Community Outreach – Caterwauling On CamoSpecs With Matt “00Dawg” Frederiksen

For as long as there has been BattleTech, there’ve been people painting minis. In the earliest days, a well-painted miniature was sometimes the most realistic-looking image of a BattleMech you could get. These days, digital art has caught up with the real thing, but miniature painting has only gotten better as techniques and technologies improve year over year.

Leading the charge is CamoSpecs Online, the official repository for BattleTech‘s unit liveries. CamoSpecs has been a big part of BattleTech for many decades, and I’m honestly a little ashamed that I haven’t gotten to chat with the folks at CamoSpecs sooner. But that’s changed thanks to a recent conversation I had with Matt “00Dawg” Frederiksen. We talked about CamoSpecs’ past, present, and future, and how to best tackle your Mercenaries Kickstarter.

Sean (Sarna): Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to us about ComoSpecs, Matt. For those unaware, CamoSpecs is the officially sanctioned site that keeps track of various factions and unit liveries so that people know how to paint the Grey Death Legion at home. 

So to get us started, we’re going to talk a little bit about you. Who are you? Give us a brief introduction and your BattleTech history. 

Matt “00Dawg” Frederiksen (CamoSpecs): Yeah, no problem. I’m Matt Frederiksen. I’m the coordinator for CamoSpecs these days.

My intro to BattleTech starts in a Destin mall in Florida in the 1980s. I’m going to say in a Walden Books, but I don’t know that it was necessarily—it was one of the mall chains. I saw a BattleTech Second Edition box set for 20 bucks, and against my dad’s best wishes, I went ahead and purchased it.

Next thing I know, we’ve got a small group of teenagers and preteens playing BattleTech pretty regularly in my hometown of Mississippi. I took a break from BattleTech for college but then came back In time for the FedCom Civil War. MechWarrior: Dark Age is kind of happening, but I never strayed from what became known as Classic BattleTech. 

At some point, I discovered the CamoSpecs online community and decided that I would try for submissions, and after many submissions, I was accepted for membership. One of my gifts is organization and I started taking over a lot of the project work from Ray Arrastia, who’s now the BattleTech Line Developer, but he was the head of CamoSpecs at the time. So I started doing organization for things like the Gen Con diorama and then getting stuff associated with individual artists for Iron Wind Metal‘s catalog work—all these different little projects he would work on for what eventually became Catalyst Game Labs.

When Ray decided to step aside as the head of CamoSpecs—I’m not sure that exactly jives with him becoming head of BattleTech in its current form, but probably does—I stepped into his shoes and became the coordinator. 

Sean: You’ve touched on a lot of things we are definitely going to talk about later in the interview. Are you an exclusive tabletop player or do you also dabble in any of the BattleTech video games?

Matt: Let’s go with all of the above. I don’t own MechWarrior 5: Clans yet. I’ve actually had some wrist issues due to work at the moment, so me and gaming are on a little bit of a break. But I had the original BattleTech game for PC, Crescent Hawks’ Inception, and I own the sequel, Crescent Hawks’ Revenge.

I own MechWarriors 1 through 4 plus every add-on that you could get, and then everything up until Clans. I played MechWarrior Online for a while; I was one of the founders. I’ve got swag in a box around here somewhere from that launch. 

My gaming time is limited just due to my career. I’m in IT and so it fits in random niches sometimes. I don’t always get on with friends and gams, you know; instead it’s a lot of random assignments and just jumping in the middle of a match, and then the single-player stuff. 

The tabletop is the top. I’m generally into the original version of BattleTech. I do some Alpha Strike from time to time, and I’ve dabbled a little bit in the RPG stuff. I’m not the best game master, and there’s obviously been several different systems through the years. I think MechWarrior: Second Edition was probably the one where I was doing the most RPG stuff. I haven’t gotten into Destiny or A Time of War very much, not for lack of desire to, but more for lack of time.

Sean: Well, when you do get the time, I can recommend MechWarrior 5: Clans. It’s very good.

Matt: Glad to hear it. 

Sean: And of course, we’re getting to the all-important question. What’s your favorite ‘Mech? 

Matt: If we’re talking about aesthetics, I’m an old-school Warhammer guy.

I have a shelf in my office that’s got the BattleDroids box next to a Yamato 1/60-scale Warhammer. There’s just something about walking that 70-ton, two-PPC load into battle. If you’re bringing in the Warhammer 6R, knowing that you’re going to get a shot or two off and then you’re going to die. Hopefully, you’re bringing a 6D or something newer.

If I’m on the tabletop and you’re telling me I’m in a competitive match where you want me to win, there’s some other stuff, depending on class. I like Gauss Rifles and 15-point headshots. And if I’m doing Clans, that means you can also bring all the ER PPC, or I guess if you want to throw in some retro stuff, a Blazer.

But yeah, Warhammers just hold a special place in my heart. Part of it may go back to that bookshop in the Destin, Florida mall—that the first image I ever saw of BattleTech was the Warhammer on that Second Edition cover. So stick with Warhammer. 

Sean: Warhammer is a good choice. Many imitators, but only one original.

Let’s move on to CamoSpecs. For people who’ve never heard of CamoSpecs, could you give us a brief history of CamoSpecs? When did it get started, who started it, and how has it evolved over the years? 

Matt: I’m going to keep my answers brief on a couple of things because we’re working on putting together—just kind of our own little gift to the public—a guide to some of the history of CamoSpecs, and I don’t want to spoil anything.

Short answer, CamoSpecs has been around for about 20 years. You’ve got a group of guys that include the likes of Dave Fanjoy and Ross “Savage Coyote” Hines. They kind of saw this void, let’s call it. We’ve got all these really great schemes out there, we need a place to keep up with this stuff, and it evolves into this official repository.

