Battle Cobra by Gunji

Description	:	My entry this month is a bit unusual, especially for a competition entry - a Battle Cobra mech from Iron Wind Metals. Well, yes, I know, mechs are boring and always painted bad but I hope to prove that those type of minis can indeed look good (or at least acceptable...). Also I hope this is a good platform to get some feedback and advice on this somewhat unusual miniature :) After cleaning the mini I filled the base with a mix of sand and paint, added a few rocks (small pieces of slate) and primed everything with black spray primer. The red parts were slowly build up with VMC Hull Red, GW Scab Red, RMS Blood Red and Blood Red + RMS Leather White for the final highlights. Between highlight layers I added lots of purple glazes to darken the shadows and intesify the colors. The black parts (very dark grey actually) started from a base color of RMS Pure Black mixed with a tiny drop of GW Bleached Bone. I gradually added Bleached Bone for the highlights, using very thin pure Bleached Bone for the final layer. Again I added purple glazes to the shadows creating a sense of unity in the color scheme. The metallics use the standard GW pallete of Boltgun, Chainmail and Mithril. Purple and Black were used fo shading. The 'head' was based with an even mix of GW Codex Grey and GW Kommando Khaki. The highlights were built up to pure white. For detailing I painted on a few scratches, Kanji numbers transalting to '49' (if I did everything correctly...) and did the cockpit in a fade from GW Scaly Green to white. Comments and critic appreciated :) -Michael

Poll results:
Number 8 overall.
Second Choice: one vote

From:	Michael Stubbs` (LavronYor)	(Tue 22 Aug 2006 06:16:45 PM CDT)
I don't know the scale, but the painting looks well done. The scratches need to touch edges instead of all being in the center of a plane. And IMHO, it could use a little more highlighting.

From:	Michael Holzapfel (GunjiNoKanrei)	(Thu 24 Aug 2006 03:24:16 PM CDT)
Thanks for the comment. I do agree with the stronger highlighting - my usual problem ;) Battletech is 1/285 scale and this mini is 40mm from the base to the top of the shoulders.

From:	Rhonda Bender (Wren)	(Tue 12 Sep 2006 02:23:13 PM CDT)
I'm not a big fan of mech type minis, but this impresses me and I think you've done a great job with it. I think your idea with the purple in the shading of all the colours really does tie things together visually, and the red in particular just looks super. The metal areas on the back could maybe use a bit more extremes of shade and highlight, but I know that's hard to photo.