush set that I got a couple of years ago, especially the three-hair 5|0 detail brush, everything went awesomely without causing a mess or swearing. I could almost get excited about this.

And indeed I got excited. I kept on my sick attempt of adding minute details by freehanding tiny shields to the helmets. One side should have a silver nazi eagle on a black shield and the other one is a black/red shield with a narrow diagonal white stripe going through it. And it ended being acceptable at least:

After everything got dry, I put the helmets on their owners and tried how they could be posing when the whole thing is done. A couple of those guns are going to cause some trouble, I may even have to tear some arms off their sockets like a mad Wookiee...

Beam crosses and brown faces

After posting the last entry I continued painting the fenders. When both of them were coated nicely I slapped them on the hull. After the glue had set nicely I mixed a bit of Dunkelgelb with an even smaller amount of white. The end result was slightly but somehow lighter than the base colour, just like it was supposed to be. I set the model in my painting box so that it was resting in a pleasant 45º angle enabling me to spray the paint exactly from top of it.
It doesn't show too clearly but maybe it worked somehow?

However my attempt went, the model doesn't seem to be ruined.

Next I struck my paintbrush on the machine guns. First I painted them simply grey-black, on top of that I drybrushed some metal colour and finally painted the handles brown for some wooden looks. Pretty simple but works nicely enough in my opinion.

After the guns I painted the outside tools, first the metal parts with that grey-black and then the handles with brown. To decorate them a bit for a worn look I drybrushed some steel on appropriate surfaces. The driving lights and the side view mirror I just painted with flat aluminium. At least the driving lights should be washed with a light yellow to make them look a bit more like headlights. Or maybe some thinned down black wash because the lights aren't on. Hmm. I'll ponder on this a bit still.

While random paintjobs were drying I cleaned the crewmembers a bit and glued their bodyparts together bit by bit. Later I noticed that I had forgotten several mould lines despite my attempts to inspect all pieces thoroughly. Oh well. The main thing is that as a whole they look better than if I had just stuck them together without any kind of cleanup...

Crew mostly in pieces

In the end I decided that I'll assemble these guys completely, excluding the helmets, before I paint them. For a while I had thought if I should paint their arms separately but then I decided against it, it could end up looking a bit silly (and needing touchups afterwards anyway). So I'll save myself the trouble of working on the same parts repeatedly. Soon we'll see how this ends up.
On a side note, I don't think I've ever added all the gear on these tiny guys before. For some reason I've never dared to go into the arms race with these 1/35 or 1/72 -scale guys. The larger scale people have mostly been just tank crews and the Hummel's gunners without plenty of gear... where are those SP-artillerymen anyway? Those small scale guys have had an insane amount of junk with them despite the smallness... and it scares me :P Water flasks, bayonettes, gas mask containers, bags and pouches. We'll see how this one goes, at least these are bigger than those ultratiny 1/72 bits.

They're just missing some paint and their hats

All that crap fit surprisingly nicely on their waists and backs. The guns are going to wait for a moment, though, for obvious reasons. The first round consisted of their uniforms being painted with Vallejo's Green Ochre and after a short paint-drying break all the skin parts and their boots were painted with Vallejo's Chocolate Brown. Of course my plastic aryan supermensch are going to get a lighter skin tone during my next painting session, the brown is just a hopefully good base colour for the recesses and such (reverse highlighting?). At least brown is better for that than plasticy gray, in my opinion.
Next I'll paint their trousers with Vallejo's Iraqi Sand and maybe drybrushing the coats lightly with that same paint to give them some definition - that green ochre is a bit too dull alone. I've got two skin paints (Vallejo's medium flesh tone and dark flesh, if I remember correctly) to be tried. I'm hoping that these guys are going to look like they've been in the sun a bit already, not like they just got to North Africa. If I feel really daring, I'll try to do something about their eyes and mouths, even though I can still remember how awful my last attempt was. Detailing the uniform shouldn't be too difficult and I'm not going for anything too daring, anyway.

Paint coat after the first phase

I also tried to freehand some Balkenkreuzen to the sides of the vehicle. The small ones I painted on the sides, rear and front I approve of, but that monstrosity on the nose that shows mostly in the air... that's just awful. That'll need to be fixed. Quickly. Small insignia are easy to paint freehand, without fooling around with masking tape or anything, but that one just went wrong. *sigh*

You can't always win, but you can always lose.

Last building steps are approachething!