The tagline is regimental paint schemes, but the reality is there’s this loose set of rules about what actually gets in that goes beyond just regiments. We’ve had some folks that—like me—share a touch of OCD that have come to us and been like, “You can’t have 10,000 schemes out there for every mercenary lance that ever existed,” which we say, well, not yet, but there’s a spreadsheet out there that has them all listed and at some point we’ll get all these up there.

I will tell you, even now with the images that we’ve accumulated over the years and the records that are in there, we’re already stretching our hosting agreement with our provider. So at some point, as we add bigger and better, more high-resolution images, and more units, this does become a pretty hefty library to keep up with.

You know, we don’t just help populate this stuff. We use it. I mean, I’m constantly referring to the site as I’m painting up my own personal collection of stuff. 

Sean: What does the role of CamoSpecs Coordinator entail? What exactly do you do?

Matt: Let’s start with that second question first. So I herd cats. You have a group of 20 to 30 artists—the count varies a little bit, and we’re probably at our largest point ever at the moment. Generally speaking, we’ve got a place where we keep up with the different projects that we’re working on, and they kind of fall into some generic categories like dioramas; you’ll have the Gen Con diorama that we do, and we have the Adepticon diorama we’ve done the last couple years for Catalyst Game Labs to take to that convention. 

We’ll have stuff that we’re working on for products that Catalyst Games Labs has in the works, such as Force Manual: Davion that recently came out. We helped them by painting up certain lances that went directly into the book. We helped them by painting what’s called blanks, but they’re pretty simple. Pretty much gray versions of miniatures with shading and everything else that can be taken and digitally painted so that they can mass-produce those wonderful pages that have all the units. There’s like one ‘Mech in each paint scheme and you can flip and look and go, “Oh, that’s what I want to paint today.” 

Then we’ll have some stuff like the faction painting guides which came out of the original Clan Invasion Kickstarter. There have been six of those released. There’s another six that are coming, and just the way Catalyst Game Labs has had to prioritize some of their layout resources and things like that, we’ve gotten caught up in that log jam.

Then we’ll have discussions ongoing of individual units. Could just be an artist has come along and something’s caught their eye, or they were inspired by the latest story in Shrapnel and they want to put something in rigor around what a scheme looks like. An example up on the site; we had the Clan Burrock release a couple of months ago, where all of a sudden we are putting out some schemes for some units that we’ve known have existed for a long time but didn’t get a ton of time in the limelight so there was never a real focus on figuring out what their schemes looked like. In some cases, that’s working hand in hand with Catalyst. In some cases, that’s Catalyst telling us what to do. In some cases, that’s CamoSpecs gets free rain and off you go.

You try to keep all those balls in the air. We haven’t started planning Gen Con 2025 yet, but Adepticon 2025 planning is well underway. So you’ve constantly got this nice assembly line of things moving along.

Sean: That sort of leads into the next question. What is the process for something becoming an official paint scheme exactly? You mentioned that sometimes artists are given carte blanche, and sometimes you’re told what to do. So how does that actually go? 

Matt: Yeah, it really does vary. We’ve got authors that put things into canon text, and the rule is, the text takes precedence, and newer text takes precedence over older text, except when—and we’ve run into this a few times—where it’s obvious an author didn’t know a previous example existed. Or they put something in incorrectly. Sometimes that gets caught in fact-checking. Sometimes it gets caught later and then we’ll put in an errata. Sometimes, depending on discussions with the author, we may put in something that says, “Oh, they changed their paint scheme.”

Internally to Camo Specs artists, we’ve got a list of units that are out there that need schemes that for whatever reason were given somewhat of a priority. It could just be we’re trying for completeness. It could be something that was specifically requested by Catalyst such as they knew something was coming down the pipe product-wise and they were trying to save themselves a little bit of work so that the artist didn’t have to wait for the book to get kicked off, the author to get assigned, all the contracts to get inked and all that kind of different stuff. We could speed things up a little bit by deciding ahead of time what those schemes might look like. 

And then there are some situations where an artist—I don’t want to say earns, but yeah, that’s probably the closest term to it—we’ll say earns the right to pretty much go from scratch with a unit that has no indicators of what it is that they look like.

Quite frankly, that doesn’t happen much anymore because we’re so busy with other things. It’s not a case of idle hands or the devil’s workshop kind of stuff. It’s more a case of everybody’s so busy on neat things like the books like the Force Manuals. Tutorials have to be written. Lances have to be painted up. We’ve got to get new sculpts painted with these blanks that can be used for digital painting. We’ve got all these different little things that have got to happen. Everybody stays busy. 

Sean: For the artists that were given carte blanche to create whatever their hearts desired, is there a favorite Camo Specs creation you can think of?

Matt: Ooh. I need to go back. My favorite scheme to paint is the First Kestrel Grenadiers. I think that one might have originated from somebody’s mind at one point. Unfortunately, when we lost the CamoSpecs.com site a number of years ago, we lost the forums that had a lot of the history in them.

There’s been some things that we just lost to time. Even in the world of the internet, there are not always good backups of everything, unfortunately. That is probably the one I’m going to claim. We may get a Sarna fan who immediately sees this interview and goes, “No that was in the Davion book and this page number,” or something.

That’d be a good thing to do. I’m gonna go look that up while I’m right here to see what we claim as a credit on the First Kestrel Grenadiers. But I’m going to point out something in that let’s see, where did it come from? No, Jal Phoenix canonized this in 2005 so that’s Lance currently. So Lance is responsible for my favorite scheme in canon BattleTech. 

