I wanna post through my progress on painting my Battletech starter set. I don't know if anyone else here paints tabletop guys but that's fine.
I've finished up the Battlemaster and the Wolverine (the blue guys) and have moved on to the Locust and Shadow Hawk (yellow/grey)... they're kind of in that middle "ugly but idk why" phase but I'm just gonna push through. I'm really excited to get to the green and red guys.
Man, these look so fucking sick. I haven't played Battletech but I'm always seeing the figures in games stores I go to for D&D supplies. How difficult is it to paint them? And what are the general dimensions of these? I've been thinking about getting into the minis side of TRPGS now that I play more in person than online and I'm always entranced but a little bit intimidating by the big racks of paint they have. I worry I don't have a steady enough hand though.
My hands are really shaky all the time too, but there are techniques to get over that issue same with any other visual medium (for example for freehanding details you kind of brace your brush-holding hand against your mini-painting hand to kind of gyro lock them). There's also sooooo many videos online that explain both beginner and advanced painting principles so it's not that hard to get into.
Battletech guys are really varied in size, the Locust is like ~3cm while the Battlemaster is ~6cm, and then you can start getting in the weeds with Elementals (basically powersuits) or regular infantry guys that are like 8mm scale.
Also IMO the like 50 different shades of green and stuff is for when you're painting a really big army and need consistency across several weeks of painting; if you're just doing one-offs for like TTRPGs or something you can just have a couple colours that you mix as needed - it's all just acryllic paint with really fine pigments.
I love what you've done with your mechs! You have really confident vision.
I would love to paint some minis some day but no real interest in the games they're generally associated with, so it would feel like a waste to get a bunch of paints and tools...
That said if all you need is a few paints to mix with.... Mmh...
I guess I simply need to find someone who really wants to play who really doesn't want to paint...
I think the colors and mech choices for them are looking very nice so far! I also always had a thing for solid body color and making one arm or arm+leg on one side being another, always a solid look i think. The evil red egg on legs is def my favorite rn...
I sadly never got into painting minis due to living most of my life in a place where i couldn't really play with people, but just yesterday i was talking to a friend and he told me just recently he was researching what kind of miniatures he saw in a clinic while waiting and spent a little time with...turns out it was battletech and was researching it past couple of days. I was honestly thinking if i'd get into games like this with some minis it'd probably be battletech and painting them sounds quite fun... Sooo maybe in a month i'm gonna share some of the guys we get!
Done with the yellow/grey guys! I'm kind of improvising so I gave these guys an accent piece of a green vertical stripe on the grey side, and an orange/green unit insignia on the yellow side. I'm basically just slowly ramping up the freehand practice until I get to the green guys, which I plan to have a lot of freehand stuff on.
It's awesome how much the single white highlight dot makes it all come together and look finished.
Really liking how they are turning out! Highlights really making them pop and in general very nice color schemes!
Looking forward for the red guys being done
Mostly done with the green guys - went for a more 'realistic' approach with lots of rusting on top of the green paint, heat-blackened gun tips, etc. Freehanding the details was scary but a lot of fun! All I have left is to paint the bases and coat them, though that step might take some time until better spraying conditions.
they are looking good I think! I think the whole set is ending up with some great visual variety!
As me and my friend are getting ready to paint some battletech guys in a month we're gonna get some practice on the bootleg molds he has but never really done anything with, i never seen a real GW one but these ones seemed to be p alright to me, they aren't ideal and i had to cut a lot of excessive plastic and some spots filled the detailing but I think they'll work very well for practice, so going to start with these Tau crisis battlesuits. We don't have a lot of materials yet, but gonna see what can be done with what we got tomorrow.
(also I'm a fool not sure how to actually link image proper, i figured it out!)
