How to Paint Everything: BattleTech

Whether a joint, a gun barrel, or a heat sink, there’s exposed metal all over a mech. Painting this to stand out helps define the shape of a mech, particularly if you’re working with a single color scheme, and it generally goes very quickly.

1. Basecoat any area that will be metallic in black or dark grey. While not strictly necessary if you’re using a paint with good coverage, I find it helps make sure there’s no underlying color tint.
2. Paint the metal areas in Proacryl Dark Silver.
3. Give the entire thing a wash with Nuln Oil.
4. Add a few edge highlights with Proacryl Silver. You don’t need to hit every edge, just the uppermost ones, but taking a few seconds to add some highlights makes things pop. On larger areas like a big gun barrel, you can lightly drybrush the upper surface with the silver to add a bit of texture, but you’re still going to want to add the edge highlighting as well.

Picking out each laser on the mech is another great way to draw attention to the model, and can be done very quickly to great effect. While there’s no officially defined color for lasers, I use colors from the Battletech video game – red lasers are small, green are medium, and blue are large lasers or PPCs.

1. Put a dot of Proacryl Silver on each laser. You’ll want to do two coats to be extra sure it’s bright and shiny.
2. Put a drop of the appropriate one-coat paint over the silver. I use Asurmen Blue, Karandras Green, and Baal Red from GW.
3. After you’ve finished the mech and any protective matte varnish, go in and put a drop of gloss varnish on each laser.

Much like the lasers, cockpits are another prominent block of color that also serves as a focal point for the entire mech. Even if you aren’t painting the lasers, doing the cockpit is probably the single biggest thing you can do after the base coats.

Some cockpits can be hard to find, but Camospecs hosts a pdf guide that highlights them all here.

1. Basecoat the cockpit in black or dark grey.
2. Apply Proacryl Silver in two to three thin coats. The thinner the better here, as any roughness will be magnified by the next step.
3. Use a one-coat paint to apply your cockpit color. I find that I mostly like using cool colors for cockpits – purple, blue, or green, though a orange/copper also works well.
4. Once you’ve finished any matte varnish on the mech, apply one or two coats of gloss varnish to the cockpit.

The various mercenary force packs released have each included one mech that can be either placed on a base as usual or on a smoky jump plume. I think the jump plumes look cool, and using them is another easy way to make your models stand out. I’ve done mine in two different ways – once with a bit of a blue glow at the center, and once with an orangey burn.

Either way, you’re going to want to paint it separately from the mech, as otherwise it’ll be very hard to reach everywhere.

Blue Glow

1. Start by priming the jump plume with a very light grey or white.
2. Lightly coat the entire thing in Aethermatic Blue Contrast. Concentrate it at the top where the clouds are thinnest, but having it hit the lower areas adds some nice definition.
3. Heavily drybrush the entire thing with Proacryl Bold Titanium White.
4. From about 2/3 of the way up down to the bottom, drybrush with Proacryl Bright Neutral Grey.
5. Repeat step 4 with Proacryl Neutral Grey, Dark Neutral Grey, and Black. Each time you should cover less of the plume and drybrush more lightly until you’re just barely hitting the very lower areas with black.
6. Apply basing texture to the base, then superglue the plume to the base while the texture paste is still wet. This’ll embed the plume somewhat into the paste, which makes it look like it’s actually there and not just sitting on top of it.

Orangey Glow

This is harder to get looking “right” than the blue glow above because it’s something we have more real references for. If you look at a rocket launch, the area just outside the rocket is very very white, with just the slightest tinge of yellow, then turning into billowing white clouds as it gets further away. With paint we have much more limited dynamic range than our eyes can see, so we can focus on making either the rocket glow look right, or making the clouds look right. I’ve chosen to focus on the clouds, which are the biggest part of these bases, but if I wanted to focus on the rocket glow I’d use darker greys instead of very light grey and white in the clouds.

1. Prime with a light grey or white, then basecoat with Proacryl Bright Neutral Grey.
2. Airbrush Proacryl Bold Titanium White onto the top of the plumes. You’ll notice there’s an area that has a more streaky and less billowy texture – this part is sculpted to be the actual burning part of the jump jet, so we want to make sure it’s white.
3. Lightly drybrush that section with a very pale yellow like Scale 75 Lilith Yellow.
   
4. Drybrush again with a Proacryl Yellow, this time further away from the tips and closer to the cloud section.
5. Do a final drybrush that starts to overlap the clouds with Vallejo Game Color Orange Fire.
6. Heavily drybrush all the clouds with Proacryl Bold Titanium White.
7. Apply basing texture to the base, then superglue the plume to the base while the texture paste is still wet. This’ll embed the plume somewhat into the paste, which makes it look like it’s actually there and not just sitting on top of it.

