Buffy

Attempting modulation

 

Making the Jagdpanzer's top surfaces a bit more sun-bleached with buff (ABT035) had worked pretty decently, so I felt like trying it on these people as well. This first test photo showed the difference between a treated Dire Wolf and an untreated Summoner. I liked the effect so I used it on all of them.

My method was super simple. I poked several tiny dots of paint onto the upper parts with a toothpick and a couple of them onto the arms, and depending on the miniature and its pose something even onto the knees. Then I spun the paint around and mostly into nothing with my round-tipped blending brush and that was that. Had I waited for the next day for taking my photos, the paint would've been dry and the photo more accurate.

Mid-process photos

Kokoelma

Olivat ne aika yhdenmukaisia vaikka tässäkin oli kolmea eri vihreän pääsävyä ja ainakin kolmea erilaista naamiokuvioideaa. Jadekorostukset olisivat kyllä voineet olla voimakkaammatkin.

Oily washes

Sepia

 

The first hour

One evening I started by thinning a bit of Sepia (ABT002) into a wash. My Dire Wolf had been in the front of the queue from the beginning so it got the first treatment here as well. How to start with something new? By dropping a poolful of dark wash onto the largest cockpit canopy chunk, how else? I had thought in my twisted mind if I could get some funky cockpit jeweling effects done with oils, but this wasn't going to be the paint nor the method for it.

I went methodically through all the panels and edges from top to bottom. This time I knew to stress little about overflow, but I still didn't just slather the thing with my wash.

With the Dire Wolf highlighted without incidents I decided I could start with the Mad Dog. The method was the same, I simply highlighted the bits that the camouflage paints had toned down.

Somehow I still had some time to spare afterwards, so I started cleaning up the Dire Wolf's panels and other bits. Yes, I know I had been praising how ridiculously easy and simple it was to undo oil painting, but oh my how great it was!

Here I took a photo of two pin-washed and cleaned up Points with the three Points still waiting for their turn. This made them look much nicer, let's see what the gently buff layear I had thought of would do to them later on. Of course all of them would first need to wait for a day or two first, so I could avoid excess messiness.

Funny how different the greens of the Dire Wolf and Mad Dog were. The Mad Dog had a much better shade of green, I wished I had written that one down.

The second and third hours

The next time I got to paint I followed the exact same process with the remaining Points, starting from the canopies and then from the highest point down to the toes. All the panel lines, edges, holes, gaps and anything that might have benefited from a bit of an artificial shadow, every single one got pin washed.

Of course this took a silly amount of time, so just when I got done with the pin washing, I only got to start cleaning up Gargoyle's jade mohawk when I had to wrap up for the day. Then I had a three-day hobbytime break due to life in general. I was super happy again that the paintbrush barely moistened with thinner just did the trick and I could keep cleaning up my overflowed pin washes.

Looking at these photos I noticed that I should clean Dire Wolf's viewports quite a bit more still, under a better light. I had just chosen a badly lit spot the last time, so the end result wasn't quite what I wanted. Like I said in the previous post, I had had some megalomaniacal thoughts of doing jeweling with oils but at least with these colours and in this scale it wasn't going to happen.

Looking at it I thought that I could paint the tubelike thing from the top of Summoner's LRM launcher (between the tube and the head) with a dark grey. Not necessarily with the GG so that it wouldn't get visaually mixed with cannons and stuff, but somehow, to make it stand out a little more.

Gargoyle looked uglier and uglier. Maybe these panel highlights enhanced its roughness.

Mad Dog felt like it benefit greatly from the highlights. I should clean up its canopies as well before declaring the end being nigh, but these were tiny things now. At some point I realized that this version of Mad Dog didn't have the missile tips poking out of the LRM launcher unlike in the more emaciated IWM miniature. If I was entirely mad, I might consider trying to paint red tips into these launch tubes, but I wasn't quite sure if I was there quite yet.

Another gainer was Hellbringer's torso with the CASE panels and other details popping out so much better. This version of its missile launcher also hid the missile tips so I couldn't paint them either, and I really didn't see myself painting them red with white caps - inside their tubes.

Yeah, you could definitely see more details from these now, and the overall paintjob didn't feel like it got severely toned down.