Yes, I made that last word up myself. How did you guess? :P

Fooling around with the wheels took a lot of time in the end, especially as I wanted to get some sort of a rubber rim -like effect painted on the edges of the wheels. All the pieces went in pretty nicely without a horrible amount of swearing. For a change... Too often they've ended up being in stupid angles or just plain horrible, but this time things went better before the big test: floppy single piece tracks (can't remember the correct name for them, for I'm used to calling them licquorice tracks myself). I twisted, bent and mangled the other end piece through a small hole in the other end. Pressed the ends a bit, glued and left drying overnight.
It ended up looking fine even though I was pretty worried about it in advance.

During the next day I drybrushed some brown color in the recesses and after a breather I drybrushed some metallic on all the highlightable surfaces. When I had decided that it was the time, I took a deep breath and took the bull by the horns. First I pressed the drive sprocket into the track piece, that went surprisingly well. It fit and all that. How unusual.
Next I applied some glue to the axle shaft of the drive sprocket and pressed it into its place while hooking the other loop of the track around the last drive wheel. All this happened quickly, effortlessly and nicely. After a short glue-setting break I repeated this on the other side, too. With equally good results.

I'm speechless.

Why complain when the usually hopelessly difficult piece works as it should - for a change?

As my following step I constructed the fenders with all the junk and knick-knack according to the instructions. Nothing strange or adventurous happened:

I put the fenders lying on one of the sprues so I'd find the best place to hold them. Then I anchored them with a short piece of tape on the other side and quickly airbrushed the top and side areas with Dunkelgelb. After a while I grabbed a corner of the sprue and painted the bottom sides as well. Of course I'll need to touch up later on the couple of patches that were blocked by the tape or shadowed by the sprue, but as that's on the bottom side, they'll be easy to just brush. Before they're glued to the hull, that is. Oh, and I guess I could try to weather them a bit with those pigments. Just in case.

Next time, in addition to the aforementioned part, I'll glue the pieces together and spray some lightened Dunkelgelb straight from the top to emulate sun's light somehow. Just like I planned the last time.
Of course a couple of Wehrmaht's Balkenkreuzen need to be painted on, the tools are to be painted and weathering needs to be done but otherwise it's almost done already.

Those small dudes are going to cause a couple of "errr.. eh?" moments, that I guarantee...

Painting and testing a new effect

Since the last post I've been cleaning up the wheel pieces, painting random parts and all that. For a change I thought I'll do the priming a bit more smartly than what I've usually done. In many past projects I've just primed most of the pieces while they're still attached to their sprues, just because I've been lazy like that. After that I've just cut them off and fixed the missing patches. It's pretty quick, spraying over the whole sprue from both sides and letting it dry on its side for a while. That way they get to dry nicely, too.

This time I thought I'll do something more proper than that or another of my old methods: putting those pieces on a strip of tape and painting that way. The problem with that method is that if the tape is too strong, it screws the pieces up or if there's a bit too much paint, it leaves a stupid looking mark. A "hem" or another type of a bumpy surface which isn't nice at all.

So I cut short pieces of a metal wire and stuck them into the remaining half of the hex-base I did for my X-Wing. On the end of each of the eye-pokers I attached a ball of blu-tak (Mistake! That thing was way too old and didn't behave as that crap usually does). After the first set of pieces nothing got stuck anymore so I kept using my rig. I could've done better but maybe this is one of the mistakes I'm supposed to learn from. Oh well, I attached the pieces-to-be-painted on the thing and sprayed around.

Before the first layer

 

The top sides are now handily primed

The first set of pieces went while wondering how this could work nicely but the rest were just a breeze. That spray primer is really handy because after five minutes of drying you can replace the pieces and handle them. I got all the pieces I was working on painted in a bit over half an hour and most of the extra time went because I got stuck at the computer. I found something for my next BattleTech-related project...

After that, somewhat unsurprisingly, I went to paint all those pieces with Dunkelgelb. For some really strange reason my Vlad Tepes -inspired rig didn't work at this point anymore. All the sticks were loose and wobbled annoyingly, unable to withstand the air pressure from the airbrush. That caused some worse than mild swearing. As a fallback method I just stuck the pieces in pairs on strips of tape and went painting.
My idea worked nicely and was handy, but I have to improve my implementation a bit to make it more stable. Next time it'll be useful for a bit more than just the first round.

