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I’ve always had a vague intent to be able to clear my backlog of Mechs, but I’ve always had trouble deciding how I’d like to split the models between the various factions in a interesting way. So instead I’ve tended towards painting my mechs up in something I came up with under the excuse that it’s some mercenary company or other, and unfortunately, it’s taken me long enough to get through the mechs that my painting preferences have changed a lot over the years, which has meant that I tend to come up with a new scheme once in a while when I have a idea I really want to try or if I am bored with what I was doing before. This article will end up being essentially a collection of the concepts I have done over the years, since they still look good even if I have changed styles in the time since.
For a quick overview of the structure, I’ll start off with my current scheme, as that seems like as good of a starting point as any. The rest of the article is a mostly unordered list of schemes I’ve bounced between over the years that don’t fall under one of the canon factions. There might be some overlap with factions, but I can’t say I know that many schemes off the top of my head and there are a ton in the lore, so it’s always a bit of a surprise! Finally, the article finishes with a collection of common recipes I use on most of my mechs; if some detail of a mech doesn’t appear in the main recipe, it should be there instead.
The recipes themselves are primarily illustrated by a top town list of colours for each part of the scheme in splash images for schemes rather then piecemeal in the instructions. I prefer to talk about the mechanics that go into a scheme rather than typing out the same colours a ton but this also helps keep them to hand in one easy reference while you work through them. In general, you’ll find each section starts with a base coat or zenithal, a wash, and then highlights. I tend to like mixing the highlights into the base coat gradually to get a smooth transition, but I’ll get into specifics when talking about each scheme! For all the cockpits and weapon lenses, I’d suggest first checking out our article on Gem Effects, as I use the technique extensively.
Teal and Grey Mercs
As mentioned above, this is my current workhorse scheme that I started using last year after drifting away from the Comstar one I had been using. It’s a particularly fast one, and I am quite pleased with how it turned out! I’ve managed to do uh rather a lot of them in comparison to my other schemes…
It’s honestly a pretty basic scheme, with only two main colours, but it’s got enough to be interesting and very readable details so it works out as being a bit more then the sum of its parts. This in turn does mean that the recipe starts off simple – prime the model with a dark grey/black primer and then a zenithal of Mecha Medium Grey, and you’ve got the base for the main part of the scheme. I’ve used a few different initial primers; lately I’ve been using Vallejo Panzer Grey, but pretty much any neutral dark grey works. After that I do all the basecoats in one pass before drowning the whole model in thinned Nuln Oil, which makes for a good time saving as I can use a massive brush in a quick pass without needing to worry about precision.
On to the highlights! These follow a pattern as a whole, take the base coat and mix small amounts of the highlight colour in and then apply it in big soft area highlights. These are a bit more crude than properly glazed transitions, but there are a ton of surfaces in a full-size force and you can usually get away with 2-3 layers of highlights instead. You are looking to gradually get brighter and more focused to roughly replicate the effect you’d get from glazing and to follow the pattern of light falling on the model. Note though that the main grey panel colours break the pattern a bit by using dawnstone instead of the base coat, and you only need teeny tiny amounts of Administratum to get to the right colour tones.
Once you’ve blocked out the highlights, then it’s on to doing the details. I throw in the usual weapon recipes, then finish off with the cockpits in a gem effect of brown and yellow. One thing you’ll note in some other schemes is that I often use black as the base colour for the cockpit lens and end with stark white in the corner, rather than this comparatively soft transition. I tend to base my preferences there on how harsh the contrasts are in the scheme overall. In this case, most of our colours go through a fairly similar set of value changes and have not dissimilar saturations, so I prefer the slightly more subtle transition on the cockpits to avoid making them too stark and out of place, while still popping out.
Mil-Tech Mercs
Ok, so if my current scheme is nice and soft with a clean feel that is helped by it’s narrow tonal range, here we have a filthy mech with transitions defined by dirt. This scheme is also cheating a bit, as when I was working on this set of mechs, I was also priming some Victrix WWII models and I could bonus some BT models done up in the same basic colours. At the time, I was also playing around with using Vallejo Smoke to get a nice dirty transition as a crude inverse of panel lighting transitions, something that I later brought over to my current 40k guard scheme using a different pallete of colours.
Essentially, the idea here is that rather than the clean smooth area highlights in the previous recipe we do quick and, attempting to imply, dirty differentiation of the various surfaces to keep them readable. The effect doesn’t require great precision, indeed can benefit from appearing more natural, I typically do one to three coats of various intensities of Vallejo Smoke, depending on the size of the area. It’s a relatively translucent paint out of the bottle, so you can often get away with using it undiluted but larger areas can benefit from a slightly more gradual blend. Since we have good panel definition in most cases, the highlights serve to emphasize important edges, so can be simple single colour edge highlights, but if you wish you could introduce an additional step for even more pop using something like Ogryn Camo.
