A long collection of steps
I started all this by fixing the tan-coloured parts on the upper hulls that caught my attention. On top of that I mixed in some white and drybrushed the edges somewhat cautiously just to give them some more worn and light-shadow highlighting before I would reach the oil washing stage.
Metallic barrels and other pieces
Then I stopped for a bit to ponder on which metallic paint to use on all these guns. Gunmetal, steel, oily steel, chrome? The chrome paint would probably be a bit over the top even on Clanners. A clean metal sounded like a decent match with the light paint scheme, but not standing out way too much. Maybe.
After painting the weapons with gunmetal I used Vallejo's Duraluminium (77702) on various joints and a couple of jump jets.
After spending a couple of years using dark grey on bare metals, using something this bright was indeed a bit baffling.
Jade highlights
Running with the story I thought that these five had been turned from various Wolves to Jade Wolves with a bit of a rush and even less pre-planning. To support that I thought that the amount of jade highlights wouldn't be huge and they wouldn't be anything elaborate. Before hitting the paint with a brush I was thinking along the lines of doing the front edges of missile launchers and such, and adding some individual stripes in places. Some of these could be done with all the care in the world, some "I was running out of paint, Star Commander, so I had to thin it down a bit to be able to finish my job"-kind of moments. I would, as always, decide as the actual painting progressed.
I concentrated more on the torsos and arms than the legs, but that was how I always did it. I also decided that I wasn't going to try any freehanded Clan, Galaxy, Cluster or any other insignia, as they weren't really even defined anywhere. So they had to be ok with just the general paint scheme, I wasn't going to invent any markings myself.
Oil wash with cleanup
My hobby time happened to squiggle into the calendar in a way that I got to touch up the gun barrels before the oil wash. That the Marauder IIC and Stone Rhino had the upper barrels so different was intentional, and after the oil wash got cleaned up I'd go retouch them again with gunmetal. Of the three here you could see best how the sandy paint had shown a bit underneath, and I wanted that gone.
With a very little effor the armour surfaces were so much cleaner again.
Here was a quick WIP pose, after the cleanup session. The next step was to poke all the barrels again, maybe re-highlight the upper frames with a drybrush. As soon as the thinner had flashed, that is.
A highlight round
The planned quick cleanup/highlighting round contained repainting the three aforementioned gun barrels with Vallejo's Gunmetal, and drybrushing the upper torsos with the original Tan Earth. The idea was to enhance the way the local sun's light hit the 'Mechs, I didn't go for the oil buffing this time, even if it was a fun effect. Before the lenses I also painted each of the barrel ends and viewport panes in black.
Lenses, cockpits and Jump Jets
For the jeweling I followed my now-standard recipe based on Vallejo paints. In it all the small lasers started with a Bloody Red base, all the mediums from Escorpena Green, the large ones from Magical Blue, and the various Particle Projector Cannons and Jump Jets all were based on Electric Blue. Each of the cockpits was always based on something that stood out from the scheme, now I picked the red, just like for the flashlights.
Marauder IIC only had a single glass pane in the front, the gun pods and the turret had ER PPCs, and the Medium Pulse Lasers were also in the arm pods. An array of ER Small Lasers were installed just below the cockpit. This gave a wide red-green-blue scale for the energy weapons, even if the Large Laser's shade was missing.
Over the head of the Stone Rhino we had two Gauss Rifles, then Large Pulse Lasers in arms, and a Small Pulse Laser in the middle of its chin. The cockpit was pleasantly simple, if a bit narrow. The Jump Jets lived in the calves and in the middle of its back.
Warhammer IIC's loadout was nice: ER PPCs in the arms, an SRM-6 launcher on the shoulder, and around the torso a set of five Medium Pulse Lasers. That five-part canopy under a heavy brow was a bit bothersome to paint, which made it also difficult to see from most angles. For reference the photo below: you couldn't see much redness in there.
This basic variant of Supernova was just about as insane as Nova's, but heavier and hence smaller in numbers: six ER Large Lasers in clusters of three. The Jump Jets were in the legs and back, as usual. Nine pieces of cockpit viewports made me think it was designed in the way Dornier bombers were, but at least these were pretty decently sized, unlike some competitors.
As your run-of-the-mill Hunchback had an AC/20 on its shoulder, the Clan-improved Hunchback IIC of course had two largest Ultra AutoCannons the factories could produce, and a pair of ER Medium Lasers in the middle of its chest. Jumpjets included. In comparison to the original HBK the IIC's viewport was quick and easy to paint properly.
Cockpits, round II
Unsurprisingly I didn't quite have the time to get all done in one painting session, but luckily I could jump back in the next evening. Only after these touchups were done and the painted bits had dried properly, it was time for the gloss varnish. Those two Gauss Rifles still needed a bit more work, the bastards.
Gauss rifle effect, variant 3
Stone
Rhino's Gauss Rifles were waiting for the heat stress effects, and that's why I was so bothered with the painting of the metals themselves. This was exactly the same effect I was mumbling about a couple of silly weeks ago, but now on a different base. I redid the same approach as the last time: three slightly overlapping bands of stippled washes (Citadel's sepia, violet, blue) instead of flooding the surface.
From this viewpoint the sepia part didn't really convince me, perhaps I could've used the original recipe's bottom-most shade (whichever the Citadel's darker brown one was) but this could also work with just the violet and blue band alone, I thought. On some parts the brown had ended up in a thicker layer than on some other parts, like you could see from the side view on the next photo, where the effect was much more subtle. I guess this was a yet another case of lack of skills.
Last things to be remembered
Looking back at all the stuff I had now typed down, what was I forgetting? Maybe I had tried to collect a bit too much into one single post, so writing things down on various days increased the danger of something falling between the cracks.
On these bits there were few ammo-consuming weapons, so I didn't do soot stains on more than Hunchback IIC's murdercannons' front, back, and spent casing ejector ports. The Warhammer IIC's searchlight box needed some sensor lenses, so I painted them with Yellow Ochre and one brighter shade. I did this instead of painting the whole thing as a searchlight unlike back in the day. The SRM-6 launcher was in need of a cleanup after all the messing up, so I painted the caps in jade.
Nearing the end of this sessionset I painted the various grilles and vents with diluted dark grey. The Abteilung Sepia wash hadn't been quite strong enough, so I did this as an extra layer of shadowing. My absolutely final step was to apply the Vallejo Gloss Varnish on all of the lenses, viewports, and the Warhammer IIC's searchlight/sensor complex.
