Miniature Friday: Mechs!

It’s been over a month since my last Miniature Friday, and that one just showed off some of the bare metal I had bought at Historicon. Well, it’s back to painting this week, and showing off some of those Historicon purchases with paint.

Here we have a couple of mechs and a couple of heavy tank escorts. Normally, I talk about how much I enjoyed painting a figure, but in this case, I can’t. It’s not because there is anything wrong with the miniatures. I actually think they are all top notch. Instead, the problem is with me as a painter.

Although I’ve been painting miniatures for about twenty-five years, the vast majority of that painting has been of living creatures. As I once again discovered, painting something to look like real flesh or cloth is very different to painting something so that it is looks like it is painted. Do you follow?

Whereas something like a cloak has lots of subtle colour variation because of its numerous folds, big flat expanses of metal do not. I know there are lots of tricks and techniques for painting machines of war, but  I don’t really know most of them. Sure, I can do a bit of shading in the cracks and dry brushing, and I’m learning how to use metallic paint to (ironically) show edges where the paint has rubbed off, but my expertise when it comes to painting these machines is much less than when painting creatures, and that is frustrating.

All of that said, I’m not unhappy with the results that I have achieved on these figures. They are bright and colourful. While this doesn’t really make much sense on a battlefield, I think it is necessary to make these figures an enjoyable spectacle. I even managed to get a couple of BattleTech House Davion decals on them (decals being another technique in which I have little skill).

So I didn’t enjoy the process, but I like the results. Now, I just need to see if I can’t convince myself to paint a few more so that I can actually play a game.

For those interested, the larger mech is a Reaper Cav figure. The smaller mech and the two tanks are from Iron Wind Metals.