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So, If you look in my older threads you can see I painted and lit a reaver titan a few years back. Well, it didn't really work all to well: the filament lights I installed heated up so much that they caused the plastic in the head to smoke (which looked really cool, but smelled funny and was not too good for my brain cells). Then the lights burnt out and I had to basically try to relight everything from stratch, causing no end of difficulty with wires and old glue etc.
Well, I lived and I learned, and now I have a comission to paint and light a mars pattern warhound titan. The paintjob needs to be good but basic: the guy I am doing this for is far better at weathering and such then I am, so he will do that on his own time, as well as painting the cockpit crew.
The color scheme is pretty basic: black and white, with metal bits and gold trim. similar to the nice red/blue/yellow one on forge world, only black instead of red. Also a good deal darker and more worn looking since he wants it to fit into his massive Death Korps of Krieg army (truely massive; at least 20,000pts!).
I have some ideas and a plan of attack, and I think this lighting system I will install will not only last a long time, but it should be easily replacable if any parts wear out. The difficult part will be the positioning of the lighting since the model is already assembled: some spots are going to be pretty tricky to get a drill bit into without taking the model apart completely.

Anywho, heres todays progress, and the question of the day is this:

Are the white stripes on the gun arm too "busy" looking? Would it look better as just a flat black with gold trim?

Day 1:
Prime entire model black
Add in white on torso and head
greenstuff back of guns (its all rough from the resin blocks)
Try out some sample trim

Maybe make the white lines a little wider? It's hard to know how the model will ultimately work, paint scheme-wise this early on. Keep at it!

Day 2 of the build!
Since this machine doesn't have the underplate for the carapace, I decided to light the interior with some "frosted" plastic panes. Also going to use the same plastic over the eye lenses of the head. This will hopefully diffuse the light a bit.
Question of the day: do I stripe the plastic to make it look like a bunch of smaller panes, or just leave it as is?

If you're already making the carapace striped, I'd suggest making the rest simply either black or white, else the model becomes way too 'busy'

I think you are right: I'll keep the guns black with no striping.
Just a couple of more pictures of work so far

Day 3 work (sorry its a bit late, but I was away all day and went to bed right after finishing
Plasma gun!

Ok, so no updates for a while because I was working on some top secert stuff. Well, not really: I was working on terrain and since the warhound (Its not mine, but I have affectionately named it "fluffy") was just waiting on lights so theres not much to update on it...UNTIL NOW!
Got some awesome lights from a company called Poweredplay gaming. I build and paint: resistors and such are a little out of my range of expertise, and since there is no way I could have made the wires as clean as what they did, I bought their set. It's a little expensive, but once you drill the holes for the lights its really just plug and play. Unfortunately, the 9v battery that the system uses is too big for where I want it to go, so I am ordering a special mini 9v battery from them to clean up the loose wires and such.

Sorry for the lack of updates: waiting on a super small 9v battery (see photo). Now all my electrical stuff fits in the spot I want! My question is: do I cut a hole in the cover plate for the light switch, or leave it as is?
Also, very little warhound work left: just some interior details. As such, I am moving on to my next project: my reaver revamp! (pics to follow)

If you do cut a hole in the cover plate for a switch, cover it with something to map it blend in with the titan, as a with sticking out the back would look rather ugly.