I want to share one of those little inside tidbits I don’t think anybody would mind if I did at this point,  and if they do I’ll get my hands clapped and a call from Ray, but when we were working on the initial stuff for Force Manual: Davion, there was a piece of art that came by that showed a First Kestrel Grenadier.

And I said, you know, this is a little different. We’ve always had blue flames only on arms and legs, but this has got it in several different places. This is awesome looking. And it turned out that someone—and Brent Evans is involved in this picture at some point. It may have originated with Brent. Maybe it’s somebody else, I don’t know, but at some point Brent told an artist, “Improve this,” and they did. So Dave Fanjoy and I both painted up examples of Kestrel Grenadier stuff with this new adjustment to the scheme. And all it is is putting blue flames in new areas and making them bigger.

But even that little adjustment just takes what was a pretty good paint scheme and makes it a really good one with a refreshing look for the new era. And you can see that, I think there’s a Stalker and one other ‘Mech that’s in Force Manual: Davion that’s got that not-really-a-new-scheme, just an adjustment to one that’s in there. I love little things like that. So just sharing. 

Sean: And there’s no reason that paint schemes can’t evolve over the centuries anyway. 

Matt: Absolutely. 

Sean: Are you still currently painting and getting things shown on CamoSpecs as well?  

Matt: I do. I don’t know that I’m as prolific as I was at one point.

Everybody’s got real life that intervenes from time to time, so you get into periods where you can really hammer some stuff out. Historically, I do most of my painting immediately following Gen Con if I got to participate in that year because it’s just inspiring. When we’re working on stuff for Gen Con you try to put in that little extra oomph to take it to another level since the fans are going to get to see it in person. Maybe it’s modifications to the model to get a different canon variant represented that you don’t really have an Iron Winds or canon Catalyst release to cover, or maybe it’s putting on special weapons effects, or it’s doing extra battle damage, or it’s really heavily reposing it to make it more action-oriented. I get done with that and the amount of time put into a Gen Con miniature is a couple of times to four times over what I do normally when painting. So then all of a sudden I feel like I’m speed painting when I go back to just my normal work, and so I’ll spit some out. 

One of the blessings and curses of us CamoSpecs artists right now is we’ve got a large backlog of miniatures that we have pictures taken of that aren’t up on the site yet. We’ve talked several times about ways to help mitigate that. I think more than likely we’re going to revamp the website at some point in the not-too-distant future and change away from what was this 2005-2010 technology-driven thing of every Wednesday we release six miniatures.

We went from that to putting out six a day. The guys are producing so many beautiful miniatures for the site that we can’t really catch up. So you’ve got stuff that I painted six months ago that’s not up on the site yet. That doesn’t mean necessarily there’s a six-month whole backlog at this point, ‘cause for one thing I’m far from the most talented CamoSpecs miniature artists, and I want to get the best stuff up there as quickly as possible. The other thing is I’m a completist. I have this huge collection of miniatures and many of them are unpainted. So I’ve also been recently experimenting with trying to do something closer to a speed painting, not for use on CamoSpecs.

We’ve got this huge backlog. I don’t need to be spitting out content for the site as much, but I’ve got ‘Mechs I’d like to get on the tabletop. I mean, did you participate in the Mercenaries Kickstarter? 

Sean: I did. I have my minis all sitting in my display cabinet. They’re still gray, waiting to be painted. 

Matt: Right! The same thing happened to me; this big box shows up and I get that endorphin rush. I’m looking through all these beautiful miniatures, and can’t wait to paint them. Then over the next few days, a couple of weeks, it sinks in how much I’ve enlarged my collection and how much longer I’ve added to the required time to paint all these miniatures.

I’ve been playing around with some of the Vallejo spray can paints and working on them—I’m not sure if you’re familiar with zenithal painting, but pretty much you put the whole thing in a dark color. Then you just do a pass with an airbrush spray can on the upper surfaces with a lighter color, then maybe just a spritz of one more even lighter color, and then you come back and touch up in between.

I’ve kind of got my Davion green worked out with the colors that I want; I’m a Davionista. I’m looking forward to putting a company and then maybe an Alpha Strike battalion at some point of these speed-painted guys on a tabletop. So that’s what I’m into painting at the moment.

Sean: I know your site has previously done a lot of how-to guides for painting, but if you can put that kind of process up there that might be something that I could get behind. There are more than 50 ‘Mechs on my shelf here, and if I could get some of those painted quickly—maybe not to CamoSpecs quality, but good enough—that’d be swell.

Matt: Let me ask you this, Sean. You’re obviously a consumer of the media and we’ve had this discussion internally. How best do we get the how-to guides to the BattleTech community? Is it the YouTube channel? Is it the guides that we put into the faction painting guide slash the new Force Manuals that Catalyst is putting out? Is it old-school pictures and steps on the website? Is it all the above? What helps people? What do they get the most use out of? 

Sean: I mean, I think it’s gotta be all the above. You’re still going to have the old school grognards who want to get their information straight out of pages and official sources, you’re gonna have people who are—I’m not going to say casually into the hobby, but not necessarily having the resources to spend on every single new book release, and they’re going to want the tutorial they can get for free on a website or on YouTube. 

And then there’s also going to be people like me who really haven’t painted in years and want to get through this backlog because they don’t want to push everything on their brother the whole time, but also want something that still kind of looks good. So I’m going to turn to something like YouTube to see what is a good, quick, and dirty way of painting up a whole bunch of miniatures. So I really do think it’s going to be a combination of all three. 

Matt: All right. That’s good feedback, thanks. 

