263: Firewarriors

(No, I'm not posting on Julafton, this just happens to be scheduled for today,

Merry Christmas, God Jul, and assorted Winter Solstice greetings to you all.)

In the time its taken me to change the paintscheme on these guys, the Tau have had 2 new codexes, its a testament (if you want) to the speed of the current GW release cycle, or more likely, how slow my painting is these days.

A simple white paintscheme with blue accents.  The guy below is meant to be a Cadre Fireblade stand in or similar, hence using a lot more blue in his scheme.

262: Tomb Blades - the obligatory Decurion choice ;)

Not the most groundbreaking post, but here's the tomb blades I started about 6 months ago when the new Necron codex came out.  They are a pain to build, extremely intricate with lots of fiddly little bits that have to be put together in a very precise order.  They do paint up nice and quickly and easily, and I've found them to be surprisingly useful on the tabletop as well, a nuisance unit and good for grabbing objectives either late in the game, or as you pull the cards when playing Maelstrom.

Standard paintscheme as with all my Necrons, and as ever, I've magnetised the weapons so if I want to mix up the options.

230: Tau paint scheme

I've managed to snatch the odd half-hour here and there recently, and as well as finishing building my Riptide, I also sat down last night and painted up two Tau Firewarriors to test out my colour scheme.  I'll go through it step by step here so that its always there as a reference should I need it in the future.

Base coat is Fortress Grey, applied in two thin coats to get a good smooth coverage.

Next I block in colours.  Codex Grey for the cloth of their fatigues, Boltgun Metal for parts that I think should be metallic, and Ultramarines blue for armour plates that I want to be blue to give some colour to the scheme.

Next up is an all over wash with my own recipe "Soft Body Black" wash.  It consists of equal parts Badab Black wash and Water (distilled if you have it (I don't), or tap water that has sat for a day or two), and the 1/10th of that volume of washing-up liquid.  The washing-up liquid helps to reduce the surface tension of the water so that the wash flows more easily, its a poor mans version of Flow-Aid or Lahmian Medium.  Be careful not to shake it too much, or be too vigorous applying it as otherwise it'll froth up ruining the finish.

Cover most of the armour plates with a 50:50 mix of Fortress Grey and Skull White, this is just below white to allow for a final level highlight.

Final highlights, Skull White and Enchanted Blue edge highlighting of all the armour plates.  Not pictured here is also an edge highlight of the metallic areas with Mithril Silver.

I used a sponge technique to apply some battle damage with Boltgun Metal

I used the same Calthan Brown and Yellow as my Marines to paint the bases.  At the same time as painting the bases, I use a very watered down Calthan Brown to apply a little weathering to the lower parts of the models, and then when drybrushing the Yellow, I deliberately get it on their lower legs to make it seem as if they are muddy and dusty (oops, took the photo before that stage, but I'm sure you can imagine it).

That's my first painting points of 2014, and its only 2 weeks old!

208: Squad 5 complete at last

Much more of a record keeping post today, just a picture of the finally finished squad 5, the 3rd 5-man squad completed for One Force.  These guys took part in the defence of Hive Okess as reported last week, dropping in towards the end of the battle to draw off some of the Tyranids letting my commander get to the Hive Tyrant and luckily slay him in single combat.

One thing that game taught me was these squads aren't the most effective in small numbers, so I'll be working to get another 5 painted as soon as possible so that I can start running two squads of 10, rather than 3 of 5 as I am at the moment.

5 painting points!

201: Throne of Skulls

This weekend I'm off to Throne of Skulls at Warhammer World.  This'll be my first Games Workshop run tournament, so it'll be a new experience if nothing else.  I've read all the hype and hate that goes along with this but I'm going to try and keep as open a mind as possible and just enjoy it for what it seems to be, an excuse to play 5 games over 2 days.

One Force Squad II: 5 complete

Finally, after faffing around for far too long I managed to get around to completing these guys.  Its all those last little things that I just can never bring myself to do.  Anyway, here they are:

All ready to go!

Blog Wars 4: the painting project

Of course my trip to Blog Wars required me to complete the painting of a lot of my Necrons that were almost but not quite finished.  This is what I managed to get painted:

Necron Overlord / Trazyn the Infinite

2 painting points

One Force commander

I'm a little late with this post as I'm currently away with work, but have managed to get some time to finish things off and get this uploaded.

I'm currently in the finishing stages of painting the commander for One Force so that I can start taking them as an allied detachment (using C:BA) in games.  It's going to be fantastic to start getting these guys onto the tabletop.

TFP: Badab Project competition (4) - Complete

Here he is, finished and ready for the judging and the auction.  Lots more images of him below, including an attempt at a rotating gallery (courtesy of this code supplied by Dezartfox).

EDIT:  You can now vote in the competition HERE.

I've really enjoyed painting this guy, taking some time to lavish attention onto a single miniature and try to experiment with some newer methods for achieving a desired result.  Getting the black right took a couple of goes before I felt satisfied, and I still think that I could perhaps improve it ultimately.

Verminous Tide - more Clanrats

Its been a while since I posted anything for my Skaven, mostly because I haven't done too much for them.  I have played my first ever Warhammer game, a loss against the new Empire, but the glaring hole in my army was the lack of numbers.  So, I've painted up my second IoB set of clanrats as you can see here, and also purchased nearly 50 more clanrats to bolster the numbers.  They are all in bits at the moment though, so they'll be a while coming.

One Force Terminators Completed

You can see the stages I've gone through with these guys here, here and here.  Its taken a while, and I've had to completely re-work the painting method for the new paints, but I'm really happy with how they've ended up.  I've also tried battle damage and weathering on these guys for the first time in my painting with mixed success.

click to embiggen

I'd really appreciate any comments anyone has, especially criticism and constructive feedback in case there are things you think can be improved, and how I might go about it.  You can see some closer shots in the last in progress post here.

Cheers - Andy

Edit:  forgot, this means I've now added 10 painting points for this year.  You can see my running total on the right >

Updated One Force paint-scheme & new paints review

Here's my first guess at how to achieve my One Force look with the new paint range.  As I haven't really started the force, and had only bought 2 pots of paints for them, I'm just going to accept the loss of the old scheme, and start from scratch.  As the local GW didn't have a full selection of the new paints to trial, I just had to spend a long time comparing the actual new paints through their pots to try and work out the combinations I needed.  I've also changed my style slightly, shading a lighter basecoat rather than layering a lighter colour over a dark base to try and speed up the process.  Comments on the paints at the bottom.

Castellan Green - basecoat, this is a perfect colour for the overall colour-scheme, very glad for this release

2012 New Years Resolutions

So here are my resolutions for the upcoming year.  I'm trying not to be too ambitious in setting these so that I actually have a chance of achieving some of them, but as with the best laid plans and all that...

• Post once per week minimum - don't post when I write, schedule posts to come up each Wednesday, only allowed to move forward if already have posts to fill in at least the next 4 weeks.
• Painting Points - start keeping track of how much I've painted, will also review the previous year (maybe 2) for comparison (see below).
• Space Wolf Achievements - see how many of these I collect in gaming.
• Attend Blog Wars and at least one other tournament.
• No more purchases until my remaining Necrons (Wraiths, Spyders, Destroyers) and Skaven (IoB boxset, Stormvermin, Bell) have been painted and I have sold my spares (Land Raider, Drop Pods, Valkyrie etc.).