#starslayer

In 1982, I was a huge fan of Pacific Comics, and really all of the new companies that had begun to spring up in the developing Direct Sales marketplace. These new companies and their assorted offerings excited me with the possibilities. I truly felt that I might be on the ground floor of some future Marvel, having come to that outfit far too late to have been there at its formative days. I’d…

Starslayer And Grimjack

Original Art (1983)

How To Paint: Lense Gemming

In the Heat Sink tutorial I mentioned that glow effects are really common in 40k paint schemes but see less use in Battletech so let's look at something that I frequently see go the other way- flat painted gem effects for lenses. These work well for Battletech energy weapons, but they can also be used for sensor clusters, glass eyepieces on things like a space marine helmet, or jewels on a more fantasy inspired mini. There's a variety of ways to do these- gem or contrast paints over a metallic base coat, gloss varnish, or just splashing the area with a little color all work just fine- but today I'm going to go over my basic recipe for a green reflective glass effect.

Paints I Used:

For as much of a love/hate relationship as I have with GW citadel paints their color system is remarkably good at getting proper highlight colors for things like this- I'm largely cribbing my color choices here from the old Duncan Rhodes videos and you can feel free to sub out for whatever colors work best for your particular project.

Citadel Caliban Green (dark green)

Citadel Warpstone Glow (green)

Citadel Moot Green (light green)

Army Painter Matt White (titanium white)

Method

Once you've completed the area around whatever you want to gem, start by painting this with your darkest color. Here we'll be using our dark Caliban Green, focusing on the Starslayer's two large lasers. If a little gets on the rim around the lense at this step that's fine.

Once your dark green is dry, take a very small brush and thin down your mid-tone green. Choose one of the bottom 'corners' of the lense and start carefully applying paint there. Ideally, we want to paint a 'crescent moon' shape centered on that corner, with a fatter middle section and thinner tips, leaving the darker green visible in the lense center and one of the upper corners. If the detail proves to small or your hand-eye coordination is too unwieldy for this, sketching a 'C' shape or simply putting a diagonal line thru the lense and coloring the lower half with your light color will also work at this scale.

Next, take your light green color and thin it with your smallest brush. Very carefully apply a thin line of this color along the outer edge of the area you painted with your green midtone.

Finally, apply a small dot of pure white to the upper corner of the lense that remains dark green.

P, Craig Russell

Initially I called my OC mercenary unit “Körsnär’s Carnosaurs”, after the symbol I made for them and an old ttrpg character, but eventually I just decided hell with it - this is the same Varangian Guard as in my MegaMek campaign (or at least, the 3151 incarnation of them). I’m pretty happy with the paint scheme, I think I managed to avoid the iron man connotations of the red and burnt yellow, and I continue to enjoy the lightning on the right arm.

For this particular mini, I had a stab at using a Neon Green paint over white for the cockpit and I’m pretty happy with the outcome - the corner of the shine effect could be sharper, but that’ll come with time. I also ended up accidentally Norwegian-izing this guy, I slapped a cross pattern on the left upper arm without thinking about how that would look. Maybe a deliberate homage from the MechWarrior? Finally, this sculpt really had some issues in the legs. I’d be curious to hear if other people who picked up the Mercenaries box found this, but the plastic on the legs is has some very strange and clearly unintended sags and crevices.