You know, I also use our tutorials, and I’m a real old-school guy. But you know, there’s something to be said for the dulcet tones of B1B Flyer walking you through whatever it is he’s decided to paint this week. I’ve really enjoyed some of those videos myself. But sometimes you want that step-by-step stuff and I recently found myself referencing something in one of the old rule books that had been written up about painting stuff.

I see benefits to all, and you answered the question, which is just keep doing them all. Maybe this is also one of those things to revisit again later as technology is always shifting, right? And it’s the tools that provide us with what we can do. 

It’s pretty much an open secret the current CamoSpecs site is built on a realty listing format. Our big fans are going to say, “Every once in a while I see a map show up on a miniature somewhere.” That’s because your miniatures are actually house listings. You just didn’t know it.

This was because the webmaster that we paid a number of years ago had pretty much a shoestring budget to redo the site. That’s what ended up being within our budget. Now we were able to later on get some more funds going through our eBay auctions and some other things and hire more professionals to finally get the new site published. But behind the scenes, the database that we had pumped into and some of the widgets and plugins that we were using were aimed at a realty listing. We are in discussions about what the next generation of the website looks like. ‘Cause you know, everything keeps moving.

It just occurred to me: how do we get a CamoSpecs AI and then have it just handle everything for us so we can retire? But that’s probably still a way down the road.

Sean: I haven’t seen an AI completely take over web engineering, but the day may be soon, for better or for worse.

Well, let’s continue on. How does one get featured in CamoSpecs? Is it just submit a photo of something really cool, are there rules that you need to follow, or are there tips to better your chances?

Matt: Well, generally it’s actually becoming a CamoSpecs member. And I wish I could give you more guidance at this point, but we have currently paused the membership process. 

Historically, you prepared a suite of miniatures in canon paint schemes. They had to be the official miniatures by Iron Wind or Catalyst, or if you still had Ral Partha stuff lying around you could pull the old plastics out of the box set and make those work.

What has happened recently is that we got a little too big for our britches. We went from 10 to 15 artists for the past decade to where all of a sudden our membership almost doubled. And so we discovered that we’d kind of outgrown the process as it currently stands.

And please, no one takes this as a negative, but at one point we were getting almost daily membership submissions. It became a heavy lift to vet through those and to provide detailed feedback in as many cases as we could. It became such a heavy lift that we pretty much had to make a managerial decision to say, let’s pause. So there has been a conversation ongoing about what that looks like.

The other part of this is that’s just another indicator of what’s really going on in the BattleTech community right now, which is the Kickstarters and everything else going on, outside factors that include the video games, that include people being unhappy with the gaming lines made by other manufacturers. It’s been this perfect storm where we’re seeing BattleTech as popular—I don’t know if you can quote and say as popular as it’s ever been kind of thing, but if this is not the golden age of BattleTech, certainly the second golden age of BattleTech. 

So we’ve paused to take a minute and figure out what that’s going to look like because the number of talented painters in the BattleTech community has increased exponentially. And I can sit there and admire their work day in and day out, but figuring out who can come into the Camo Specs community, is up on the BattleTech lore, and has somewhat of a history of supporting the game… We’ve had some people that came in and it was like, “Hey, I took up BattleTech this week! I’d like to be a CamoSpecs member.” That’s great and you’re a spectacularly talented artist, and for all I know you’re going to be here for five years, but we need to have a frank discussion about what all is involved here.

You don’t have to be able to recite The Star League manual or anything, but when you’re having discussions with people who don’t know what a technical readout is, it quickly lets you know that they’re probably not up on BattleTech lore that much. And we do have a lot of deep dive stuff that goes on. We have a lot of obscure vetting of things.

You know, there are Catalyst freelance authors who are members of CamoSpecs. You have at least former members of the fact-check team—I’m not sure about currently. We have a lot of demo agents. And so you have this vast store of knowledge because we have to do deep dives on stuff and we get asked to do deep dives by other people. 

But anyway, what I’m hoping is going to come out of this will be a membership process that continues to attract folks who love BattleTech, folks who are talented artists, folks who can contribute to CamoSpecs and represent BattleTech and CamoSpecs professionally, and we’re still hammering out exactly what that looks like at the moment.

I will say, as far as to say “featured” in CamoSpecs, we do still have guys that are out there just combing through Twitter and InstaFeeds and stuff like that, and occasionally tagging stuff that catches their eye and putting it on our official Twitter account.

Sean: So, right now, the best bet is to post your stuff online. If the quality is there, then a CamoSpecs person will just retweet you or something. 

Matt: At the moment, yes. 

Sean: Let’s talk about that deep diving that you mentioned earlier because there have been disagreements in official lore. How exactly do you resolve differences in a CamoSpecs paint scheme or something that’s in the Unit Color Compendium, or even older sources? Are there a whole lot of differences or is this a problem that comes up often?

Matt: Often is a strong word. It’s certainly not rare. I don’t know if I’d even necessarily call it uncommon. The Unit Color Compendium, that’s one of those things where that site came out while we were still struggling to get the right technical personnel in place to get our new site released.

There are a number of schemes on there that aren’t technically canon. Some of them are derivatives. Some of them are created from whole cloth. We haven’t really used that site for any references with anything.

Generally speaking, we’re going into the old source books, the old novels, the old digital releases of things like BattleCorps fiction, and we’re looking for art and we’re looking for textual descriptions. Longtime BattleTech fans are going to instantly remember that there have been books that came out within a couple of years of each other—when we talk about the Field Manual series—and pretty much one negated the other. And so I mentioned earlier, text is your rule and newer text is the rule. 

Look at Hansen’s Roughriders; you went from this blue and gray scheme to a brown and tan scheme. I know that’s not the exact wording, but that’s what’s coming to my old brain at the moment. And so you have a time period where really only the most recent of those should be the one that’s valid. But then someone in management realized, “Oh, this was just a mistake.” That this was, I’m gonna say poorly fact-checked, but I don’t know that’s necessarily the case,  and I don’t want to place any blame at any team’s feet.

