Finished: Project VI/24

Twinkle twinkle little Star

This always rolled off the tongue like nothing: one of the Stars in the Clan Ghost Bear Delta Galaxy's 73rd Battle Cluster's 314th Battle Trinary now had the missing two Points ready to join their comrades in their quest in freeing the barbaric Inner Sphere, bringing Kerensky's vision to life. On my timeline the Bears were tightly on the Crusader camp and any kind of what-iffing about Wardening was just delusional nonsense.

Stormcrow Prime #211

55-ton Medium Stormcrow, Ryoken for the freebirths of the Inner Sphere. A quick beast with both long- and medium range weaponry and also a neat dozen extra Double Heat Sinks to help out. A symmetrical loadout had an ER Large Laser and an ER Medium Laser in both Arms, and a third ERMLas in the head. Perhaps that one was located there in case the pilot lost both Arms in some weird situation.

Viper Prime #215

In the neighbour Point the 40-ton Viper was quick - which probably gave the Inner Sphere name of Dragonfly to it - but somewhat lightly armed compared to other 40-tonners. There were two Machine Guns in the torso (the fact that they were called MGs didn't mean that they were directly comparable to the ones infantryfolks carried around), an SRM-4 in the Left Arm, and twin Medium Pulse Lasers in the Right Arm.

Shooting the stars

Here we were, a full quinted was acquired. The fact that I had an untouced Kodiak in one of the boxes made me think if I was going to need a Binary of Ghost Bears, but then again, other Clans also had few Kodiaks. A funny thing about its name was that in Finnish I was about to call it simply with another nickname for a bear, but those (Karhu, Kontio) were already used for actual 'Mechs so I had to be more careful with my nicknaming than usual.

While I was on it I dropped the minis on a hex map that I had used under the light tent's canvas for ground support:

As my 25th Anniversary Box was open, I plucked a Lanceful of scouting Steiner's BattleMechs for target practice. This sort of a 5 vs 4 wasn't according to any Honor Rules, even if I suspected the mass advantage was more on the side of the freebirths.

Final mumblings

This excitedly painted duo took a moment less than three hours (2h 55mins). Painting just one of them wouldn't have been mentionably quicker, that's how efficient I happened to be.

I'd remain in the BattleTech universe, but I wasn't entirely sure how. The Jade Falcons were calling me after a while, and I had been pondering on and off for a couple of years if I should take a couple of the IIC 'Mechs and set up a Solahma Star just for the fun and variety.

Stormcrow and Viper basing

Last fifteen minutes

Nothing special remained anymore, especially the bases were done in a flash. Had I not a simple example of the original two Points to follow, I'd done something else but still nothing too complicated.

Glasses

Each of the lenses and all of the cockpit canopy panes got a coating of Vallejo's gloss varnish.

Hexes

This was a very simple base: a layer of white glue on the ground, then Woodland Scenics' Ballast was sprinkled on, and left to flash. This time I added no vegetation on the bases.

Timekeeping

All in all this was a fifteen minute show. Total time spent was about 2h 55mins. Getting the final photos with all the digging for the other three Points, setting up the light tent, the proper camera, and fooling with gimp was going to take an hour easily, but that I never included in my actual time spent on the model/mini.

Stormcrow and Viper jewelification

Painting the jewel effect on the lenses, even if badly, has been a lot of fun, so I was actually excited to get my two minis to this stage already. Some pretty day I needed to sit down and start working on the about 145 earlier painted minis that only had a red dot or a blue wash on a metallic base.

Energy weaponizing

I spied from TRO 3050 how the weapons were officially located, so I'd paint the correct lenses the correct way. This time there were no flashlights or PPCs so for the mediums I used the green (VGA 72732 Escorpena Green) and larges I got blue (VGA 72721 Magic Blue). For mixing I used off-white (VMA 71270 White RAL9001).

Stormcrow

Here we had five rayguns to paint. Both arms had a medium and a large one, and somewhere in the head I was supposed to fit a third ERMLas. The head's lens was something I had probably missed on each of my earlier IWM minis, but all that could be fixed one by one.

Something had to be the first and this time I started with the green ERMLas lenses. In the laser barrels I painted the base layer of bright green. For the next dollop I mixed a drop of white and aimed to the 17:00-19:00 sector as well as I could with a tiny paintbrush onto a tiny target. Lastly I mixed another white drop in and attempted to do the tiny brightest dots with the even tinier opposing reflections.

This exact same was done for the ERLLasers but in blue and onto a bit larger target. The sizing alone made this somewhat easier.

I had managed better results before, but they worked fine by me.

 

Viper

I expected even less work from the Viper and its twin ERMPLasers. As long as I remembered to check that the RT-mounted double machine guns were barreled properly, everything was going to be fine. Again I was thinking that if the CGL's SRM-4 launchers had tips for the missiles like in many of the IWM minis, I'd be supremely happy to paint those as well.

