Mini Painting: Mars Camo Cyborg (Camouflage Experiment Part 1)

After I saw a great youtube video about painting different types of camouflage patterns onto miniatures, I was immediately taken by the Mars-pattern camouflage (having never seen it before) decided to try it out for myself using the paints I had on hand and one of the Fantasy Battles brand Cyborg Endoskeleton miniatures that came in a pack of six. While this article is about the trials and errors of my first ever attempt at painting camouflage, a word about said cyborg miniature because it’s an odd one.

First, it’s not immediately apparent that it’s a cyborg (as opposed to just a straight up robot) aside from the fact that it looks like someone stuck a Darth Vader helmet on a skinless T-800 but I’ll give Tehnolog (the manufacturer of the Fantasy Battles minis) the benefit of the doubt and just assume there’s a squishy organic brain or heart somewhere inside of the endoskeleton. Maybe it tells you on the package, but the package is all in Russian. The other thing is that instead of the 28mm Reaper minis I’ve gotten used to so far, these are a good sight larger (1/32 scale/54mm) and are made in a more rigid plastic that’s more akin to regular toys.

So unlike Reaper or Wizkid miniatures which (as advertised) are ready to paint right out of the package, I decided to hit the Russian cyborg with a coat of flat gray primer before laying down a basecoat. In retrospect, I should have sanded it down first because it didn’t quite pass what I like to call the “fingernail test” (wherein I see if paint scrapes off my fingernail once it dries) after my initial priming. Lesson learned for the next Tehnolog Fantasy Battles mini I try to paint (and I have quite a few because they come in large packs and are dirt cheap on Amazon).

Either way, I got him primed and painted the areas I wanted camouflaged in my basecoat color (Vallejo Calvary Brown). I’d figure out what to do with his gun and everything else later.

I should mention here that the only paint I had in common with the youtube tutorial was the Vallejo Calvary Brown and everything else I improvised using the paints I had on hand. For the first and lighter of the camouflage layers, I used a mix of Vallejo Flesh Tone and some Reaper Desert Sand. Not feeling too terribly confident in my skills with a brush (and feeling even less so when I was done), I set about applying the first camo layer on the back attempting to follow the basic camo shapes set laid out in the video: a line, a line with a smaller diagonal at the left end, a blob/splat, and a dot. While the free-form nature of it was still a bit daunting for me at first and I took way too long second-guessing myself and trying not to make the placement of the shapes look too deliberate, I found that I eventually found a rhythm and stopped overthinking it.

For the second and darker layer, I used a mix of Reaper Pure Black, Harvest Brown, and some Leather Brown to lighten it up a little. I learned another tough lesson there. I should have cut out the Leather Brown and gone a lot darker with it, because not only do I suspect that it would have made the second layer pop more than it ultimately did, I would have been able to actually SEE it better against the Calvary Brown basecoat (again, my eyesight isn’t the greatest and I have a bit of selective color-blindness going on as well). For the final and lighter layer (which consists of random dots), I used some Reaper Pure White and either Desert Sand or Vallejo Fleshtone (I honestly don’t remember what I mixed with the white and it’s not like it matters since you can’t see any of it after I applied the first wash anyway.

Then it came time to blend everything together with a wash and while the video used a flesh colored wash (it didn’t occur to me to try to make one by diluting the Vallejo Flesh Tone with water and I thought at the time it would cover up more of my crimes if I went with a darker wash), I looked at the premade washes I had on hand and ultimately decided to go with a Vallejo Dark Rust wash since it seemed to fit the whole surface of Mars aesthetic better in my mind. I put some of the Dark Rust wash on his exposed metal parts as well just to see how it would look.

See what I meant earlier when I said I thought I went way too light on the darker brown layer? While this was always intended to be just me experimenting, I couldn’t help but being a little bit bummed that it didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. That’s what I like the call the “AAAHHHH” moment. That’s whenever you’re new to a hobby and you hit that snag where you’re reminded that your skills don’t yet match up to your ambitions. So I set the mini aside for a day or two and decided to try and fix it up as best I could, or at the very least try to finish the job by adding some paint to his non-camo areas and going back over some of the camo areas that still bothered me (namely the front of his helmet). I also tried out the Agrax Earthshade wash (which took forever to arrive in the mail) to see what effect that might have.

After a bit more tinkering and brushing on some Reaper Blade Steel, I was finally ready to throw in the towel and move on to the next thing. Though I will say, I ended up feeling a lot better about this miniature towards the end than I did at the midpoint. Overall, it was a fun experiment and a good learning experience.