For Pride Month this year I decided to try to paint an absolute buttload of urbanmechs in pride colours. I was inspired by CerberusXt’s pride marines, but didn’t spend nearly as much time on them. Also, because Catalyst makes their money selling models and I wasn’t about to blow a couple hundo on boxes of 4x urbies for a meme, I tracked down a 3d printable model and used that. Unfortunately, most of the easily-visible search results are rips from Mechwarrior, which lack the physical textures that make a miniature easy and fun to paint. There are some exceptionally well-sculpted proxies out there but for legal reasons you can’t search for e.g. “Urbanmech” because that’s what Catalyst owns. Once this project was over I found Wolk’s “Urbie American Mecha” which I plan to use for a diorama idea I had, and the works of Sir Mortimer Bombito, Neroimus, and Voxelforge. But! With what I had, I managed to grunt out over a dozen different paint jobs in a month on evenings and weekends and despite the flaws I’m pretty happy with it. The key thing I had to keep in mind was that I was pushing to do these fast, 15 or so mechs start to finish in a month, which is about a third of the time I usually give myself. The paint wasn’t going to be perfect (and it wasn’t), my goal was representation.
I started with an airbrushed rainbow fade that I’m immensely pleased with. Classic pride rainbow, with some freehand. Added some oil pinwash. No notes. Then I tried a bi flag and realized very quickly that I wasn’t going to have time to freehand much. Then I did a pan flag and realized I should probably stop with freehand if I was aiming for speed. I started trying some homemade washes to get panel lining quickly. Found out I needed to be careful how strong I made it and that I needed to wipe it off panels, especially anything with yellow in it because yellow is a bitchass colour that will shit itself if black gets anywhere near it. Anyway, went too strong with the wash on the gay male unit and my first attempt at the lesbian flag, but I figured out I could use a magenta wash on yellows, oranges, and reds for my second attempt and that went way better. I did permit myself a quick labrys freehand on the missile cover (by which I mean a couple of hours being not careful enough with brushstrokes).
Then I went on to intersex, which I managed a gorgeous yellow on thanks to a pink underpaint, and… circles are hard. I used leather punched painter’s tape to start and then suffered through trying to keep the shape as I made the circles thicker. Moved on to a trans flag whose white… suffered from the wash, which I figured might happen, but it gave me a chance to get a visible edge highlight in pure white. Then I based the ace/demi palette in black and managed a really nice fade up to white at the top that I’m still pleased with. Purple piping was all freehand and looks okay. I used two different strengths of wash for the ace and I’m just really pleased with it. Then I snapped the cover off the nonbinary’s UM-AIV and had to push on through. I kinda want to go back and add an in-progress laser blast to the break, maybe some hot metal spatter, to make it battle damage. Anyway, another nice fade and the hazard stripes are a nice eye-catching use of the enby palette. Sadly they’re not super popular for actual play, given the AIVs have a range of “8 maps” and a total ammo of 10.
Polysexual pallete was bright and poppy, and I was starting to run out of easy patterns. I went with a medieval quartering for the aromantic flag, and a chevron and border for genderqueer. I was in the SCA for a while so I know there’s technical terms like “quarterly per fess” and “pall and chevron” but whatever, you get the idea. I have lots of new ideas for mercenary lances in the future now. Also, I couldn’t not paint genderfluid pride on a LAM.
Then it was clanner time, which I tried to paint as ally and pride progress. I figured vertical stripes on ally would get the monochrome-rainbow mix, but when I was done I had painted a beachball. I can’t complain, exactly, and I was really running out of steam so I called it a day and tried getting onto pride progress. Which… has the right colours on it. I was exhausted at that point and just muttering to myself “representation matters more than perfection,” which is true but I feel kinda bad about how it came out. Anyway, that’s the last time I’ll ever try to paint fast, and I’m pretty happy that I got the whole crew done in a month.
