Vaaish does battletech...

[Vaaish]

Well, it's that time I start a new thread in Solitary. After much effort, probably far more than necessary, I've finished up two of the three mechs for the first "lance". The Battlemaster will be done soon but with the extra scaling type detail on the various areas I decided that it needs a bit more attention to paint properly. I'm mostly happy with how these turned out. These are mechs from the Draconis Combine Ryoken-Roku unit.

[mangozac]

Fantastic job as usual. Are the colours a little darker IRL? They seems a little washed out in the pics. Did you paint the clan icons or cheat again and use transfers?

[Vaaish]

Thanks! Yeah the colors are a smidge darker. Hard to judge how the photos will look on a variety of monitors these days so I aim for a slightly brighter image to counteract things like dark monitors and sunlight bleeding in.

No cheating this time. I don't own any battletech transfers and I'm too cheap to go buy some . That means all markings on these guys are freehand.

[SSB]

Yep, beautiful paint job !
What is the size of the mini ?

[paulson games]

I saw these on LOTB, they look killer you'd never guess that these are plastics. Bang up job on them.

[Vaaish]

Thanks! I guess I can admit this here, but I did kind of push the paint job a little farther than necessary just to see if I could get a reaction on the Classic Battletech forums after seeing just how many of the paintjobs are a bit under par with their studio team. It didn't seem to work

[paulson games]

Battletech is a crowd that is all about the game play, the average paint level is pretty poor in most cases and that's if they are even using painted mechs. GW stuff has incentive to do nicely painted stuff with competitions like the golden demon and they have some top grade advertising featuring painted armies to pump up the gamers. The majority of battletechs pro painters are like mid grade 40k painters.

White dwarf might be a joke as far as game content, but it does have great paint spank material.

Battletech as much as I love it is a very differant animal when it comes to the hobby aspect.

Something that may be up your alley, check out the stuff for battleforce it's basically Epic scale battletech set to something like 1/500 or 1/600 scale, minis are about half the size of the ones you have been working with. They are selling them in boxes of 10-12 mechs for about $40.

It has it's own rules set to keep the game play streamlined and the start up rules can be downloaded for free on catalyst's website. Good option if you want to play really massive battles, or if you want to play a space saving game of regular battletech as you can shrink the map sheets to a single piece of paper.

[Vaaish]

Speaking of gameplay, I STILL haven't had a chance to actually do the intro game to find out how things play. Anyway, I have noticed that most of the painters really weren't that good. There are a couple of exceptions but I've even seen one where it looked like someone gave the model a coat of candy red spray picked out a few metal areas and called it good. Shocked me that a game company would use something like that to promote their products.

I've seen the battleforce stuff before, but as odd as this sounds, I'm trying to use what I've got right now and not sink a lot of money into battletech. That means I'm stuck with the 3rd ed models, citytech models, and those two boxes of the blue resin and metals I ran into. It's a surprisingly large selection but it's requiring a rather lengthy cleanup period.

I guess when it comes down to it, I just can't abide putting a poorly painted or unpainted model on the table if it can be helped and the battletech stuff is more of a challenge to make crap models look good hence why I've spent far more effort on technical stuff like blending and shading as well as accurate color schemes and insignia. Needing fewer models to play just means I'll have a decent amount with a fairly low initial time cost.

[mangozac]

[Vaaish]

Well, the battlemaster is finally done. I tried a shortcut to do the hex pattern and it failed miserably. Partly due to the cast and partly due to the sculpt. It did help somewhat so that left me going back in and painting each one while trying to account for the blending. I'm not entirely thrilled with how he turned out because of the canopy. These large odd shaped cockpits aren't something I'm used to so it makes it far more challenging. I'm also not thrilled with how the draconis symbol or the number turned out and I'm kicking myself for trying to finish it. Basically, too much time without food equals shaky hands combined with too high a temperature in the studio makes the paint dry too fast. Other than that, I do like how the missiles turned out and most of the other bits I would change just come down to the problems with the plastic cast losing detail or being garbled by where the mold lines were.

I have some other bits to go on to for now, but next up will be to finish up the victor fixes and start in on the dragoon's wasp, wolverine and warhammer. I've also included a group shot.

[mangozac]

That's great! The hexes look just fine to me and the cockpit shading looks perfect. I can't imagine the level of patience required to paint all of those tiny hexes!

[paulson games]

I'm liking it, the hexes came out great. I've always loved the battlemaster but hated trying to paint the hex pattern as it so dang hard to get it to look right. Very tight looking group you have so far.

[Vaaish]

Yeah, the hexes were a pain to paint. I really hope I don't have to do a pattern like that for some time. I don't have the patience to do it 100% properly since it would take forever. I think the lights when I took the photo helped the cockpit, but without those additional specular highlights, it just isn't reading as glass to me. I find these hard because the light wouldn't refract through the glass and pool in the same way it would on a solid gem rather than a thin sheet formed into that shape. To me it doesn't feel quite right.

[mangozac]

We're our biggest critics eh?

[blind pig]

I wonder if the hex pattern could be done up in something like CorelDraw and then printed out on that decal paper and put on?