These jewelings had gone better on earlier minis. Still, this was a vast improvement over my old approach of "lasers red".

 

Jump Jets

My Stormcrow was doomed to roam the ground on wherever it was deployed, so only the Viper got glowing JJ nozzles. To keep up with my earlier decisions and to remain somewhat constant, I got the same blue I used for the PPCs (VGC 72023 Electric Blue) and edited it with the same RAL white as all the jewelings. For a hopefully more gentle transitions I added a drop of tap water into my paint when I started.

According to the TRO the Jump Jet layout was LT/RT with 2 each, also LL/LR so eight nozzles for eight-hex leaps.

Hm. These looked nicer than the ones I painted previously into the butt-side of Grendel A. Maybe one day I'd get all these funny details into such a state where I was equally pleased with each of them.

My time usage crawled up to 2h 40mins. This last set of pics handily told me that I had accidentally skipped a caution stripe set from the LL.

Stormcrow and Viper bathing in oil

Final tweaks

Before getting to the oils I did some last minute changes to my minis. The Stormcrow got a few blue marks onto its back as it had nothing there before. Viper's fists were painted dark grey for variety and those I also drybrushed with lighter grey, and then I re-repainted the AMS dome blue because I didn't like the unpainted steel there that much.

While working on these paints I also painted the hex bases so that the grey mess wouldn't catch my eyes constantly. For both minis I painted the front hex edges in blue, the others in dark grey.

Pin washes

Somehow I didn't feel like playing with the gloss varnish on the minis, I just sat the pieces on the crappy painter's tape I had for extra holding spots and pretty much covered them with Abteilung's Sepia.

On the first run I cleaned up what was cleanable with an eyeful. As usual, the photos revealed what I had missed but I rarely declared perfect results after just one run.

All this took an hour. We were at 2h 20mins now.

Miniproject VII/24

Executor

Yesterday was the Father's Day in this corner of the globe, and what I've shared in the 'Mumblings about that was anything silly, like this time. The Return of the Jedi 40th anniversary block -decorated set was quickly built, all its six hundred-ish bits. Then it was moved to safety from the cats.

My construction proceeded like an AT-AT on Hoth.

Long stints of greebling was done, that was fun. I guess there could've been more asymmetric parts, but I also didn't remember the movie model that perfectly anymore, so I guess it was pointless to yap about it :D

 

Finished

It ended up looking fine. Even the cats didn't try help more than by biting the plastic bags.

Right after my quick and silly photos we moved the Executor to sail the space over the bookshelves, right next to MP-36 Megatron. This was good.

Stormcrow and Viper detailing II

The wonderful world of additional detailing

On a Sunday evening I got inspired to paint more details and didn't even think of stopping to take wip photos. Not that my freehanding was worthy of closer looks nor documentation, they were ugly in each stage.

Dark grey fine tuning

The previous evening's metal pieces had lost something, so I drybrushed them with the lighter grey. This made them look better, now that the eyes had something in the edges to grab on.

Caution striping was completed with dark grey stripes.

For my gentle surface damage effects I again added a bit of red into the dark grey and went on filling the AMT-coloured bits with this red-tinted grey. The difference between plain dark grey and red-tinted one wasn't immene but there was a difference.

I actually liked the reddish grey so much that I used that alone for my Point numbers (Stormcrow 211; Viper 215). This approach I tried in order to save myself some pain and annoyance of paiting two ~identical tiny numbers over each other with a tiny offset.

Hands free

The Galaxy insignia I tried to implement with an ivory-coloured shape over the lightning bolts, and over that some dark dots. Those were supposed to represent the Ghost Bear that was about to maul you, in this scale.

As always, my personal problem with the insignia was the same: tiny surfaces on a mini and little space on said panels. For the Clan roundel I painted a dark grey circle. Over that I painted a blue asterisk at a 90° angle with counterclockwise-pointing clawlike bits. Over and inside them I did the same shapes with off-white (VMA 71075 Sand (ivory)) and a lump in the middle for the bear's head with the dark grey nose-eye-mouth dots. Or that's what they were supposed to look like from far, far away.

My Stormcrow definitely was missing something from the rear sector, as only the backsides of the shoulder plates were anyhow highlit and that wasn't visible enough for a follower of the Founder. Also the Viper's fists made me consider seriously if they ought to be bare steel instead. Maybe the next evening.

Viewports

All of the viewport panes were either tiny or otherwise strangely shapes. I basecoated them all with Yellow Ochre as the main colour. For jeweling I lightened it up with a drop of white/ivory and did tiny dots however I had space. On a few of the Stormcrow's larger windows I also had the space for the brightest dots.

Yellow was, always, a really difficult colour or I was just bad with playing with some colours.

While writing this I was more convinced that there were a couple of things still to do before the next main step, pin washes. This stuff took about 20 minutes, getting us to 1h 20mins.