Painting Battletech Miniatures, 3

Alright, so here we are at step three. At this step, we're finishing up what I call the base coat. I call it that because we are at the point where the basic underlying painting of the miniature is done, and we're moving into details. In fact, the Firefly essentially reached that point in Step 2, as there was no further need to change the black highlighted in dark blue any further.

Firefly
Not too much of a change here. For Wolf's Dragoons, the paint scheme chosen is black with red accents. Since the base coat is finished, we start on details by painting selected panels a dark red, which will be highlighted later. So, which panels do we highlight? That's basically artist's discretion, as there's nothing to say which would be most appropriate. If you look on Camospecs, however, you'll notice a bit of a pattern. Many times the lower leg panels or arms are the accent. Many times the accent colors are put onto panels, as opposed to being simple lines or blocks or other shapes painted directly on the 'mech irrespective of panels. There's no right or wrong answer here, So I selected a few points that are based on the panel lines. This miniature has a series of small panels right above the central gun, which looked interesting.

Firestarter
Things are taking shape on the Firestarter. Wet brushing was used once again to help layer up more color in some places while leaving others a bit darker. Wet brushing uses a wet brush (of course!) with thinned paint, kind of like watercolors. The trick is to keep things wet, but remove most of the water. Leave too much water on the brush, and you'll end up doing a wash instead of precisely placing paint to get a blending effect. For the Firestarter, wet brushing was used in two colors, white (this time a bright white) and blue. You can see the results in the picture (above) looking at the legs. These miniatures are just that, miniature, so a bit of a challenge to see in a photograph. Overall, the edges of panels are lighter than the center portion of the panel, which has a bit of a grayish hue.

Thorn
Like the white portion of the Firestarter (above), the Thorn was painted again with wet brushing to build up bright white on edges. This also highlights a problem: some panels are way too small to highlight. In those cases, you're basically just painting the panel a solid white, which is the case in many places on the Thorn. For this miniature, it also demonstrates another issue to resolve: what do I do when I inevitably paint a panel line, obscuring details by painting them white? After all, some of these panels are literally 1 millimeter in width and height! Well, hopefully you were careful enough to minimize this problem, but I guarantee you that it will happen. Here's the bad news: you need a really thin detail brush using the black ink to make as thin a line as possible to replace whatever you accidentally covered. But now you have to be careful not to get black lines everywhere or too thick! An interesting trick a friend of mine told me about is to use a micron pen to draw in the lines. Using the pen, the thickness will be a bit more than using a fine brush with ink. I'm pretty comfortable using a brush, so I made sure the paint those in as needed.

Raven
The Raven (above) also uses wet brushing to layer in a lighter purple in the same way we saw white and blue earlier. Unfortunately (or fortunately), there's a ton of details on this miniature, all of which lead to tiny panels and lines. Therefore, we're not left with much to work with. But we use the exact same color we used in Step 1 to dry brush it. At the tip of the "beak" of this miniature's head, we use the full pigment, though in most other places we use limited wet brushing to highlight details where feasible, like in the toes and some portions of the legs.