Energy weapon effects
Once again I felt like trying something new to me, this time I was going to attempt a jeweling effect on the lasers and PPCs. This wasn't too far from Shilone's engine glow, I'd just use different paints and paint onto varied sizes of targets (all tiny compared to the engine nozzle) and finally, they'd all also get gloss coated.
My colour scale
Based on my quick searches, some people who were much more excited than I was, went so far as to paint different types of beam weapons differently from each other. Meaning, normal lasers, ER lasers, pulse lasers and who knows what sort of x-pulse and microvariants each had a different style in the same weight class.
In my opinion it was more than enough if the small, medium, and large lasers and PPCs were somewhat different from each other. I just didn't see any added value of having to look at the colour to decide if the weapon was a Medium Laser, ER Medium Laser or a Medium Pulse laser (or some more modern variant).
- Small Lases: red (VGA 72710 Bloody Red)
- Medium Laser: green (VGA 72732 Escorpena Green)
- Large Laser: blue (VGA 72721 Magic Blue)
- PPC: light blue (VGC 72023 Electric Blue)
All of these got painted following the same pattern: the concave barrel end got painted with the base colour. Then I mixed a bit of creamy white and that got painted onto the lower right corner (a Camospecs video used the clock face example of sector 16:00-19:00). Finally I mixed a tiny bit of the base colour to the white and painted a single bright spot into the lower right corner (@~17:00). In some cases I managed it better than in some others, and some of the colours looked better than the others.
ER Small Laser
Only the Gargoyle had a small laser, in its Center Torso. The barrel's surface area was so sillily small that my attempt at a gradient didn't really show well, the photo here showed three layers.
While I was painting with the red that was a bit lighter than the RLM23 I went through all of the canopies on all the 'Mechs to paint a small edge into the top left corner of each panel. Doing this memory-based meant that I remembered the method wrong and the "brighter corner" effect should've been in the bottom right.
ER PPC
The PPC barrels of the Hellbringer and Summoner were larger than the lonely ER Small Laser so the progress of the paintjob showed a bit better:
One thing that I did differently from the tutorial video was that I didn't wait for the layers to dry but I painted on straight away, thinking I was doing some blending. That may have been an erroneous choice, but I could always do better with the next miniature(s).
Medium Pulse Laser, ER Medium Laser
Now I had a handful of medium-sized flashers. Dire Wolf had two in each hand, Mad Dog one per arm and Hellbringer had a cluster of three in its Left Torso. I only could choose something for the death rays of the Dire Wolf, and after a tiny bit of pondering I ended up in a mirror-symmetric setup because I didn't want the lasers to be in pairs or haphazardly mounted.
This green effect seemed to stand out nicer than the electric blue I had painted mere minutes earlier.
Large Pulse Laser, ER Large Laser
There were just two 'Mechs armed with the biggest flashlights, and being the last type I didn't even need to think were they lived.
Interestingly this, too, worked better than the electric blue of the PPCs, or maybe I had become this much better in this time.
Group photo n+1
Canopies and sensor lenses
While I was at it, and as I still had some little time left, I thought I could do a silly effect test on the canopies. As the energy weapon lenses with their tiny bright reflection dots seemed to work nicely, I wanted to see how they worked on the red panels. I tried it onto a couple at this point, and if it worked nicely I could do more easily, and if it didn't work, cleaning up would be simple.
It felt like it fit in the overall look of the Dire Wolf.
Summoner would've maybe needed a slightly stronger reflection point. I'd try that later.
Doing this effect on the tiny panes of the Gargoyle was a bit complicated even with a brand new paintbrush. What I got done felt good, especially from an angle that wasn't the one in this photo.
I also painted the couple of nose-mounted sensor suite lenses of the Mad Dog, I painted them red because it felt like a good generic lens, and fit in the theme of the canopies. The canopy reflection points didn't work here at all, they too went to the "//fixme" queue.
Hellbringer's canopy thrived here. Maybe the spot should've been made a bit more to the left, but this worked just nicely from more normal angles of viewing.
All of this was surprisingly fun to do, and I spent quite a lot less time than what I had expected to. The painting took half an hour only, as I didn't stop to wait for the layers to dry. Had I done that, I'd just conveyor belted it so that I'd done each of the base layers first, then the second ones in the same order and so on.
