Had an absolute blast with these, pushing the quality up a little with some new techniques. Airbrushed the base layer on (blue with a little red), then did a couple rounds of careful drybrush with a pretty starkly bright highlight to catch the teensy Battletech sclupt edges and get an edge highlighting without having to deal with the cussedly shallow features. Smoothest highlights I ever done did on a mech. Then, I finally broke out my spirits and black oil paint and tried panel lining (again, after the disastrous brush-on-gloss attempt with my terrain). Let me tell you, it’s not something I want to try doing when jittery or tired, but hot DAMN does it make those little robitts pop visually. Like, look at that side view of the King Crab. Look at that almost cartoonish visual separation! I’m never going back. This method makes Battletech figures look proper gorgeous both up close and at tabletop distance.
And then, because nobody ever accused me of knowing when to stop or letting my shitty skills slow me down, I freehanded a half dozen symbols on prominent spots. I’m tremendously pleased with what I got out of this. Next time I might want to freehand (and veeeery carefully drybrush highlights on it) before I panel line, and if I don’t care about the model (or my lungs) I might try airbrushing gloss before lining for Extra Flow, but the thinned out black I used flowed pretty well and didn’t stain the other surfaces (much, most of which I dabbed off with a q-tip).
Anyway, happy little robots.
