Bot War Painting Challenge 2021 - Atlanticans Rising

Time to work on pushing up the numbers. One of the big leaps you can make when doing a challenge like this is to break the project up into smaller mini sprints and hammer out some batch painting.

Step forward Aegon, Thermal, Nami, and Nebulous. These 4 bots are the Mud Warriors, the grunt core of the Atlantican force in the starter set, combining both ranged and close support roles. Together with Octo (who I don’t yet own) these 4 bots combine to form the mighty Leviathan.

My goal for tonight was give these 4 their 3-paint metal coats so that I can break out the airbrush tomorrow for the top coats, and then have Friday and half of the weekend to edge highlight and detail them to completion. All being well that will be 10 days down and 5 bots down, with 4 + Leviathan for the final half of the challenge. I’m on the back foot, but I know I can do it using the weekends to be able to dig deep for big gains.

This is the same workup as I used for Neptune, a thinned black metal base coat to cover the primer and seep into the recesses, a gun metal layer over the top to block in most of the colour for the metal parts, and then highlights and edges in chrome. I’m not too worried about the joints that will be painted grey later so ignored those for now to reduce the number of paint layers going into them.

I use a synthetic brush when working with metallics, and have been enjoying the Broken Toad Fugazi for this sort of work. I find I’m more aggressive with the synthetics compared to kolinsky sable and end up stipple and smudging the paint with the Fugazis to almost buff the colours into each other – a rough buff blend so to speak.

For the last of today’s painting progress I re-primed Stingray and Moray to get then ready for the weekend.

Exactly as before, prior to their biostrip 20 bath, I gave them a Badger Stynelrez Black prime with the airbrush, then once it was dry (it was very hot in the south of the UK this evening) I went over with Vallejo Mecha Primer Ivory coat.

And that’s Day 7 wrapped up. Setting myself up nicely for the next few days and the coming weekend.

One week down!