MFin’ MFRs

I ran through some more minis painting this week.  I got the bug so I’m going to strike while the iron is hot.  It was odd though as everything seemed to work really well or be fraught with disaster.  A very “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” situation.

I started off early this week with a little more work on my Optimus Prime Dropzone model.

I taped off the trailer with some painters blue tape.  I had already painted this up weeks ago and then sealed it as I notice even painters tape will take off the cheap acrylic paint I use.   This taping worked perfect. Nice crisp lines and the matte seal that I used insured that none of the previous paint job was compromised.

Then WTF. Same tape, same session but almost the complete opposite result.  I pressed the tape in with a lot of pressure on both sides before I sprayed but this side just decided to completely fail.  You had one job!  Ah well. I have some silver paint that I’ll be using to fix this side up.

On a more productive note, I started up my Marine Force Recon squad.  I plan on using these bad boys in my next Dropzone game later this month so I wanted to get a jump on the painting train as I tend to have to pull some eleventh hour nights getting them done during the week of the game.

The MFR soldiers are probably the best 10mm soldiers I’ve had to paint for Dropzone.  I don’t know if it was the grey primer and the fact that I started by washing them in an undiluted dark wash (Nuln Oil from GW) but I swear the sculpts are top notch.  When I’ve gone to paint my Resistance faction soldiers, they tend to be pretty light on detail at best and totally unrecognizable at worst.  These models actually come from the UCM faction, the Resistance faction just borrows them and makes them better.

These soldiers are pretty useless without a transport so I picked up their standard short bus, the Raven A (also a model my faction co-opts from the UCM faction but makes them better in every way possible).

These guys are sporting my standard Resistance faction themed blood stripe (Yay Beer!).  I thought I’d be all smart and prime these guys grey first, then wash in undiluted Nuln Oil, and finally seal with a matte spray since I knew I was going to mask tape the models to get straight blood stripe lines (see! they work here…).  But. I decided to add a little more to the color scheme and accented with a dark grey.  This side didn’t seal so in typical fashion, the blue painter’s tape I used lifted up my new grey accent paint and I had to redo some work.

That dark grey worked well on the first one but the second one decided it had had enough of this mortal coil and totally jumped out of my hands to land smack dab in the middle of my grey paint load.  I don’t even know if I could duplicate the maneuver if I tried but it swan-dived full on into that sucker and so I had to change my scheme a little to compensate.

I originally wanted both to sport the dark grey accent at the wing line like the left model but fate decided that they would not be fraternal instead of identical twins. It could have been much worse and in the end, I think it works out well as now I can tell them apart.

I thought this would complete my next army list but after playing around with the builder, I found I have at least one more model to finish up before the campaign starts up again. Luckily, it is an easy hovercraft transport that I’ve already painted a few of and should make for a quick work session.