The Buffet Assault Group goes green(ish).

 o/

The initial test model.

Not for the first time, and I cannot say it is for the last, but I realized that the reason I have been painting minis from every faction BUT The Buffet Assault Group is because I just don't enjoy painting their color scheme anymore. No real reasoning that I can think of but it happens. The tan/OD green camo with the central red stripe and occasional battlefield repairs is actually their third color scheme. 

So what follows is a bit of a history on their previous colors: 

The original TBAGer color scheme was an urban-type camo that almost looks like SWAT camo to me now. 

Yes, the Awesome on the left is the same one that is now painted below. It's been waiting on a paint job since 2019!

Note the Billboard sized/15mm scaled TBAGers logo on the side, and some digital chicanery to make up for an apparently crummy photo. 

I've looked & looked but cannot find a photo of The Buffet Assault Group's 2nd color scheme, that being not too dissimilar from the last one. It consisted of the same shade of tan (Vallejo Flat Earth) with a deep red, almost crimson trim. I know I had a metal 3rd party Stalker from Australia (yeah, that wasn't cheap) again with the TBAGer logo billboards on the sides of it's LRM arms. That was the unit's command mech at the time. 

I had at least an assault lance painted up like that before they went the way of eBay. I recall that they went to a buyer in Detroit. Their trip was more of an odyssey as the package visited every Detroit suburb that surrounded the buyer's burb over the course of two weeks or so, before landing in a distribution center that had no public access. Worse yet, he drove by it every day on his daily commute. The package spent another week or two there before finally arriving at his house. We had so many convos over the shipping shitshow that we were almost friends by that point.

Then came the color scheme that you all are familiar with: 

A company sized photo-op just prior to my first game of what  would become the eventually disasterous Steel Haven Campaign.

I kept the HBK-4G & UM-R60, but the rest of the painted mechs from the this bunch have redeployed to the western coast of Florida. The Urbie was featured in my last post, the Hunchback is currently soaking in Simple Green, and the two painted Warriors are now just a generic VTOL flight for whatever faction needs them (which is more or less what they were doing anyways). 

There isn't any consistency of the fonts used for the numbers on individual units.

I retained the tan and red in their new color mix for both some contrast and as an homage to the old color scheme. 

The addition of some Autumn colors to their basing shrubberies means the red still works for camo, or at least as much as camo works for a battlemech.

This is an Awesome choice for a my new company command mech.  

So, skipping to the present, I thought I'd try something different (yes I know that I paint most everything green, shut up!). I wanted to try a pattern breaker camo as that is about as close to digital camo as I can personally get. At first it seemed a bit tedious, until I realized that if I fucked up somewhere, I could just repaint over that panel with the next color selected. 

I am very pleased with how this lance has turned out. This color scheme has also been well received on my FLGS' discord which is nice.

The dark green AK Grime has given me fits though, far more than the regular shade that I use on everything else. Not sure why but I had to almost repaint close to a third of the Awesome after inking and maybe a quarter of the Blackjack.  That's as much trouble as I have had with almost a full battalion of the Desert Horde.

I just started on an armor lance, so will try using the regular grime on them and see how they end up. If they are not too visually different in the end, I may just continue on without the green grime going forward. 

We shall see I guess.