We’ve all been around long enough to know some things go out of print and become hard to find, and it’s not easy to reference some of those old sources anymore. All sorts of things happen. When something like that gets singled out, we’ll usually have an internal discussion. If it’s something that’s been brought to us to either rectify or issue an opinion on and get in a discussion—if that’s with Catalyst or someone else—we’ll usually list all the sources. 

I will tell you the one that has been brought up the most historically has been the Lyran Guards. A number of very spectacular artists through the years have depicted that blue and white scheme and how actually it’s divided on the ‘Mechs very differently. Sean, I will say, I’ve had to apologize to people in a couple of cases because I got very heated. Like, we’re down to zooming in on scanned copies of 20-year-old books to figure out what’s a shadow and what’s actually the artist trying to do a slightly different shade of the color. It can get to that minutiae. 

That’s a rare occasion. Usually, somebody will quickly surface something and we’ll look at it and go, “Yeah, you’re right. This is the newer one, but it absolutely doesn’t agree with the earlier one.” Doesn’t look like they were trying sometimes. We’re using our own intuition to figure out what we think the artist was thinking.

Smithson’s Chinese Bandits I think is one of the ones where two different authors gave them very different schemes. They were both represented in art, so we had to pick a cutoff date and I think we picked 3057 in the Sarna March stuff that they’re involved in. We wrote it up as of Operation Guerrero in 3057 they changed their scheme. So that was how we handled a conflict at that time. It’s usually a very amicable process, and sometimes it’s an opportunity to take what might be a kind of drab scheme and make it pop more.

One of the things I would want to bring up in this interview because I’ve had it surfaced to me several times; there’s people that tell us we always do way too difficult new schemes. They’re always too complex to paint, and then I’ve had people that tell us to stop doing the most basic schemes that are a single color with a highlight because we don’t create any difficult schemes! And you know what, that’s just the internet era, where both sides of opposing viewpoints feel very strongly and are convinced that their viewpoint is right.

The reality is that we make a concerted effort to do both, and so we will put out some simpler schemes, we will put out some more complex schemes, and sometimes we get that perfect fit where we can give a unit an optional scheme where one is simple and one is not, or give them something that can be added that’s—I’m going to use the word highlight here. We do have some art teachers and students of the arts in CamoSpecs, and there are discussions from time to time about what technically highlights refers to, but general historic BattleTech fans, they’re going to think, “If I’ve got olive drab with white highlights, I can put just a few little pips of white or I could give him half of his arm as white,” or that kind of thing.

Sean: Because we’re in the ilClan era, some units have been around for a very long time. Are these sorts of color scheme conflicts going to become more of a problem, or can CamoSpecs muster the resources to handle multiple schemes for multiple eras for a single unit to cover how it evolves over time?

Matt: It’s not really taxing on resources unless someone comes in and wants to do a whole ton of them. There’s obviously been somewhat of an intentional effort from Catalyst Games Labs with that. You saw the 21st Centauri Lancers added the purple to their traditional blue scheme. You’ve got a few other examples out there. 

I don’t think there’s any kind of effort I’m aware of that’s underway to wholesale revamp the schemes for stuff. I mentioned I’m the Davionista; the move back to what some people call the tracksuit scheme for the Davion Guards, where you’ve got the powder blue and the tiny white and red pinstripes on it versus the French flag scheme of the FedCom era. You know, I prefer the tracksuit. Not that I don’t like the French flag, they’re both really pretty schemes. The ability to—depending on what era you’re in—do either one can be nice, but I do I hope for a day where our website could represent things by era, where you could tell it, “I want to see Smithson’s Chinese Bandits in the Fourth Succession War,” and the only one that comes up is charcoal and magenta. And then I tell it, I want to see them in the Jihad, because I want to paint something where they’re dying, and it’s green and gold. 

Sean: Does CamoSpecs allow unique or one-off designs that aren’t necessarily connected with a unit, but might be represented in a short story or a book or some other piece of lore?

Matt: If you’re familiar with the website, there’s a personality tab under “special projects” where a lot of guys have created individual stuff out of something in the lore. The UrbanMech LAMs are a popular choice at the moment. These aren’t really a canon thing, but we’ve got these really neat, fun little new miniatures from Catalyst Game Labs, and everybody loves UrbanMechs. You have to get those represented somehow.

And then you’re going to have stuff that’s out there that’s in a Technical Readout, a piece of fiction, or a character like Dechan Fraser. His Shadow Hawk, I believe, was called out as being a specific paint scheme that doesn’t really match with any of what you’d normally think of as Wolf’s Dragoons.

I wasn’t around for the original Dragoons discussion back in the day. I don’t know if Dechan Fraser’s example is how we ended up with they can use bold colors or generally Wolf’s Dragoons can do whatever they want to, but there are a lot of pilots like that who get one-off descriptions, so we’ll put them in personalities.

One of the older traditions that hasn’t been kept up in recent years was the April Fool’s where occasionally we would have just a picture of terrain that says it’s something like the Null-Sig system of an Exterminator in action or something like that. But generally speaking, that’s where that kind of stuff ends up living. 

Sean: Actually, you’ve got a real Exterminator using its Null-Sig system here [ed. It’s actually the Chameleon Light Polarization Shield, but we both goofed that!]. It’s pretty cool! I have no idea how you made part of it transparent.

Matt: Yeah, Iron Wind Metals put out a short run of a clear-resin printed Exterminator. I was thinking of a different one that I wonder if it’s been lost to time. That one you’re talking about that’s half in, half out, that’s a great piece of work. That one came out really well. 

