When I first got into Battletech, I really struggled with a paint scheme to do the miniatures justice. I tried some camouflage schemes and some of the complex traditional Inner Sphere liveries as well.

Camouflage seemed a little pointless with giant nuclear robots crashing through the forest in the universe of the third millennium trying to hide from all sorts of tracking & targeting tech.

I also had about 20 miniatures lined up ready to paint, and just like all good war gamers, I wanted to get them onto the table quickly & easily. I also remember thinking that when the time came, I also wanted to have a paint scheme that was easy to replicate so my legion of Battletech miniatures looked cohesive on the table.

In the end I settled on a blood red with details picked out in black & white.

….I should also mention it was the 1990’s and a lot of my painting style was heavily influenced by Games Workshop miniatures painting I was into at the time – bright colours, ink washes and flat grass green flocked bases…

Despite my painting formula being a reasonably simple one, over the years as I picked up more Battletech miniatures here & there – but I didn’t paint them as I acquired them. They tended to accumulate until I reached a point where there was ten or so that needed to be painted & I would do them in a batch.

…Except for this last batch…

I definitely left this little project get away from me. My purchases were mostly nice-to-have additions, collecting some doubles of mech I already have, some LAM (Land Air Mechs) that will never get any table-time as well as some 1st Generation Ral Patha mech miniatures bought for variety and novalty value. I had also tried to collect sufficient Mechs to do both sides of the “4th Succession Wars” campaign scenario book and all of the Inner Sphere Mechs for the “Tukayyid” campaign.

This resulted in the box of unpainted white metal BattleMechs hiding underneath my bed  getting more than a little full – I had put it off for too long -time to paint some BattleMechs again!

Although I was quite daunted by the thought of painting 44 Battletech miniatures in one go, my original paint scheme concept proved again to be a quick and reliable way to mow through a large number of figures production line style. Even though I am a notoriously slow painter, the whole project was done over a couple of 1 hour sessions broken up over two weekends.

While colour matching the paints wasn’t a problem, the toughest part of the project was getting a match for the Games Workshop grass green flock I originally used back in the  90’s. This required a little “blending” of scatter flicks purchased from AliExpress to approximate the bright & cheerful medium green scatter which was prolific on Warhammer and 40K miniatures back in the day.

What is surprising is that the old Games Workshop  “Citadel” paints I used when I  painted my first batch of Battletech miniatures over 20 years ago are still good and the new batch miniatures fit in seamlessly with the rest of the army.