Alien bug colour scheme

I've been experimenting with how I would paint an army of bug like aliens. My inspiration came from terrestrial beetles. They come in some amazing iridescent colours. Metallic golds, greens, purples and blues. The common feature is that, for the most part, their undersides and limbs tend to be black. 

I've opted to go for blue for the hard carapace and black for the body and limbs. For any weapons and other details I'm going for a dark flesh, tongue like colour.

I painted my samples using three different techniques. As mentioned before to paint a lot of models, I want to use the most efficient technique.

In all cases they are primed in black. I've dry brushed over the entire thing in a very light grey. This could have been white.

The hard areas on their backs are glazed over in the base blue. Pulling from the middle out to the edges with several layers nearer the edges to get more colour there.

From here, I tried the several methods to emphasise the extremities.

Sample 1: I tried multiple individual lines, but despite trying a few times, I was not happy with the results, so I changed tack. I highlighted the ends in pale blue then glazed from the base blue to the pale blue using a 50:50 mix of those two colours.

Sample 2: The next model I simply edge highlighted. I didn't like that either, so I changed that to a glaze of pale blue for the tips.

Sample 3: Lastly I dry brushed the tips and some of the other edges with the pale blue.

All three results are acceptable, but the best value for the effort, as always for me, was the dry brushing. Quick and reliable results.

I tried a few variations for the weapons and other details. I've settled on a dark red flesh colour with a black wash over the top.

For the brains and orbs in, what I am calling, the floating mines, I've used a base of bone colour with a wash of dark flesh colour.

I finished them with a matt clear coat. I deliberately used a type that tends towards satin, more than matt. That gives a little sheen to the end result. 

This is a very quick to apply paint scheme, which is exactly what I want to get another army on the table soon.

==

Links:

My clear coat testing review:

https://blog.discoverthat.co.uk/2026/05/matt-clear-coat-testing.html

==

Tabletop smoke

I decided I needed some smoke effects to mark damaged vehicles. Or perhaps I just wanted to try to make models of smoke. I also wanted to add better smoke to one floating model.

I used cotton wool pads because that is what I had to hand. For the rocket jets, I pulled fine filaments off with tweezers.

For the smoke plumes, I tried various methods of mounting the cotton wool to try to make them more stable. The problem with all of them was hiding the base! I found either masking tape, no base or for those with a wire support, I used hot glue.

Shaping the cotton wool was a bit hit and miss. I found that hot glue was the best way to join them, although sometimes a bit messy. Once I had shapes I was happy with, I used hairspray to hold them in place.

Cotton Wool Smoke

Painting with an airbrush was surprisingly easy. I used a 50:50 mix of thinner and black paint lightly over most of the cotton wool. After that I used undiluted fluorescent orange up close in some of the creases to give a fire effect. Then a light dusting to give a glow effect.

Looking online I found that people also used cushion wadding or teddy bear stuffing. I tried it out and it was much easier to work with than the cotton wool.

For tabletop smoke, I think wadding is much easier and acceptable, but perhaps glued together balls of cotton wool have the edge on appearance. For whisps of smoke, cotton wool is also more effective because it can be tweezed out into fine filaments.

Wadding Smoke

==

Weber carburettor spacer

The manifold converted to fit a Weber carb instead of an SU carb on to the hot rod puts the cable connection a little too close to the bracket. The solution is to make a taller spacer.

==