I’m looking now at the April Fool’s Brigade. I gotta find where this thing’s stuck that I’m thinking of. Some of this stuff dates back 20 years, but there’s a Devastator that’s painted green and purple. You get Constructicons and Merge for the Kill references occasionally in BattleTech. 

Sean: What happens when CamoSpecs is going to a convention? You guys make all those beautiful dioramas, what is the planning process for those large-scale projects? And where do those dioramas go once their time in the spotlight is over?

Matt: Great questions. Generally speaking, we attempt to work with Catalyst Game Labs to see what products are going to be upcoming for the year’s Gen Con.

We usually start this discussion in—if we can—the January/February time frame. Unfortunately, everybody who’s been involved in a company knows that there are delays and priorities and all sorts of things interfere. Sometimes we don’t know till March, April, or some years, even May. And there are times where we’ve done everything we can and Catalyst has to try to align with having a diorama at the convention that’s going to match with a product release and then something delays the product.

So sometimes you end up with things that don’t quite jive. The one where the shipyards were represented comes to mind. I think that was supposed to align with the Clan Wolf invasion of Terra and that product did not come out that year.

There are times when there’s not a big product release planned, and so then we’ll have a discussion of what we would like to do. What would be the neatest-looking thing? This past year, that ended up being New Avalon; we want to put Kurita and Davion face-to-face on that board. Once that’s done, we start—if possible—having discussions about what the size and footprint are going to look like and what the focal point is going to be.

One year we did the fighting around the Kerensky Blood Chapel. So you’ve got this giant Blood Chapel that’s going to be the center point for everything. Usually, it’s one artist doing the terrain, that’s probably something like 60 percent to 75 percent of the time, and then we figure out units involved and we ask who’s interested in painting and who’s available.

Sometimes real life intervenes in this kind of thing. I sent an email earlier today to someone at Catalyst saying, “Hey, we’re still trying to figure out exactly how many miniatures per square foot,” because we’ve had one or two dioramas where we didn’t think we had enough miniatures, and we came out of New Avalon thinking that was a little crowded, particularly because you had some miniatures that had to get rotated every day. We didn’t have space for everybody’s stuff to be out there every day of the convention.

We definitely don’t want to do that. We want to give everybody’s stuff equal time to shine in the sun. Once that’s done, we try to figure out if there is anything special with miniatures releases or stuff of that nature, and then we get together a list of parts and pieces that we need. Generally, we were talking to Iron Wind about what our giant order is going to look like and what obscure stuff that’s in the archive that we’re going to need. You know, so and so wants to do the K variant and he’s going to need the sword of this thing you guys haven’t printed in five years, all this kind of fun stuff. And then everybody sits down and gets to work. 

We do have an international component to CamoSpecs, so we have to build in time for international shipping, then we arranged for one of our several artists in the Indianapolis area to be the recipient of everything and then we ship them everything. They put it together in their basement or garage, and I’m pretty sure they play Alpha Strike and do all sorts of things with these spectacular miniatures without telling us. Then they pack it up and take it to the convention.

Recently we’ve been in the Catalyst booth, which has been great. We’ve been really glad to get that kind of exposure and put something that pretty out for everybody to see what you can do with BattleTech if you want to put the time and effort into it.

After all’s said and done, generally speaking, we sell the miniatures off of the diorama. A lot of times that money’s going to things like our website hosting fees or miniatures that we need to purchase as a group or putting aside for website revamps. I’m trying to build up a fund to do that again. It’s all over the place where artists have sold to friends or family back home, but some of them will be available for sale right at the convention. And then some of them don’t sell at all and we’ll put them up on eBay afterwards. 

You asked about the board itself, and honestly, that varies from year to year. I can tell you that I’m about 20 feet away from the Misery board from 2017. Occasionally you’ll see a board get pulled back out and appear in some artist’s picture for a miniature that he’s just painted up. Most of them get sold to someone. 

The gentleman who purchased the Kerensky Blood Chapel used it in an Alpha Strike tournament in Atlanta some years back. I think it still occasionally gets used for that sort of thing. That always brings joy to my heart because I’m sitting there going, we’ve made this representation of BattleTech lore and different generations of players get to go hang out and just go look at what really talented artists have spun up. It just it adds that little extra oomph to your table to have that sort of thing in there. 

I would suspect there are a number of pieces that are on display elsewhere. Catalyst currently has The Black Cobras DropShip from maybe the first or second CamoSpecs Gen Con diorama that has the working lights and the sound effects in it. I actually helped them refit that thing a few years ago so that it could be displayed at conventions from time to time. 

So there are pieces and parts of the previous dioramas that are around and you’ll just randomly run into them at some BattleTech event somewhere. 

Sean: Well, I hope to see one eventually. Let’s move on to one of the latest product releases. Have you had a chance to use the new Mercenaries Paint Set? And what do you think of it? 

Matt: I have not had an opportunity to use it. I will tell you that as an artist, one of the hardest things for me is to find a range of paints that I don’t have to do a lot of mixing for the shades in between so that you can have those nice smooth color transitions.

And let me be very clear: you don’t have to have nice, smooth color transitions to paint stuff for BattleTech. You don’t have to paint stuff at all for BattleTech. You show up with bare metal minis and no one’s going to look at you funny.

I’m in Birmingham, Alabama and our local gaming group, and I love seeing them grow. Even if it’s only one miniature that they’ve put that extra level of care into. It’s so awesome to see it and appreciate it. 

But one of the things that I struggle with over the years is finding those shades of paint that match exactly what it is I’m looking for.

