Speed-painting BATTLETECH miniatures

Lately, I’m a bit obsessed with BATTLETECH and speed-painting its miniatures. BATTLETECH seems to become my favorite miniature game.

I 3D-printed a Locust¹ and a Jenner², my favorite light ‘Mech at the moment, as well as a Saladin Hovertank³ and a Striker Light Tank⁴. I added links to their respective free-to-download STL files in the footnotes.

Then, I glued the miniatures to their bases and applied small stones and sand on watered-down PVA glue as usual.

Basically, I managed to paint and completely finish these 4 miniatures (a BATTELTECH Lance) in one relaxing evening session.

Priming

The first step, once the glue has dried, is to prime everything in black and dust it with grey spray paint from a 45° angle, a zenithal highlight basically.

First drybrush

To finish off the foundation for the following painting step, apply a very light and dusty white drybrushing layer to the miniatures to highlight all the sharp edges on your miniature. It’s a “lazy pre-edge-highlighting” if you want. I use a small makeup brush for this.

Speed Paints

Now, it’s time to decide on a paint scheme, if you haven’t already. House Davion from the BATTLETECH lore being what I had in mind, I went for a military green-brown combination using The Army Painter Speed Paints. I painted “Dark Wood” on the lower parts and “Desolate Brown,” which is more of an army green, on the upper parts, such as the torso. I also applied it to both vehicles, for which I didn’t bother going for a two-color combination since they’re quite small.

Quick tip: always try out your colors on a test model first. I always have a couple of 3D-printed miniatures lying around on my desk for this purpose.

Details

After the Speed Paints have dried, it’s only a matter of painting some details to your liking. I painted all the joints and moving parts black and added some yellow accents here and there. And that’s it. This short step might be optional if you really are in a hurry, but adds so much more character to your miniatures.

Second drybrush (optional)

The Speed Paints I used were quite dark and obscured some of the underlying highlights. Thus I went over the models with a beige drybrushing to pick out all the sharp edges again.

And that’s the miniatures done!

Basing

The cherry on the cake is painting that base. I applied some cheap homemade wash (calls for a hobby shortcut in the future) and while that’s wet, I dropped some Army Painter Strong Tone and Mid Brown washes unto the base.

Make sure the wash is completely dry, before heading to the next step.

Weathering (optional)

A fun and easy, and completely optional, step, is weathering your miniatures using pastel chalk pigments. I always use my 4 brown tones when I weather models. It’s just me … To use your pigments, just use a hobby knife to scratch some powder off your pastel chalks and apply it to the base and the lower part of the model using a small, soft brush.