Speed painting Martians!

I bought some Mars Attacks models at Salute either this year or last, thinking I'd use them for ... oh, I dunno, something. I am now painting them up just for fun and they seem to be getting a better response than a lot of other things I post. I think they may be well-suited to my speed-painting style.

ACK! Ack-ack!

Anyway, I thought I would do a step-by-step of how I painted them, just to illuminate the technique.

First I texture the base, prime the model with grey car primer and drybrush it all over in two stages, first with a mid-grey and then with white. Normally I would also remove the mould lines, but the material of these Mars Attacks minis makes that a giant pain in the butt and I think if you look at the photos they're not too visible in the finished product.

 Next I apply the base colours in a thin layer. The main areas of the suit are VMC emerald thinned with blue Army Painter quickshade. The thinned paint lets the highlights created by the drybrush show through. The head is just washes; the very textured surface doesn't really need much else. The photo showed some blank spots, which I went back and touched up.

 Next I Just give the whole thing a black wash. Again, the highly textured surface of the model really makes this effective. There were also a few areas I wanted to be brighter, so I spotted them in after the wash -- the glowy coil on the gun (which I have kind of failed to cover) and the goggles are examples of this.

I also drybrushed the base.

In the final stage, I went back and did some spot highlighting, picking out the goggles again with a lighter shade of blue-green and lining the edges of some of the suit plates with the original colour. I neatened up the base and applied the helmet, which is a bit of a tricky process.

Anyway, here is the expanded squad. I've still got a few more to do but I think they're coming along nicely.