A thing a week 2023, week 50

This week we have something special. These are vintage metal Mekton mechs to go with the vintage Mekton people from Week 9 of this year. I had a really rough time finding references for this stuff since a) Mekton is kind of an obscure game, and b) these are obscure minis for an obscure game. Even lostminis.com only has a partial list. Some guy at CMU has a partial list, too. If you do manage to find good reference, be a pal and drop me a note. 

All of these were painted in a batch and they're all Old Skool (TM) models which involves gluing multiple heavy metal pieces. In fact, I'd already glued them a bunch of times and done some pseudo-painting with enamels (gasp!) way back in the 90s which all needed stripping. Uncle Atom's go to is a product called LA's Totally Awesome which I bought a while ago from the dollar store specifically for stripping paint off minis...which I do almost never. Mostly I've been cleaning my stove and bathrooms with it which I gather is what it's actually for. Short version: it worked and worked great and even broke the bonds between the extra super thick late 90s applied superglue. 

Some of the mold lines were pretty deep so I filed off material as bravely as I could and while they're a lot better, if you look close you can definitely tell where I lost my nerve. Bases were built up once the mechs were glued to the bases and I used the opportunity to use some of the giant box of 3d printer supports that I pretend to keep for exactly this purpose. Priming went exactly how you'd expect with the necessary 24 hour cure time for Vallejo Surface Primer (note that Stynylrez needs no such cure time but it doesn't stick to metal very well). 

These were zenithaled with their base coats played by Daler Rowney inks. For the red, yellow, and green guys, there's also a slight yellow palette shift from the top for fun. Flat details with minor highlights were done next. I did some edge highlighting here too but I ended up redoing it because the oil wash step mostly covered them up. Every time I use an oil wash I'm shocked by a) how messy it is, and b) how good a result you can get with minimal effort. The last step was doing as much highlighting and edge highlighting I could stand and painting sky/earth non-metallic on the big domes and an orange glow for other cockpits.

For anyone wondering, I cribbed this process from Not Just Mecha aka Marco Frisoni and I've not only used it before, I expect I'm going to use it again. Somewhat ironically, I've never actually seen Marco paint a mecha but I'm happy to say that his speed painting method does work on them. The sky/earth NMM on top of the oil wash elevates an otherwise pretty uninteresting paint job. They look heavy and worn and came out way better than I expected. In addition to getting a good result, these also finish out the remainder of my unpainted vintage collection. 

2023 finished mini counter: 322/104