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.

261: Recovering from varnish frosting

I found a way to fix frosted models!

1. put the pieces in an electric fan oven at set to 50 degrees C (120F) to pre-warm them. 
2. oven started cold, and I only left them in for 10 minutes throughout the process I am describing. I would not do this with resin or thin plastic bits (swords etc).
3. I took each piece out, sprayed it, and put it back in again.

(Gas oven would be a bad idea: water is a combustion product, so they are intrinsically more humid)

The longer version.

 I had sprayed the guns for my Crimson Death (which are magnetised) with dullcote a while back. It was cold and humid, and I got the dreaded frosting. This was a bit of a downer, and it has taken a while for me to get the drive back to tackle the job.

The guns are mostly black with green gems. I repainted over the black, as it was quick (I had just painted black and edge highlighted), and the frosting stood out over the black worse than the green. My gems have a 5 step highlighting process that I could not be bothered to do again. The black came out looking shiny in places and matte in others, so really needed matte varnish again.

Warming and spraying again worked well. It made the black matte, and on the gems that I had not repainted, it actually removed the frosting. I can only assume the solvent in the dullcote re-dissolved the frosted layer and this time dried properly because is was warm and the humidity was low. I imagine that if the original frosted layer had been too thick, this would have been less successful. These gems were frosted, and this is them after the fix.  

The formation.