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

A thing a week 2023, week 9

This week we continue our pseudo-theme looking through the remaining unpainted figures in my vintage collection.

These are Maria Mercurial and Kyle Morgan from Shadowrun and also by Ral Partha. Shadowrun is a game I have a lot of nostalgia for even though I've only actually played it a handful of times. These are fantastic sculpts and are on opposite ends of the complexity spectrum. Because most of both of these figs was done with contrast paints and because Maria is far less complex, she got a bunch of extra time which I think shows. Kyle's sculpt has a mess of detail in a very Daniel Craig-like way. About the only thing I don't like is their sculpted eyes but I can look past that (pun intended). Ultimately these figs can hold a higher quality paint job and I might repaint them at a much later date. Harder with vintage figs than 3d prints but I'm not above painting right over the existing paint job. Either way I think they look good and I'm happy with the four-ish hour investment in them.

Last up we have Laian and Tammis from Mekton, an ancient game that I actually played a long time ago. These are at best OK sculpts and the cleanup was really bad. You can kind of see how off the mold was on Laian's helmet. For this paint job I wanted two things: sculpt some with paint to make the most of out of these sculpts, and to experiment with teal and orange as a color scheme; a new one for me. Laian has pink hair and pink tights since I mostly paint fantasy figs and don't get to paint that kind of thing often. The former kind of sells, the second not so much. Overall they were done in around five hours and much like their sculpts, I think they're OK.

2023 finished mini counter: 67/100