Green Mercs
Now for another twist on ways of creating definition, this scheme is from my era of zenithal priming and contrasts instead of traditional base coats. Classically, you might try to leave the colours to save on effort, but I find it doesn’t leave the smoothest of tones. So I returned with a choice of highlights to build up both the intensity of the transitions and their cleanliness, but we can leverage the existing transition to help with placement and relative intensity of the highlights we are adding. While I might ordinarily suggest quick mixed paints to do crude blends, with the nature of the underlying paint layers, you will instead want to do conventional glazes in this case so as to not completely obscure the existing transitions.
Note that there are a few sections that are more traditional in nature, details such as weapons, cockpit frames and missiles are tackled with a conventional sequence. This is because it would be additional effort to keep them clean from the initial contrast coats and can slip by somewhat unnoticed in the rest of the scheme, easing your work until the detail stage.
If you wished to avoid contrast-based colours, you could shift away from them by starting with a zenithal of Warboss Green and Skarsnik Green then doing the joints in Skavenblight Dinge. I would probably still reuse the contrasts from the original thinned as washes to maintain the tone, before doing highlights with simple blends of the final colours in the original recipe. Note that you have two choices on the main green, either highlighting brighter with something like Nurgling Green or trying to keep the zenithal as clean as possible with recess shading.
Grey and Blue Mercs
Based on the same idea as the green scheme above but in cooler colours, the scheme was originally to be a clan-themed one in opposition to the warmer inner sphere scheme in green and warm colours.
If you wanted a more conventional recipe, I’d suggest a Black Primer to Dawnstone or similar zenithal, with the blue base coated in Kantor Blue and the thinned contrasts used as a wash, with the highlight colours reused from the original recipe.
Unlike the previous scheme where it would be up to preference, here I would probably suggest using the more conventional scheme as it took rather a lot of coats of the contrasts to get the tone I wanted, which makes for a messy scheme. That could be desirable of course!
Nebula
I believe I originally intended this to be a canon clan scheme, as I knew there were a few clans that had nebula themes on some of their units, but I think I ended up not being into any of them in particular and just did my own thing. I’m not sure I’d suggest doing a substantial number of mechs in this scheme as it is rather high effort as these things go, but it was a fun one-off project done as a challenge from our Patreon server!
If you start at the bottom half of the mech and work up from there, you can mostly get an idea of what’s going on in this scheme from a mechanical point of view. We leverage a transition from a dark grey primer through Corvus Black to give the model some balance by avoiding making the lower half too busy. Instead, we focus on using the black area as a canvas to fill with nebulas.
I’ll point out one detail that’s easily missed and can be confusing – the Dryad Bark in the ‘transition’ part of the recipe is thinned into a recess shade on the legs. This is an example of one angle of how you can paint black or other very dark colours. Since it’s difficult to get a differentiable wash or recess shade against very dark colours, you can instead use a lighter dirt or other environmental colour to point out the recesses to the viewer. It’s a relatively natural looking approach but can trip you up if you don’t account for having the rest of the model similarly dirty, in this case I could cheat and leave it mostly just on the lower legs since you can logically expect those areas to be dirtier then the rest of the mech and we already have a colour transition occurring.
Moving on to the nebulas themselves, they’re remarkably simple too. I sketched in the basic shapes I wanted, trying to use them to help define the detail of the mech by clearly crossing borders or being across complex surfaces with the recesses left dark. Then, to make the designs a bit less stark, I merged them in with some glazes towards black. To further help differentiate panels and shapes, I then scattered dots of stars in patterns like the arms of the Milky Way or star clusters, with only selective overlapping of the nebulas so as to avoid the model being excessively busy. You can use the colours of the stars to help define shapes too, transitioning from lighter to darker as a mirror of the nebulas and emphasizing the panel lines as a side effect.
I won’t say this is the perfect approach to this, but I’d initially gone in for having it be something repeatable if I wanted, you could add more visual interest by blending within the nebulas and having them shift hues entirely. You could even fake area highlights if you use cooler colours lower down and shift to warmer ones higher up on the mech.
Common Recipes
Laser lenses – These are just simple gem effects and while I prefer keeping them consistent, you can do them in various ways to indicate class of laser for example you could use this red and yellow for small, then Caliban and Flashgitz for medium lasers and end with Naggaroth Night and a white for large lasers but that’s a little bit much effort for my usual BT painting habits.
PPCs – These are basic centre-out transition to imply a glow effect from a hot emitter or electrode. An odd detail that I quite like the look of is a gem-style ‘reflection’ at the top corner, it doesn’t really make any sense but I quite like how it pops.
I’ve been basing all my mechs and tanks in basically the same basic pattern – paste, base coat, wash, no drybrush. It is pretty basic, and you can do stuff like water or more fancy effects, but I find that it works out pretty great once you toss the Gamers Grass tufts and Woodland Scenics bushes on, and it is quick to pump out on even a dozen models.
If you do decide you want water effects it can be achieved relatively simply too. Use whatever tool you spread paste with to make a smooth recessed area, either as a winding river or the edge of a lake, then instead of the normal wash use Wyldwood to make a dark wet base tone. Then, after you varnish, apply gloss varnish to the area to make it shiny then sculpt waves or current over top using Vallejo Transparent Water paste. It will dry semi-transparent, which you can leave there or drybrush with white to pick out some froth on the water.
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