Numbers, insignia and muddy bases

Being slightly differently detailed than the IWM minis the new CGL had less easy and simple places for the numbers and insignia on them, at least for someone with my nonexistent freehanding skills. I still was going to follow the same process as before, choosing a number for each and tried to find space for said numbers. First I painted the numbers with black, then over and offset slightly top/left them with white.

 

Both the Galaxy and Cluster insignia were based on light-coloured planets so for those I just painted cream-white circles. To get the Gamma Galaxy I painted a birdlike shape with jade, for the Cluster I painted a swordlike thing punching through the planet.

 

The Clan Jade Falcon insignia was the most complicated and challenging. I started with a grey box, added a birdlike jade shape, a black line at the talons and later yellow points for talons to grab onto the black sword handle and a yellow beak around where the head should be.

In a way it was pretty simple, but as said, in this scale and with my limited skills it wasn't child's play. Of course I could've ignored them all but I wanted to get these markings onto my minis.

Muddiness

There had been no plans for the hex bases, but as I was here I decided to mess them up right now, with the main painting business being behind me. I got my Vallejo mud products and thinned them down with water to get them spread on the bases to begin with. Most of the stuff was light-coloured European Mud but when I added a bit of almost black Russian Mud all of it ended up pretty damn dark.

I applied to goo pseudorandomly onto the bases, I wanted the terrain to be uneven. I also tried to pile the mud so that it looked like my OmniMechs had just stopped somewhere and displaced the crap from below their feet. Not that it showed well from this photo, or with the paste being wet and not set yet.

So far I hadn't painted on the weathering pastes, but now we'd get to do that too, later. My next step was going to be in the footsteps of Bob Ross but without the happy trees or mountains.

Nonmetallics and jade highlights all around

German Grey

40% of my Star had already received the metallics and the cockpit canopies, of course I did those for the rest. The base idea for the Star was clear, I would simply follow on the path I had started on.

Gargoyle

Getting this Assault monster decorated was the most painful subprocess, because it was just so insanely ugly. I painted the AC barrels in the arms, and the laser barrel in the chest. The air intakes and the missile launcher ports also got painted metallic grey. In the legs there was loads of space, so from the front I painted the knee joints. To get something else done here I also painted the shoulder joint, it didn't look too stupid in the end.

 

The backside hadn't got much more than some joints and grilles to be highlighted. At leat the gun pods in the arms looked nicer with these changes.

 

Mad Dog

Finally something more interesting to look at and to paint. My first and most obvious detail were the faces of the LRM-20s and the laser barrels. For a moment I thought if the upper arms should have been painted metallic, but I decided against it with the large entities on the upper hull already done that way. So I painted the hip bit and the ankle joints instead.

On the back side I had a number of grilles, vents and Jump Jet nozzles. Maybe I could've painted some more on the legs themselves, but I didn't want to go overboard.

Hellbringer

Last but not least, Hellbringer got to the painting station. As expected I painted the missile launcher and the searchlight or whatever sensor pod's face, the ERPPC barrels and the side torso's lasers, without forgetting the knee joints. I was pretty happy with the asymmetric detailing on the Hellbringer, that made detailing it more fun.

Unlike the other ones, with Hellbringer I thought that if I painted the upper arms metallic they wouldn't stand out too much. So I painted them. It worked nicely in my opinion.

Jade highlights

Now my full Star was more or less in the same point, except for the canopies. I decided to leave them for later and first do the jade highlights on each of them. I remembered that my VMC jade was a bit thick so I started by thinning it a notch. If I only had also had the time to buy new small paintbrushes as well.

As always, I chose the highlightables more or less randomly and followed my own usual guidelines, such as  painting the edges of missile launchers and so on. When I was done with the highlights, I foreached through the minis and painted a few new metallic (still using German Grey only) parts.

Cockpit admiration and metal highlights

Those done I painted the cockpit canopies with the same RLM red as earlier, and while I was painting these I also touched up the two LRM launchers that had visible missile tips. These ended up looking much better now.

Then I mixed up a lighter and much thinned-down grey, that I then poked or stippled randomly into all the dark grey parts. In this scale the trick didn't work quite as nicely as in 1:35, or my paint ended up being a bit different this time.

