John wants Bears and Horses: A Battletech Journey

Onto making the markings for my mechs!

Now that I have the factions picked, I went to etsy for appropriate decals for the markings for both factions and some generic numbering and so on.

I found Defiance Industries who have an amazing range of decals that covers most of the factions within the universe, plus a lot more, ad decided to take a selection of their decal sheets and work from there.

So onto the mechs. I’ll use my Ghost Bears as an example of the next couple of steps.

First off, the decals are great BUT they do not have a white background. This means that, as bright as they look on the paper, they are actually quite transparent without that layer of white ink behind the colour. So, how to fix this?

You can either paint white over the area you want to place the decals, or, use paint pens to quickly put a white spot where you want. This is what I did and it worked out well enough. The other issue is that the film over the sheet is not “pre cut” for each marking, so careful trimming to make the film end closer to the marking will give a better, cleaner finish.

On the Stone Rhino, here, you can see the ghost bear symbol on the leg, this is applied over a white patch made with a white paint pen.

Using the paint pens further to make the camo spots by making a large, black spot, and putting a smaller white dot off to one side within the black dot completes the scheme.

(There are other steps here, like drybrushing and so on. But since I ran ahead of myself, I will cover each scheme in more detail further on as a “recap” on how to paint the mechs form start to finish! But for now, let’s see where everything is at!

There is a lot to cover properly later on. So I’ll paraphrase for now!

Every model got the following steps after airbrushing:

• Markings added.
• Matt Varnish spray
• Nuln Oil wash
• Drybrush (green on mercs, light grey on Clans)
• Metal details painted, washed and highlighted
• cockpit glass painted
• basing material
• Super Matt varnish

That’s the basics! I promise to go in and paint one mech of each faction to properly show those steps! But for now, enjoy the finished mechs!

(I have also decided to strip my previous mechs form the Clan Invasion and starter boxes to paint them up in these two schemes, hense being able to revisit the steps in a more tutorial format!)