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.

260: Mobile Suit Gundam - Assemble

A ways back in July, while in Japan, I bought a model of a Gundam, and finally I can show you the build.  Kind of apt with the current re-launch of the Tau and all.

Firstly, despite everyone touting GW as the best model builders in the world etc. etc., they've definitely got a thing or two to learn from BanDai, the kit is staggering in its design and complexity.
Take a look at the sprue below.  You may notice that the plastic has two tones of grey, that's because they are able to cast the sprue in at least two stages to produce pieces that are already articulated, with extremely complex joints and sliding parts, some actually cast within other parts to move like pistons.

The whole kit is press-fit, I didn't need a drop of glue, and the only time I used any tools was to remove the parts from the sprue, clean the odd mould line (far, far neater casting that GW), and to cut a few pieces of piping to length that were inserted into joints to represent hydraulics.

The kit was essentially two kits in one.  The first was the fully articulated skeleton of the model that you can see below.  Every joint was articulated with a very wide range of motion.  In fact, as I continued to build the model I discovered more and more points of flexure and the number of poses that you could build is mind-blowing.

Once the skeleton is built, you add the armour panels to make up the final model.  The different parts are cast in their appropriate colours so you don't even need to paint, and as before, every single piece is press-fit, highly secure, and there are individual pieces for every sub-part of the skeleton so none of the articulation is lost with the build.

The final result is absolutely brilliant, with multiple hands that can be swapped to allow different weapons to be gripped, all sorts of moving parts, and so much possibility.

Best of all, since returning, I've discovered that you can buy them on Amazon and other online retailers, so this guy might just be getting a friend sometime in the future.

Cheers
Andrew

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!

229: Riptide under Construction

I really should have posted about this guy earlier as I've been working on him for a while now, but for whatever reason I've always forgotten to take a picture, so here he is, almost finished and ready for painting.  It's not entirely evident from the picture, but he's pinned and magnetised to his base, which uses spare parts from my Storm Raven.  The toothpicks are there to build up tracks either side of the main vent part to make it look like its crashed and skidded along the ground.  Once its covered in basing material and built up, I'm hoping it'll give a nice effect.

You may also be able to see the disc of a magnet on the underside of one of the arms, I've placed them in the same place on the other arm, as well as in a place so that the shield/sword thing can be magnetised between the two arms depending on how I feel he should be armed.  The arms will be glued to the body though in a fixed pose.

You can just about make out the squad of Firewarriors behind him that'll form the minimum Troops and HQ component for this allied detachment.  Looking forward to getting these guys painted up with a quick and lightly coloured scheme so I can test them out on the board.

More updates on this one should be coming soon.

 - Andrew

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

Tau WIP

So over the weekend I found an hour here and there to get in some more cleaning up of my tau and a little painting, I've now got a shas'eil o'neil or whatever the Tau call the commanders of their squads (he's the one with the bare head, I'm stuck in that old-school marine groove). To tie him into the whole unit, but also to distinguish him (apart from the head thing, as I may give in and give another couple bare heads) I've added a bit more yellow to his outfit to set him apart, especially in his thigh plates and the large shoulder pad, I'm sure it'll look better when he is surrounded by his troops. I've also got one guy I'm modelling to look like a spotter for the squad (he's crouched down with the scanner), and a couple of guys with rifles:

You'll probably be able to see the modelling I did on the spotter model, I used the grenade arm from one of the sprues and carved away the grenade to get something resembling and outstretched finger, the commander model had a little alteration to the left wrist so that I could get him carrying his gun as he throws his grenade.

On another note, for those of you in the UK, it must be gutting if you've just made any large purchases as the site has just dropped all its prices thanks to the UK government reducing VAT by 2.5%, my comiserations to you all.

First new models

...re-posted from old posts I lost:

So I ended up back in the habit after one weekend in March when on a whim, I bought a copy of White Dwarf, it was the issue for the new release of 40k and I was certainly surprised by how much things have changed. I bought a couple more issues and soon realised that I wanted to get back into the hobby, had a look through the new armies and decided that I'd have a go with the Tau. I also got the two free plastics with the AoBR episode, and so it would be rude not to start up the Space Wolves again. Here are the first models that I've been painting, I haven't quite finished them, they still need a bit of detail work but at the moment all my old paints are still in storage so I'm having to make do with only 7 colours.

I'm aiming for a darker than average look to the space wolves that I intend to paint. I've come up with a bit of fluff for them regarding their wolf-lord, they will either be a partially lost company, or a successor chapter, I'm not sure, but their general theme has white and black counterpoints to the blue, with hands being black (more on that later).

The Tau colour scheme comes from that weekend when I bought that issue of White Dwarf that started all this, I also went to see Iron Man that weekend, and loved it. Well I'm sure you can now see where the inspiration came for their colour scheme. I've got two more that are in the process of painting, I'll try and photo them and get them online asap.

As to the Necrons listed in the header, well here's hoping that Christmas can result in me having enough money to get the battleforce, and perhaps a lord, I want to go with them as they'll be nice and quick to paint and it'll allow me to get back to playing the game soon.