The next step from here was to do some freehanding, and I've always sucked at it. I still wasn't feeling like ordering a dozen decal sheets from FPG. If they (or someone else) had airbrushing stencils, I wouldn't hesitate at all.

It's a teenager now

The thirteenth mumbleful anniversary

When I started drafting this post I thought I hadn't completed practically anything during the last 12 months. But when I started checking what I had posted about, I had almost a handful of completed things, at least on the modeling side.

V/22: SL-17 Shilone

Shilone, an additional extra bonus in the Clan Box was almost entering the AeroSpace forces of the space Swedes, but at the last moment I decided to relocate it to the service of the mighty Dragon. My dirtiness effects may have gone a bit further than needed, or not too far, but at least the kite didn't look like it had rolled off the assembly line fifteen minutes ago.

Maybe I could've tried to do something more interesting with the cockpit canopy glasses, and with the laser lenses too. I only dared to try to create some sort of a glow effect in the easier and safer choice, the engine, and that gave me some excitement and maybe even some courage to try the effect on something more visible. Or that's what I thought at this point in life.

VI/22: Time Machine

Of course I had drooled at the Lego Time Machine for ages, so when I finally got it delivered home, I was completely beside myself but in a good way. Sadly we didn't have that much shelf space in order for the customized DeLorean getting a fantastic place to be displayed.

VII/22: Galaxy Explorer

The little ISD would've been almost as excited about this set as the middle-aged ISD. Somehow I was the only one in the household who loved the ship, even though the Project Assistants were happy to play with it when allowed. And if there was no good show-off space for the car above, there was less space for this one.

VIII/22: Jagdpanzer IV

The Tank Destroyer was a peculiar project, the model was ridiculously simpler than the really detailed Königstiger from the previous year, but still I burned almost as much time on it. The years were of course very different from each other, and I did try lots of new stuff on this model.

Again, I was really happy that I finally tried out the oil paints and I also lamented because I had been dragging my feet and even discarded the whole thought for years. "Live and learn", they say, and they also say "better late than never". They do say a lot, I've noticed.

On a side note, I managed to get much nicer wrap-up photos now that I relearned some basic image editing.

I/23: Very incomplete OmniMechs

Then we had this supposedly quick and simple snack project – painting and weathering fie miniatures – completely in the middle of itself. Camo patterns themselves were progressing nicely but they were just the primary shapes now and would require more work to look decent and presentable. Could I be halfway done now, with all five being painted grey-green and I was only missing the details?

Greetings from about two weeks ago

And the rest

My Python3 Doom story generator hadn't progressed anywhere in the last months. Any of my Pygame things had also not found their way to the top of my work queues in a long while, I guess I just hadn't had the excitement to do coding after workdays.

The Steam Deck has, on the other hand, activated me on the gaming front with something new (the remake of System Shock; Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries with two handfuls of mods), which has been fun. Nothing too keyboard-intensive should be played with that device as is, based on my gaming minutes so far, as not every function in the BattleMech cockpit has a direct button and I didn't manage to figure out how to call in air strikes against my foes, for example, until I just randomly poked the d-pad in a random mission.

On the Nintendo side the randomly played Breath of the Wild had reached the point where I had just the final boss left, and before that I should've bought my pockets full of arrows and cook all the best meals just to make the most likely supertedious multistage multitrick boss fight even survivable for my nerves. Oh why, oh why hadn't I felt like playing it that much then? On the other hand Tears of the Kingdom was in the most fun exploratory phase where every corner and rock hid something new and interesting, so I've been playing that one instead.

Masking and camouflaging the fifth Point

Mummification

So, I had already masked half of a leg and now I had to mask the rest of it. I followed pretty much the same approach as before: I cut 2mm lenghts of tape and connected them on the miniature however I felt at the moment. I painted the Hellbringer the same way as the other four, mixing a slightly lighter shade than what the olive green was. For the fun of it I mixed the even lighter highlighting shade into my airbrush and did a bit of a zenithal blast with it.

The green wasn't still as light as I wanted, but they sold those for money, so I wasn't going to change careers into a paint mixer just yet. The next steps would, of course, make the mini a bit more interesting.