You’ll get some difference of opinion on stuff, but I love that there’s now this available standard. You pull your favorite shade of green off and you roll your Eridani Light Horse up in that shade, and somebody else goes, “I’ve got this guy from the Mercenaries Paint Scheme set and I think your green’s wrong.” No one’s going to do that. But I love that this is available and they cover the major factions so you don’t have to look at your Daka Daka paint chart for equivalents.

If the Lord wills and the creek don’t rise, they’ll keep this stuff in production and we won’t have to worry about the paint color being changed. I’m a Vallejo fan. I’m not a snob, just enjoy it. I have Reaper in some other things as well, but generally speaking, I have more of Vallejo than anything else.

I actually have two bottles of Khaki. They are very obviously not the same shade from being about three years apart. So that kind of stuff, it annoys me a little bit. I do paint enough to run out of paint in a bottle. If you managed to hold on to your favorite paint bottle for five or ten years and keep it going by adding Thinner to it and shaking it up and all that kind of good stuff: good on you. I don’t manage to stretch mine out that way.

I’ll also say it’s that kind of stuff being available that can really demonstrate to your fan base that you’re serious. We don’t just have books on DriveThru RPG. You’ve got a company out there that’s producing BattleTech-labeled stuff for us. And maybe one day BattleTech cereal! 

Sean: We can only hope.

Matt: Warhammer-’Os, I don’t know. 

Sean: Good enough branding for me. Speaking of Warhammer, I used to be one of those kids into Warhammer, but I eventually got out of it, and when I did, my painting skills went with it. What advice would you give to someone looking to come back to painting or looking to paint their first BattleTech minis?

Matt: Wow, such a potentially deep and nuanced question. Look, the main thing is you want to have fun. If you’re a guy who really enjoys painting and getting nuanced with it, you’re going to want to get yourself a primer of your choice. Some people love white because it makes your colors really pop. Some people love black because it’s more forgiving, particularly in the recesses. You don’t have to go find every little spot of white and cover it up with your base coat.

The rest of the CamoSpecs guys would beat me up if I didn’t say you’re going to need to thin your paints. Hint hint: if you find the right paint shades from the right manufacturers, you don’t have to do it! But I might have to censor that somehow in the interview transcript or I’ll get in trouble [ed. Whoopsie!].

I would decide—before you go buy anything—what your favorite faction or unit is. Start there so you don’t make—I don’t want to say a wasted investment, but you don’t make an unnecessary investment. Something you may not use for a while.

If you’re going to get into painting the Sword of Light, get yourself some reds and, and look at what some of the CamoSpecs guys or other talented artists out there have done. You can tell if they’re working up to a shade of orange. I know some guys that hate having the orange-shaded highlights; they want a lighter, almost pinkish red.

Some guys love Sword of Light which starts as the color of almost like a dark brick and then works up from there. Let that guide you in your friendly local gaming stores, which usually have an assortment of paints.

I stay away from the paint pots. I prefer the droppers because it gives me a lot more control. over what I put down. You can make your own wet palette. You don’t have to go buy one. I’ve got a P3 branded one that I’ve used for 20 years now. Generally speaking, the brushes that are available at your friendly local gaming store will usually do to get you started. If you decide that you want to move deeper into it, you’re going to start looking at things like sable fur and who’s outsourced their manufacturing and who hasn’t, and who’s got good quality control. Honestly, in the post-COVID area, it almost changes from year to year. 

So there’s a very deep rabbit hole, Sean, that I have been down. I did manage to claw myself back up to the surface eventually, but there are tons of great sites about this sort of thing. I don’t airbrush, but more than a few of the CamoSpecs guys use airbrushing at the very least for base coating stuff.

That’s a whole other area that I am not well equipped to advise people on, but I will say for people who will make that investment, it certainly raises the floor of what your ‘Mechs can look like pretty quickly.

You know Savage Coyote’s got kanji that’s on some tiny little portion of a ‘Mech beneath some mural that he’s done. That’s both skill and talent and years of practice to get to that point. But some of those fades and things that can be now done with an airbrush that just look spectacular on a tabletop… that’s a lower barrier of entry and skill than it used to be.

Sean: We’re going to come back to Savage Coyote in a minute, but first: what does the future hold for CamoSpecs? I know you’ve kind of already mentioned that there’s looking into redesigning the site, but what else does CamoSpecs have on its plate currently? 

Matt: Well, we’ve got a project coming in hopefully before the end of the year. Some of you guys that are the real librarians, the grognards of BattleTech, you’re going to open your tomes of history and find an older group of units that haven’t been fleshed out get that treatment soon. 

I suspect you’ll probably see a few more of those things. There is a limit to it. Actually, there’s a unit spreadsheet that we keep that has theoretically every unit that’s ever existed in BattleTech on it. It’s got notes on when they existed, what we know about them if anything, and as much as we’ve got in the canon lore. And look, it’s not going to be 100 percent complete. Someone’s always going to be able to pull out, “Look at Gen Con 2009, they made this free PDF and it had this unit in it,” and we’re like, “Oh crap, we missed one.” But the idea would be to get every single one of those covered. 

The reality is, do you need to know that both the 43rd and the 44th Benjamin Regulars had the same paint scheme? No, not really, but one of our goals is to get all the major factions and players through all the eras covered, and we’re not there yet. You’ve still got Clans that are missing from the site. You’ve got Clans that are missing from the lore, as far as paint schemes are concerned. 

We’ve teased a few things through the years. I still don’t really remember how I managed it, but I got to put together the Wolverine paint scheme years and years ago. Well, that doesn’t tell you what galaxy it is or anything about what would be our normal standard for CamoSpecs. It was just to give people a taste and put something on their favorite Clan Wolverine ‘Mech when all the Operation Klondike stuff was coming out. 

