Mini No. 19

So the UFOs in XOM are the bad guys and the easiest bad guy scheme in Mass Effect, that is actually recognizable, is Cerberus. Cerberus is an organization that is pretty much space racist. See the reference pic below that I used as a colour scheme.

Let me start off by saying that these guys were a pain in the butt for many reasons.

1. The main colour is white
2. There are 24 of them
3. The ratio of white, silver and orange is really hard to nail down exactly.

I started by priming everything white….

…… then messing with the colours. This took a loooooong time and I messed up a lot. Take a look of my experimenting below. In the end I painted and over painted so many times that I ended up just stripping the UFOs again entirely using Simple Green and started again. In hindsight, I should have just done one UFO and nailed down the colour scheme before doing them all at once.

Finally I found something I liked. The silver looked the best because it gives it a robust mechanical feel. I followed this with a black nuln oil wash and a quick dry brush of a lighter silver. I tried to do a heavy black wash and used Citadels Leadbelcher, the darkest silver I have to make it look more black.

I then picked out some details that I wanted to be the orange highlights and painted them back in white so that the orange would take better. I also worked on cleaning up the white on the disk part of the UFO. The orange is from Reaper and is quite thin so it took many coats to get a consistent coat. And there are 24 of these damn UFOs. I also did a light orange wash to give the orange parts a little more dimension.

I gave the top halves of the UFOs a thick layer of varnish, because these minis will be handled a lot during game play. And then flipped them over to work on the bottom of them. I continued the silver around, cleaned up the white and also game the silver parts a quick nuln oil wash and silver dry brush. The circle was the perfect area to add a touch of the orange to the bottom of the UFO.

And that was it, I cleaned up the whites some more, gave the bottoms a heavy varnish and that was that!

I popped the Cerberus UFOs into their little storage cases and was relieved that after a month of faffing about with them, I was finally done.

XCOM Mass Effect Soldiers – HERE

XCOM Normandy Interceptors – HERE