The most simple gems to paint are lasers, and we’re going to use the same colors as we did with the one-coat method above: blue for large lasers, green for medium, and red for small. You’ll want 2-3 paints in increasing brightness for this, plus white. With red lasers I generally move my highlights towards orange rather than towards pink.

1. Paint the laser with the darkest color you have. In this case, I’m using Proacryl Dark Blue.
2. Pick one of the two lower corners (yes, it’s a circle and they don’t have corners, but you know what I mean) and apply a crescent shape of your mid-tone, in this case Proacryl Blue.
3. Add another pass to that same spot, slightly smaller, with your brightest paint. Here I use Proacryl Sky Blue.
4. Add a tiny bit of white to the opposite (upper) corner. On larger weapons a small crescent shape is good, but on smaller ones a dot looks perfectly fine.
5. Once you’re finished with the mech, gloss varnish over the laser.

Painting cockpits is mostly like painting the lasers, just a bit bigger. Some of the complex shapes can get a bit complicated to determine where to place highlights, but I find that treating any areas where there’s a harder angle as a separate pane of glass looks best. You’ll want 2-3 paints in increasing brightness for this, plus black and white.

Again, if you’re having any issues figuring out where the cockpit is, check out the Camospecs pdf guide here.

1. Mix black in with your darkest color, and coat the entire cockpit with it. I’m using a mix that’s about 1:1 Proacryl Black and Black Green.
2. In the same lower corner as you used for lasers, paint a chunky line along the edge in your mid-tone, here I use Proacryl Green. On larger cockpits this might be too big a jump from the previous layer, in which case you can use the pure base color first.
3. Add another pass to that same spot, slightly smaller, with your brightest paint. Here we use Proacryl Bright Pale Green.
4. In the opposite upper corner, paint along the edge with a thin line of pure white.
5. Once you’re finished with the mech, gloss varnish over the cockpit.

1. Over the Dark Neutral Grey basecoat, heavily drybrush with Proacryl Neutral Grey.
2. Do another heavy drybrush pass with Proacryl Bright Neutral Grey, avoiding the undersides of limbs and the torso.
3. Mix about 1:1 Bright Neutral Grey and Bold Titanium White, then drybrush over the upper surfaces of everything.
4. Finally, use pure white to lightly drybrush upper edges.
5. Paint the details according to the guides above. For the cockpit I used Citadel Luxion Purple.

1. Basecoat with Reaper Imperial Purple.
2. Drybrush with Reaper Malvernian Purple.
3. Paint the details according to the guides above. For the cockpit I used Citadel Karandras Green.

1. Basecoat with Proacryl Dark Blue.
2. Drybrush with Proacryl Blue.
3. Optional further highlight: Proacryl Grey Blue.
4. Paint the details according to the guides above. For the cockpit I used Citadel Karandras Green.

1. Basecoat with Proacryl Burnt Red.
2. Drybrush with Proacryl Bold Pyrrole Red.
3. Optional further highlight: Vallejo Game Color Hot Orange. When highlighting red you mostly want to move your highlights towards orange (or mix yellow into the red) rather than adding white, which will turn pink. Another good option is a light ochre like Citadel Tau Light Ochre.
4. Paint the details according to the guides above. For the cockpit I used Citadel Karandras Green.

1. Basecoat with Proacryl Black Green.
2. Drybrush with Proacryl Green.
3. Optional further highlight: Proacryl Faded Green.
4. Paint the details according to the guides above. For the cockpit I used Citadel Luxion Purple.

1. Basecoat with Proacryl Khaki.
2. Drybrush with Proacryl Ivory.
3. Optional further highlight: Proacryl Bold Titanium White. If you do this, you’ll want to do it extremely lightly. I don’t recommend using their Bright Ivory color for this, as applied over Ivory it feels more like it’s just desaturated and not actually lighter.
4. Paint the details according to the guides above. For the cockpit I used Citadel Luxion Purple.

I start by priming them with Army Painter Leather Brown Spray (it’s a match to Steel Legion Drab) and a Zenithal spray of Army Painter White. I then lay on a good coat of Agarros Dunes Contrast. I paint all the metal bits with silver and wash with Nuln Oil. I add chipping with a sponge using Dryad Bark and stippling on some silver with a brush over the chips. Finally I do the cockpits, basing them black and treating them like gems, mixing in Coat d’Arms Wizard blue and highlighting up to white before putting on some ‘Ard Coat. Bases are textured with Vallejo Oxide paste, painted with Steel Legion Drab and dry brushed with Ushabti Bone before a layer of flock is applied. And that’s it!