Obviously, we’d like to move to a refresh of the website again. We do know the lift won’t be as heavy this time because we do have a database on the backend that’s got all our work to date. And we did actually use pieces on the backend that to some extent would be compatible with future technology. I’m in IT; it’s always interesting to me to see the best-laid plans go awry.

Hopefully, I’m not talking out my rear end that we will be able to get that kind of stuff done. We obviously want to resume new memberships at some point in the—immediate is a strong word, but the not very distant future, so we can figure out what that looks like and start giving the community an avenue to membership in CamoSpecs again.

We’d taken way too long to do this; we added an Instagram account to our capabilities. Now you’re getting a steady stream of good-looking painted miniatures and canon schemes. Hopefully that’s going to encourage and inspire and provide people a reference to something that they haven’t seen before.

Sean: And now for the fun questions, since we always like to have a bit of fun with our guests at Sarna. The first comes from a Sarna reader: what is the deal with Savage Coyote? Is he a machine sent from the future? An alien with multiple tentacles? How does Savage Coyote work?

Matt: My mind is reeling with the possibilities of a way to label him and the knowledge that if I do, it will probably get stuck in people’s heads as reality forever. This is such a great opportunity. Thank you for allowing me to incorrectly label one of CamoSpecs’ biggest members. 

Now, listen, Savage Coyote is this insanely talented artist where you look at his stuff from a decade-plus ago and it still holds up. I think everyone knows Savage Coyote’s real name is Ross Hines. Steering beyond that, I’ll leave it up to Ross to provide his personal details. But I know that when I was looking to become a CamoSpecs member, his stuff was one of the guys you looked at and went, “Maybe one day I can paint like that.” So here I am over a decade plus later going, still going, “Maybe one day I can paint like that.”

Because the bar is just so high there. Particularly when he gets into some of the—I’ll say the Asian flavors of things. There’s stuff that he has put on miniatures over the years that I have spent more than a few minutes looking at going, how did he do that? In some cases, I reached out to him and he’s happy to share what he can. Some of it is just insane talent. 

So of those explanations that were offered, the alien one is the more likely of the two. I like to picture him as kind of like the older gentleman from the Kung Fu TV series that occasionally comes along and out of the blue, suddenly smacks you in the face with something.

Sean: We can make sure that’s written down for the ages. A good question here: what’s the strangest submission you’ve ever seen to CamoSpecs? Or the strangest things you’ve ever put on the site? 

Matt: Oh, well, the April’s Fool Brigade is probably going to take the list of strangest things.

There’s one that’s just a long piece of static grass on a base. I will say the Transformers-inspired Devastator is also a personal favorite that’s in there. I am a child of the eighties. I occasionally work in G. I. Joe or Transformers references where possible. I admire all the people who  have turned their ‘Mechs into Starscream or Soundwave or Optimus Prime, that kind of stuff.

You kind of wonder at some point if someone’s going to throw a Space Marine at us. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Sean: And last question: we’ve had a lot of redesigned ‘Mechs. We’re going to get the Dragon Fire soon, the Hellspawn and Gunsmith are coming up, but what ‘Mech do you really want to see redesigned so you can paint it?

Matt: Ooh man, they’ve gotten so many recently, and some of them I’ve already gotten to paint.

Look at the Marauder IIC redesign. I just absolutely loved painting that thing up. It’s just a beast on the tabletop and fun to paint too. But of the new ones that are coming out no, my mind wants to go for something really obscure and try and show how much lore I know and I gotta fight that sense of pride because that’s not what we really need here. 

I want to see someone turn a Yeoman into something usable. Does that work for you? I mean, look, I’m probably going to offend someone here; that thing’s ugly. When that came out in the technical readout, I just went, “What happened? How did we get here? What was the process that led to this walking box of missiles?” 

Sean: I think it’s just the natural evolution of a missile truck; it would just be a box of missiles with legs.

Matt: If that’s a branch of evolution, it is one that dead-ended on an island in the Indian Ocean and Dutch settlers accidentally wrote it out of existence. But I’m sorry, I really would like to see what some of the artists could do. Maybe this may tell you a little bit more about my personality than I want to, but I want to challenge them. Can you guys make this thing look good? 

And I’m sure they can, but I would love to know how they’re going to do it. Is that really the ‘Mech that needs to be done next? No. There are ones far better to redesign in between that have played bigger parts in lore, but that would be a fun one to see.

Sean: One of the good bad ‘Mechs out there. Alright! That’s everything I had. Was there anything else you wanted to talk about? Or any shoutouts you wanted to give? Now’s the time! 

Matt: I want to send out a shout-out to Papa Chicken. He’s been indispensable in CSO recently helping with a lot of organizational stuff on the backend.

All the CamoSpecs artists have just been great. I really, really thought that the work done on the New Avalon diorama—some of the individual pieces in particular—included some of the best ones that had been done. I’m always blown away by the stuff the guys are doing. 

I want to say thanks to the BattleTech community and the Sarna community in particular for staying engaged. I reference Sarna.net daily, and not once a day either. So when we’re going back through trying to figure out what unit was on what planet at what time, I know they can point me to the sourcebook that I need to go figure that out. That site’s nothing but handy for me. I’m glad you guys are doing the work that you guys are doing.

Sean: Thank you very much for the praise and thank you for continuing to put out beautiful ‘Mechs for people to reference while painting their own.

Matt: Happy to help. 

Thanks so much to Matt for speaking to about his work with CamoSpecs. Head on over to the CamoSpecs site for reference material on your next project, or head to their YouTube for how-to videos and guides. Or head to their Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram to see some really cool minis.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.