My gaming world has been feeling a little unstable since the virtual collapse of warhammer 40k as a go to game. I've decided that Battletech is an excellent place to put my money and devote some time to learning more about that world. I've purchased the introductory boxed set and have decided to pledge my loyalty to house davion and their OD Green color scheme. The boxed set comes with some of the most well known original mechs and I spent a little time researching which mechs were fluffy for davion and what their military style was like, then I just chose the 12 mechs I liked the most and then picked 4 light mechs that I could include in a pinch because, well, light mechs are fun and potentially OP. This will be a work in progress as I slowly figure out a way to highlight them and pick out some details. These pictures are taken under the best of lighting conditions and on the table they look pretty dark.
A company consists of 12 mechs divided into 3 lances of 4 mechs. I also have 4 light mechs included in case I want to drop one of the other lances in favor of fast movers.
House Davion Crucis Lancers
Alpha Lance (Assault Mechs, Bigger is Better)
Bravo Lance (Heavy Mechs, Fire Support)
Charlie Lance (Medium Mechs, Flankers and Brawlers and Oddballs)
Light Mechs
That's all for now.
Here's the Company with a drybrush of Straken Green. I played around with some of the groups. I'm also just going to go ahead and do all 24 but these are the ones I like the best.
Alpha Lance
Bravo Lance
Charlie Lance
Recon Lance
Here's the company with a drybrush of Nurgling Green. You can really see the detail on the models now and there are places on each model I can see that are going to be places for a final highlight layer. I am done with the drybrushing now since I can see all the detail. I will now begin to go through each model and decide if there are any gun muzzles that need painting. I will also paint the cockpits. Then I will see where I'm at and how they look.
Alpha Lance
Bravo Lance
Charlie Lance
Recon Lance
Here are some pictures of the company with their cockpits painted orange and some hardpoints blocked out in black. These black areas I will paint gunmetal silver. The contrast is nice for a picture and you can see the black better because the silver will blend in with the green and be more difficult to see and be darker. So it was time for a picture. I have also used a brush to highlight certain areas on the center torso and to neaten up the structure around the eyes. There still needs to be more shaping to sharpen things up and more highlights to bring out certain areas. I blacked out their bases. They are ready for a game but I'd like to push some paint into a few more corners. I want to get some House Davion decals and slap them on where I can. I can also add yellow and red stripes here and there as sort of these honorifics since that's what they do.
Alpha Lance
Bravo Lance
Charlie Lance
Recon Lance
In this update, I'm showing you the work I have done on the armor plates of each mech. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go forward with the detail in this way. I think drybrushing works fine for these models. I spent a few days deciding if detailing the armor was something I wanted to spend time doing. In the end, I decided that I wanted to go over each model and highlight each square of armor all over their body. I started off with the Banshee and carefully painted each panel one by one. By the time I was done with the one test model, I was sure I wanted all the mechs to have that same level of detail. The overall result is there is more contrast between the surface of the armor and the dark lines in between. Also the overall color of the models has gone up one tone higher so they look brighter in the picture.
I have also started playing around with the grouping of mechs in each lance. I'm thinking about range bands and grouping them according to their weapon strengths and weaknesses. I haven't decided yet if I want to have each lance be good at one thing or if I want a lance that has a little bit of everything - short range, medium range, long range and support.
Alpha Lance
From left to right, Awesome, Banshee, Atlas, Zeus.
Bravo Lance
Catapult, Enforcer, Jagermech, Dragon
Charlie Lance
Quickdraw, Grasshopper, Hunchback, Trebuchet
Recon Mechs
Spider, Jenner, Commando, Cicada, Panther
The larger mechs were the easiest to work on. The smaller the mechs got the harder it became to paint each individual square tile of armor. It became a little challenging while painting the medium size mechs and then very challenging when painting the light mechs like the spider, commando and panther. My smallest brush wasn't cutting it anymore. So I had to settle of doing what I could to the light mechs, not hitting everything. I may go back later and fill things in with a newer, smaller brush. The jenner and cicada weren't so bad. I like them a lot more now than I did before armor detailing.
