Heroes in a Full Shell

Hey folks! Happy New Year and happy gaming!

For the most recent Mayacast contest, the challenge was to produce a TAG. Any TAG (From Infinity) painted to the best of your ability. I decided to paint up my Guijia:

The idea I have for my Yu Jing is for them to be the Emperor's personal guard (The Jade Guard) - As such, he doesn't want mundane war-tech in his beautifully crafted palace halls, so every heavy infantry or TAG under his personal guard is painted like jade statues.

Let me tell you; it's tough to get the iridescence of jade right on a flat pewter model...

This is a primer coat black with airbrush, followed by a carefully layered up "Sick Green" (72.029 Vallejo Game Colour). following this was a bit of a white airbrush of highlight spots and some edge-lining with the same, followed by Light Green (Vallejo 70.942) over the white and to clean up any missed spots in the first run. This switch of greens gives the somewhat varying iridescence. Next comes a layer of gloss varnish, black-lining in the cracks to really pop the highlights, and a few final spots of white lines on high gloss areas.

As a result of the "Jade Statue" design intent, I played down my usual heavy detailing of warning signs, arrows, stripes and other elements to better suggest the statue trompe l'oeil, and since these would be only the most veteran pilots, they'd already know the warnings!

I also converted the TAG to be holding the HMG. Considering a Guijia has almost no close combat ability to speak of, there's little purpose to having him only brandish the sword, when the gun (and armour) is so much the reason you take one!

On this shoulder, you can also see a Chinese-styled design, surrounding a cleaned up (not neon green) Yu Jing logo.

The opposite shoulder had the Guijia logo, more neat designs, and also shows what few markings there are (For example, the unit number, and a pilot's mark on the small shoulderpad.

The base was custom-lasered to look like a Chinese carved pattern, all aglow with science fiction tech. The Seraph corpse is treated cleanly, since it may be a wreck, but since it's fresh, it's not going to have rusted or gotten all chipped by wear. The sword was my first attempt airbrushing with tape to cover half, and seemed to work out reasonably well. The hilt is a very impractical gold-leaf design, but hey; only the most flashy for the Emperor of Yu Jing!

The sword follows much the same pattern as the armour, replacing Prussian Blue (70965) and Light Turquoise (70840) followed by white.

I'm eager to find out what the next project will be, in the meantime I've been relaxing with Team Yankee conversions and another weird project or two I'll show off soon!

Iguana post more often, really I do!

Well, it's been a while! I swear I've been painting and all, I just keep forgetting to post or to photograph!

This is a bit an older post, but I finally re-found the photos for this and have decided to put them online at long last:

This is my entry from Q2 into the Mayacast Contest, the ever-awesome Infinity Nomad Iguana TAG.

Starting out, I decided to go with a more Central-American theme with this TAG, having done Africa with the two Geckos. The TAG's pilot is named Yupanki, which is a famous warrior/military leader, and translates roughly to "With Honour". It's been painted to stay consistent with the Geckos in colour scheme, except for that ominous and I'm sure in no way relevant right hand paint!

You may also notice the TAG is converted! I wasn't a fan of the angry point, so I decided to shift the pose to be a broad-shape shooting stance. With the belt feed HMG, it looked more dramatic that way.

Here you can see a more top-to-bottom pose for the TAG. I have the same safety warnings across the guy as with the Geckos, and while I considered a bunch of integrated black and white striping, I felt the full red just felt more in keeping with how I've been painting my TAGs so far.

The tail, from behind: this tail was annoying to paint. It's a lot of segments, and I primarily airbrushed it. You can also see the warning labels on the ammo hopper, and in general my non-metallic-metal styled metallic painting. It keeps it shiny IRL, and still has a nice light-to-dark.

The markings on the side of the leg and the shoulder pads are, in Mayan and Aztec writings, essentially translated are "Death Lizard" (on the shoulderpad in this case) and "Storm Lord/Chief" - I figure this pilot, with the honour of fighting in a full Iguana, has quite a bit of ego to him!

The colours are personal artistic license, but as with the Geckos, I want to make my TAGs look as much as possible like they've been decorated by crews with a great love for machines, and a bit less a love of military regulation. No idea what I'll do for the Salamander once it gets resculpted!

Upcoming should be the Van Zant from the most recent contest, as well as (hopefully) some of the other wild things I've been working on. I'll also try to limit the amount of downtime between posts, and actually get my butt back in gear painting and not just assembling and buying!

As always, happy painting!