UMS "Agram" : Comic Style Mechas < Articles < Hobby

Comic Style Mechas

Mario Grgurev, 12nd September 2023

In today's article, I will show my way of coloring cartoon or comic style, whichever suits you. I implement it on mech figures, specifically from the game Heavy Gear Blitz. As soon as I saw them, they inspired me to try to imitate the retro animation from the anime studios of the 80s and 90s, of which I am a huge fan. I say imitations because it's not easy to transfer the feeling of an animated character to the world of miniatures, it's a question of the amount of detail and lighting - two factors that I'm still trying to perfect.

The idea is not to create NMM (Non-Metallic Metal), although it can look like that, but this is a Cel-shading approach to colors and lighting that segments surfaces into clearly separated tones. The comparison with NMM is in how it handles light on the miniature, where the parallel is drawn because you determine the source and amount of light that is shown in the shading yourself.

My examples in this article are reminiscent of NMM because I shade separate panels, trying to get highlights and slight color fades individually, but if we look at the examples in the animation, the model is often shaded by itself and the transition of shadow and light is only in a few places.

Similar to NMM, the approach is a little more complicated, but the technique is simple: we choose which side the light comes from - the panels facing the light are always brighter, the others are darker. Then we determine the direction of the light and shade so that wash or contrast paint from GW falls, but in controlled layers with clearly defined edges between tones. The final highlight is white, it's standard in cartoons. All edges, or at least all visible, are black lines.

Black lines can be obtained in three ways, one is with the side of the brush on the raised edge, the second is with the prominent tip of the brush in the recesses, while the third is with thin felt-tip pens. The third one is considered mild cheating in our hobby, but I strongly believe that such a term does not exist in our dictionary, if we are talking about manual techniques.

You have to be careful with felt-tip pens, because sometimes they can flow too much on a small edge, but that can all be painted over.

My personal procedure is as follows: I paint the entire model with the darkest color, then determine the side that is lit - in these cases, the front. After that I start shading the mech panels, roughly with triangular shapes to emphasize the light from above. So I lighten all the panels in one or two layers before adding a final highlight with white. After that, I blacken the edges for a "cartoon feel". The inevitable fix for edge blackening bugs is at an end.

For the bases, I decided to make a freehand drawing instead of a 3D base as we usually do, I thought it was appropriate that the drawings are in a flat environment. Since the game is mostly played on desert terrain, I used a few colors to show the small "dunes", black lines and, here and there, some shaded rocks. The bases were completed in this way relatively quickly.

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