If you are unfamiliar with Heavy Gear Blitz from Canadian developer Dream Pod 9, you are missing out on a hidden gem!

The Heavy Gear universe is a rich sci-fi setting with decades of lore, media, and games; spanning tabletop RPGs, miniature war games, video games, and even a television show.

Focused on combined arms combat with an anime inspired art style, the lore of Heavy Gear focuses on the wars fought over a rediscovered colony world of Earth, Terra Nova.

While Heavy Gear Blitz features combined arms gameplay, the focus is definitely on the mecha (mostly called “Gears” in-universe). Terra Nova is a desert world and the militaries of the various factions developed Gears to be a combat vehicle that could operate in the treacherous terrain of the planet.

Well, last year I finally started painting my NuCoal minis that were sitting in my pile of shame for way too long. I recorded two live streams replicating the paint scheme from the above photo on my YouTube channel.

And much to my surprise, my streams were featured in Dream Pod 9’s content creator spotlight!

This was a huge honor for me!

My first exposure to Heavy Gear was with the Heavy Gear PC game released way back in 1997. The game was bundled in with my family’s first PC, and I was immediately hooked. Since then, I have consumed all of the old RPG source manual and harassed friends for years to give the miniature game a shot. And you should give it a shot too!

As a relatively small (but growing!) content creator, I could have never in a million years imagined that Dream Pod 9 would have seen my work, let alone share it with their entire community. So, a massive thank you to Dream Pod 9 for creating a wonderful sandbox for me to play in and sharing my work.

If you are interested in seeing how I painted the Gears in the above gallery, you can check out the two streams below. Even if you don’t play Heavy Gear (you should), the techniques I used would be helpful for other mecha miniatures like Battletech.

*Fair warning, these are long unedited streams. While you get to see the whole painting process from start to finish, you are probably going to need to watch it in chunks or skip around.

Part 1:

Part 2:

At some point in the future, as I still have way too many Gears to paint, I will probably either make a dedicated painting post to consolidate all of this information into a quickly readable format or a make a shorter video.