Belle of Doom

One of the first posts I saw from the Chicago Skirmish Wargames club was a battle report for their exhibition game of Mech Attack, played in 28mm. So when fellow CSW member Karl called for volunteers to paint up the giant robots for this year’s Little Wars, I jumped at the opportunity to really blow the lid off it. And I figured I’d show the results here. (If you want to read this year’s Little Wars Report, it’s posted on the CSW blog here.)

Here’s what I had to start from:

This project was made somewhat more difficult by the fact that I do not own an airbrush, and that it’s not allowed to sell spray primer within Chicago limits. If I had been cleverer, I could certainly have asked one of the club members to snag me some primer from the ‘burbs, or even to give it a quick spray for me…but I was a little slow on the uptake and decided to base-coat it all by hand.

Fortunately, I read on King’s Miniatures all about how Windex is magical, and that made the whole thing (relatively) breezy. Just loosen up the acrylics with a bit of the blue juice and slap it on. Make sure to work in thin coats, though – I would load up my brush and then give it a quick dab on a piece of paper towel to make sure I wasn’t over-applying. That way the paint went on thin, covered well, and dried super-quick.

Since Little Wars is primarily an historical wargames convention, I decided to spoof up some WWII aircraft style nosepaint, with open jaws and angry eyes to intimidate the other mechs. I also put a tribute to the CSW logo prominently on one of the missile pods. 

On the left arm, I put some ‘unit designation’ type numerals, which are actually the model numbers for the original Gundam…kind of a reference to my first love in terms of giant robots.

Finally, I thought the historical gamers would appreciate some pinup girl art in the style of classic WWII bombers. (I was also inspired by this awesome paint job.) With that in mind, I decided to call the Mech the Belle of Doom. And here she is, sporting a morale-boosting figure, a glowing mechanical eye, and a giant ray gun: 

Let me know what you think by jumping into your own mobile armor and using the beam sabre to carve your thoughts into the blasted battleground that is the planet earth. Or you could, you know, use the comments box: