I Bleed Davion Green

Battletech has long been an interest of mine that for one reason or another I never explored deeply. For starters it just is not as widely played as many other table top games and until recent times the miniatures have been shall we say "lacking".

That has changed in recent years as Catalyst Game labs has been putting out pretty sharp looking minis that seem inspired by the styles of Mechwarrior Online, Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries, and the simply incredible BATTLETECH turn based strategy game by Hairbrained Schemes. 

The HBS game is what is most responsible for leading me to making the plunge into full Battletech mania recently. As I always do when I go back home I hit up an old friend to see if they wanted to play games and when asked what I wanted to play I eagerly suggested Battletech. My hometown always had a pretty decent Battletech crowd and the recent quality of the products has driven a bit of a resurgence there. 

Anyhow, after that little taste combined with the video games I've gone hog wild on painting mechs lately. At first I was just painting everything in a color scheme matching what I'd seen for Federated Suns units because Davion is best. I soon realized that I both wanted to be able to field distinct forces and that many mechs I had are not common amongst the AFFS (Armed Forces of the Federated Suns). This led me to coming up with a second paint scheme for what could be generic mercs / pirates.

These were painted using the "slap chop" method that people have been talking about amongst the internets for a while. I had seen the term but never knew what it meant until my Battletech friend mentioned it to me as how she painted her minis. Honestly nothing about it is revolutionary as its pretty much just zenithal highlighting but with drybrushing instead of airbrushing. Regardless the method works great on small scale models that don't need a lot of detail. 

I'm hoping to get a whole bunch of mechs painted for the next time I go back home so that I can give Alpha Strike, an abstracted mass battle system for Battletech, a try. Since these each took less than an hour to paint individually and would be even quicker if I assembly lined them that shouldn't be a problem.