All shaded and ready for yellow

So I'd hoped to do a step by step on painting the Tau, but I got a little carried away and painted more than one stage. Since the last update, I've added grey to the soft armour parts, and then I did two black washes to shade the armour and cloth.

I don't have proper washes so I've had to make my own up. Nothing more than mixing a heck of a lot of water in with a little bit of black paint. The consistency I aimed for was not much different from the water I clean my brushes with, that thin. I also added a decent sized blob of washing up liquid to try to help it run. The first time I tried without and it almost avoided the gaps in the armour, with the washing liquid it was better but still not perfect. I imagine that a wash would flow into the gaps a bit better, here's hoping when I get to try them out.

Next stages are to paint on the yellow regions of the armour, finish glueing the arms and etc on to complete the assembly, and then the highlighting and basing.

This is far and away the quickest I've got a unit painted up (even just to this stage), and hopefully the standard won't be too poor once they are finished.

I've popped up plenty of pics for record. The photography isn't the best, I don't have a place to photograph, or more than one lamp, so the lighting's poor and the camera struggles to focus.

There probably won't be many more posts for a while as I have a move at the end of the week back to the UK and I have to pack my whole flat up this week in between work. It could easily be a month or more before I get to sit down again with these or other models. I'll keep following all the blogs, so keep up the good work.

Cheers, bG

Progress of sorts

Hi everyone

So I haven't really had a chance to do anything for the last week, in fact, my Tau have been in the cupboard for the last week as I've needed to table. However, I got some time tonight, so sat down with them and have managed to get the main armour painted on 3 more of the fire-warriors. I'm doing my best to speed up my painting which has always been painfully slow so tonight I wasn't particularly careful how I painted as long as I was getting the coverage I needed, I can alway tidy things up later.

I've also had an idea how to do the other parts. I'm going to try painting the soft material parts in a grey before giving the whole lot a black wash to add depth, and then highlight. I'm going to wait till I've got them all with the armour painted first though, try and keep an even look and make the process more batch like.

More soon hopefully

Cheers, bG

I hate cleaning and assembly

I really hate cleaning and assembling my models, especially the cleaning, and it always takes me forever!

About the only good part of it is being able to convert models to give them some individuality. Its certainly easy with the new plastic kits as they are so poseable to begin with. Below is the first unit I've put all together since getting back into things, my tau. Most of them are pretty much just as they come, in differing poses, but for some of them I just had to do some further conversion work. I don't have any green stuff so I've had to do all conversions simply with the knife and trimming things to fit.

Top is the full squad, middle are the models from the left hand side of the squad, and bottom are those from the right. From left to right, models 1-12 (excluding the drone) the ones I'd draw notice to are:

1: I had to pretty much remove all the fingers, chop them up into little bits, and reconstruct the hand to show it pointing.

2: My test model, the first one I put together and experimented on the colour scheme with

3: My squad leader, as a traditionalist marine player, he is the one without a helmet

5: The spotter. He is using the scanner, and indicating where to direct fire. I made the pointing hand by carving the grenade out of one of the stock arms. He will have a rifle attached to his backpack, although I will do this after the first stages of painting so I can access some of the details.

7: Standing on a falling beam, and resting his hand on his rifle, a pretty easy conversion.

11: He is reaching for a grenade on his belt. I've set this guy forward on his base as I plan to add a partial wall or other obstacle behind him to suggest he is preparing to round a piece of cover.


Sorry for the long post, its partly for me to keep track of what I have been doing. I've also tried to re-enable Disqus on the blog for comments, if anyone cares to post a comment and it doesn't work, I'll stick my email in my profile for a while, if you can email me I'll try and fix things.

Cheers for dropping by
bG

It's all change

So it seems that Ron of +++From the Warp+++ fame and now to be found at Standard Template Construct has trumped us all in the New Years Resolution stakes. It also seems as if as a result, Peter from Aspect Portal has got a resolution he wasn't entirely expecting.

Firstly, to Ron, thank you, and I'm glad that you will be sticking around. I think what you created in the FtW blogger group is a brilliant contribution to the community, a brilliant idea, and we are better off for it. I was pretty new to it, but look forward to continuing to contribute when I can.

Peter, thank you for taking up the reins, it can't be an easy thing to volunteer yourself for, and as I said in emails, if you need any help, I'll do what I can.

In other, more personnel news, this month I may have a bit more time to paint and model so there is a chance that the first unit of fire-warriors may get completed before I move back to the UK.

Once back in the UK, I can get cracking on my New Year resolutions, first up will be my kick ass Wolves. I should be able to get hold of my unpainted Blood Claws, I have an old Bjorn that I'm going to paint up, and perhaps a few other bits and pieces and I'll see where I go from there.