The hull halves, doors and the rest of the items got their first paint coat in a couple of rounds. Nothing dramatic to share, my propellant bottle just got too cold while painting and no paint came out of the airbrush after that so I had to postpone the painting for the next day. Maybe I just don't know how to work with these things. In any case, I'll seriously consider going for a compressor because airbrushing is pretty fun and works nicely as far as I can tell. Of course there are many things I don't have the skills for (what a surprise) so I'd still be using my paintbrushes quite a bit in the foreseeable future.
At some point I would be more than interested in trying how that device works while painting some 3rd Falcon Talon Cluster's Omnimechs, AeroSpace Fighters and Elementals 8) Painting a freehand green-gray camo shouldn't be anything too odd or difficult. All the jade green highlights and such would obviously be painted by hand, as I believe that's a lot faster than first masking 95% of the miniature just to get to paint a couple of small patches of its surface.

There is some yellow but the lighting conditions sucked

The main source of excitement on Monday evening was my silly idea of trying out the colour modulation. After the whole hull was painted with one flat colour, it's a simple thing to mix a bit of a darker colour to the same paint (in this case I added a couple of droplets of Vallejo Model Air's Grey Black in the same line's Dark Yellow paint) and sprayed that slightly darker paint on the lower parts of the lower hull to emphasize the "this is shadowed" effect. Should this thing work, I'll just mix a bit of white in the Dunkelgelb and then spray some of that mixture from Zenith on the model to create a sort of a "the sun is shining" effect. We'll see how that goes a bit later, but here's some work in progress material:

That's how I left the lower hull in the evening. The end result will be seen when it's complete.

The rest of the wheels and other things I've needed so far are drying here, waiting for the next step:

Next I shall connect the hull pieces together. I have to be cautious with those assault doors in the rear, though. After that I'll weather and pigmentify the lower hull a bit and only after that I'll assemble the wheels and the track. When that's done, it'll be painted, weathered and then I shall go for the rest of the pieces for the outer hull.
The reason why I'm going to do it like this because otherwise the tracks+wheels will be a pain in the arsch to fix, paint and weather nicely, I don't know why the instructions usually tell to do these things in a more difficult way. At least I think that's a more difficult way and many people I've read/heard about do the tracks last. I assume it'll be better this way.

Halftrackingly ahead

Fooled you! Not all my time has gone to portalification. Not all of it at least. Every once in a while I've tinkered a bit with the Hanomag and of course I realized yesterday that I had been a bit overexcited with spraying Dunkelgelb on the outside of the bottom hull part.. I mean, priming wouldn't hurt of what do you think?

Firstly I attacked the interior as the instructions suggest. In the first photo I've already attached the benches and the driver's station to the baseplate. I had painted the driver's foot area because at this point it would've been a bit too difficult. Not to mention how difficult it'd been after attaching the seats.

The net wasn't too useful while searching for authentic interior, I found a bunch of other scale models, though. So I decided that brown things are just fine for my crew's plastic buttocks. Tamiya's flat brown was applied first and when that had dried I used a sponge to add some slight highlights here and there but because those two colours have such a low difference in contrast, it doesn't show that clearly even in the pictures.

After the paintjob had dried enough I decided to have a go with the man-makeup also known as Tamiya weathering pigments that I bought recently.

It looks like a small box of makeup with the applier and all that.

The end result is a bit messy, doesn't look as libyandesert-y as I had imagined. But this was my first attempt. I can always clean up the worst mess(es) a bit but maybe the next time I remember this always useful motto: "less is more".
Oh well, this just looks like a bunch of screaming preschoolers had jumped on the benches after being soaked in the rain - not like it was used a group of elite desert warriors as a transport to battle. Blah.

In addition to making a huge mess I cut off and cleaned the front wheels, drive sprockets and the road wheels. For some reason this thing doesn't have idler wheels after the road wheels. Maybe I'll get the rest of them cleaned in a couple of afternoons - this vehicle looks like it has a Tiger-like setup with the wheels: in the middle of you have the double roadwheels and between them an inside and an outside wheel.

I have a good idea (in my opinion at least) how to get them painted nicely this time. Let's just see if I manage to implement my idea in the real world. Usually I don't.
Today I continued my build by assembling that thingy in the front with the suspension and whatnot. The normal wheels shall be boringly pointing straight ahead, I don't think that these pieces are loose enough to allow changing the angle to anything else but 0º. Not that it matters, I hadn't intended to build a diorama with this thing.

To the bottom rear side of the vehicle I added a couple of these weird things, the hook-connector and a couple of whatevertheyare. Guess there's an explanation for them :P

Next in my agenda: cutting, cleaning and painting the rest of the wheels and also priming the outside of the bottom hull, then painting all that Dunkelgelb. While I'm doing that I guess I should build the rear doors and the MG-stands too. After that there's not much left in the instructions, I guess.
Despite that this'll take a bunch of weeks, even if it looks almost done already.

I've learned.


A bit.





Maybe.