Oil painting

A slow-drying weathering operation

The story so far: I had painted the BattleMech in two short painting sessions on two consecutive evenings. After this I'd have to let my paintwork dry a bit longer, from a couple of days to up to a week, depending on how my calendar behaved.

Sepia

Preparing the wash for panel lines and gentle shadows was becoming familiar: a small dollop of paint (ABT002 Sepia) onto the palette, add drops of thinner until the result got thin enough. Now I didn't get too stressed about overapplying the wash somewhere, as I knew that it went away quickly and easily whenever I wanted.

Edge by edge, corner by corner I applied my wash on the panel lines and all the darkenable surfaces. On the LRM launchers the effect was quite nice, even though I hadn't drilled the individual missile ports open. When I had applied my wash thoroughly, I wiped off the excesses pretty soon after. I wanted to keep the flat surfaces, especially the topmost ones and the forearms, clean while the joints, corners, nooks and crannies were allowed to remain darker.

This was the state I left it, to dry in peace. The shininess would be mostly gone by the next day, but it wasn't going to be touch-dry anytime soon, but sooner than if I had applied thicker paint. In any case I decided to give it a few days to begin with.

Three days later the Archer's look was somewhat more subdued. Now it was ready for the next treatment or toning this effect up or down. I was pretty happy with the panels and the shadows, so I didn't give it a new treatment.

I had pondered if I should give this 'Mech a dot filter, but I was a bit worried about getting carried away and the effect not working that well in a small-scale item like this. A gentle lightening, on the other hand, sounded nice so I decided to go for it. Lightly.

Buffaliciousness

I chose a random, very small amount of spots where I applied a dot of paint (ABT035 Buff) with a toothpick. The colours and the sizes of the dots made this look almost symphatetic and something completely different from a warmachine from the future. It was almost a shame to not leave them be.

As instructed by smarter and better people, I blended the dots away with a rolling motion using my round-tipped blending brush. Then I left the mini to wait for a better day:

The effect was pretty strong when wet. For comparison purposes I took a quick set of photos a couple of days later. Of course I ruined any kind of comparability by taking these photos in a different lighting set, opposite corner of the apartment and at a very different time of day.

I felt the efffect worked better with a bare eye, but I also didn't spend that much time setting up my photos. Hopefully they gave some sort of an idea anyway.

Project III/23

Running in the Death Star trench

The Autumn side Father's Day brought, in addition to the mumblings-unrelated things, some Lego! This has been a good theme for years and I was more than happy to build things.

It was an action diorama. I remembered seeing someone building (or upgrading) this one as an automata, but it could also have been a yet another fake memory of mine.

The trench

Building this set was quick and hassle-free, just perfect for a quick afternoon build. It only had almost 666 pieces so the expectation was "almost done".

With the first bag's baseplate done, the next couple were full of greebling at random places. My set was missing one light grey ingot (99563) from the center-middle, that I could complain about to the Danes and get a replacement. I just wasn't familiar with the process and wasn't sure if I wanted to bother.

With the floor of the trench done I moved on to the sidewall, that received a good amount of greeblies. In the middle you could see a couple of the claws that I had set 90° wrong, but I fixed that as soon as I noticed.

The completed sidewall sat sturdily on the baseplate and it got then impaled into it with two (for some reason of different length) studs. Undoing this might be interesting, but I didn't see that appearing into my calendar anytime soon.

Black squadron

In this scene Darth Vader was escorted by two wingpeople, both in TIE/ln starfighters. Unlike what the instructions said, I set the green laser blasts a bit offset for both of the firing units, because I just found it more visually appealing than the dual-firing ones.

To get the best-looking and most active scene I might have to fine-tune the angles of these a bit still.

Red 5

Then the baddie of the scene, flown by the Red five from the Red Squadron of the space terrorists, his Incom T-65C was a pretty decent representation in this scale. While building it I was wondering a bit why the spaceframe's front and back halves were only connected with two studs instead of all the four available, but maybe it looked better this way, greeblie-wise. The S-Foils were not adjustable: the split-wings were going to stay open so you couldn't use the fighter on a more calm scene just as it was.

Diorama

With the fighters built and installed only the Taim & Bak XX-9 heavy turbolaser turret was missing. It was a pleasantly poseable piece, even though it didn't have any green turbolaser blasts for the barrels. As befit the scene.

We were running seriously low on space on the shelves with these various Lego sets we had accumulated over the years :D

Shades and some previously ignored details

The actual paintjob

Now that my basework of the Archer's paintjob was done, I got to tweak it. It was somehow fun to notice that sometime earlier at this point I'd call my painting done all but for the weathering. Over the years I've slid further and further away from that and added more tweaking and finetuning layers. And I still haven't started doing chipping or somesuch time-consuming stuff.

Taking the black down a bit

Highlighting the upper arms, hips and thigs with dark grey (VMA 71055 Black Grey RLM66) over the flat black was interesting, but I tried to approach this so that the black worked as shadow and panel line decorator. I used the dark grey to cover most of the surfaces, concentrating on the topmost parts to try to follow the flow of natural light. The lower/bottom parts I mostly left alone. When the paint dried the effect was a bit clearer than when wet. All this looked like it worked decently with the naked eye, in the photos it seemed a bit stronger.

