Stormcrow Variant – Creative Juggernaut

Pew – pew

If you are unaware, our little company (Creative Juggernaut) is working on producing variant ‘Mechs for BattleTech in limited production runs.  To address your questions up-front – I do not have a date when they will be available yet (though rumor has it that the Black Knight’s are done.  Don’t tell Brent I told you that though – that’s our secret!)  They will be sold through the Catalyst website – we have to for licensing reasons. No, I do not know what the final price will be.  In many respects, I am a cog in this machine, and in the case of minis, a pretty insignificant cog. 

Brent sent me along a Stormcrow kit so I could paint it up.  This comes with the arm fitted with the pulse lasers, and the option of fitting it out with the gauss rifle or the autocannon.  I opted for the AC20 because I like using one when I play. 

You will see the production baggie (ohh…ziplock!) and the components.

Its like the prize inside the cereal box when you were a kid

The only clean up I did to the parts was with my bare hands, rubbing off a tiny bit of flash. I wanted to duplicate what a gamer might do if he wanted to put in the minimum effort and get the mini into battle quickly.   

It fit together pretty well.  I uplifted one leg slightly, I like the look of my mini’s as if they are moving. I angled the arms a little on-purpose. Not sure if I like that or not. I’m sure some Senior Tech in the Clan will have my hide for that.

For paint, I used the airbrush to do a layer of black, then gray on the bottom, dark blue, with the top being light blue.  I was going for a Ghost Bear look, doing a reversal of the Omicron Galaxy paint scheme. Why Ghost Bears? Because they have some wonderful colors to work with…and they are Ghost Bears! Seriously, I would love to tell you there was some reason for this, but there wasn’t other than I thought it was a neat look.  The layering of the paints did a lot of the work for me and the base coat of black took care of the recessed areas. I avoided doing a wash simply because I liked the effect I came up with. 

Total paint time for this mini was 22 minutes – the vast majority of which was cleaning the airbrush between color changes.  I added some decals, but right now I lack Ghost Bear decals, so I kept it simple. 

Overall, I love the results.  The ‘Mech is very airbrush friendly and can be posed with little effort.  Let me know what you think in the comments below.  Enjoy!