I think I reached my goal of highlighting the details of the black-painted parts from the flat darkness.

While I was playing with the dark grey I also painted some of the bits that I couldn't touch the last time as I ran out of paint. These included the insides of the missile bay doors, the lower arm laser cannon barrels, the random bits and greeblies in the Archer's backside. A couple of the nozzles looked like Jump Jets but were most likely heat sinks instead, as this was a steady groundpounder by the specs.

Metallic paint

The only place I used metallic paint (VMA 71072 Gunmetal) were the LRM launchers. I thought that as they were behind the armored doors, they'd stand out nicely from the insides of said doors. I'd wash them darker later so that they wouldn't stand out quite that strongly.

Red paneling

The dark grey panel effects worked pretty nicely on the black so I wanted to do something similar on the red bits as well. My problem was that my basic red was so bright that I didn't have much in storage to stand out, but I also didn't trust my mixing skills to be able to get a slightly brighter red that wasn't straight out pink.

Ultimately I borrowed some Ferrari Red (VMA 71085) from the Project Assistant I and that worked decently. The difference wasn't massive but you could tell. At this point I mostly worked on the upper parts and the protruding pieces like the forearms and the legs.

Detail work

The caution stripes have been my favourite decorations on 'Mechs and such. This time I managed to rein myself in and chose only a few spots to highlight: the inner edges of the missile bay doors, the heat sink edges on the rear side, and the front edge of the hex base.

Of course I encountered a problem with my yellow paint (VMA 71002 Medium Yellow), it was at best a half-wet lump inside its bottle. I plopped out a dollop onto my palette and with some tap water I managed to get something spreadableish. The fact that this paint wasn't smooth or provided even coverage was not a bad thing but was perfect for a worn and suffered surface.

My black paint was still out, and I used the dark grey again. In advance I was a bit concerned of my stripes becoming too faded, but the result was just fine.

Kell Hounds insignia

As Camospecs told us the doggies had their insignia on the 'Mech's Left Torso. The insignia was an inverted black-lined red triangle with a black hound's head, something that even I could approximate badly in freehand. I guess I could've gotten tighter triangle edges with a better hand-control or a thinner paintbrush.

This torso had few suitable spots where I would've dared to start painting something as simple as this. My own choice would've been in the middle of the top Center Torso, but as that wasn't according to the specs, I painted it onto the open missile bay door. And yes, I did remember to paint it upside down so it'd be the right way when the door got closed.

This was pretty much what I was going to do for decoration. During my short painting sessions I noticed a few spots here and there that I painted dark grey after I had originally considered myself ready. Now I was content, the red sections were broken down enough but not too distractingly.

Groundwork on the armor

Hands dirty

After a tiny bit of scratching and sanding off plastics I decided that I wasn't going to poke it anymore. Now it was time to paint.

Priming

Ok, so I had managed to completely ignore topping up my storage of primers, but luckily I had over a bottleful of red primer (VSP 70624 Pure Red). I blasted the miniature top to bottom, then bottom-up to get all the corners and angles covered.

Even the photos didn't immediately show any missed spots. Nice.
 

The red parts

If I had any of the gory red that I had used painting the previous Kell Hounds, it wasn't going to pass through my airbrush anymore. Lately I've relied on the RLM23 red (VMA 71003), as you may have noticed, so I was going to stick to it now as well.

I used the flip side of the Alpha Strike card's artwork as a quick reference of Morgan Kell's BattleMech. Based on the small pic I painted especially the lower legs, arms, and the torso from the hip up.

These shades of red differed from each other a bit but not strongly. If I didn't actually know I used different paints, I might not be able to tell it with my crappy eyes...

Blackness

After air-drying the red layers I decided I had a tiny problem with black paint (VMA 71057). My last bottle of black was so low that I barely got a thin layer of it painted to give me a guideline for the dark grey layers.

How did this happen? Black had been one of my main paints for ages. I realized it right away: I've moved without noticing away from the extreme colours also in the bits that are instructed to be painted as black/white, because they are somewhat unnatural-looking in these scales.

That wasn't too much of a problem, this black layer had the honour of working as a pathfinder and the base of shadows. Just about everything I painted black was going to be overpainted with dark grey (black grey or german grey), and maybe they would also get a slightly lighter grey over them.

These photos didn't show too well that the area between the side torso's armoured ridge and the shoulder was red. While painting the other bits I was thinking if that ought to be black too or would a dark wash be enough to differentiate it.

The past ISD made one sort of a decision for me by not buing more black paint, so at least today those bits remained red. Perhaps I'd practice making fake shadows with the oil paints, this could be a fantastic guinea pig for such a process.

A couple of red bits were shining through in the hips and on the antennae, so I had ran out of black a tiny bit too soon. This last photo showed how I had decided to paint narrow strips of the lower R/L Torso black, to break the monoblocks of red in the torso. It felt like a good breakpoint, especially from the viewpoint of a vehicle or an unfortunate foot soldier.

Next up

Next time I'd paint over the black parts with grey and go through the metallic parts (laser cannons, missile launchers, the insides of the missile bay doors, the hinges). I should also go over the cockpit canopy bits too, so that the green jewe effects would have convenient dark frames.