XV-88 Broadsides deployed…

This weekend, I finished up my latest Tau project, a unit of three Broadsides. Technically, the unit's not finished - I have a couple of shield drones that have the flat colors done and are getting ready to move into the inking and detail phase - but the battlesuits themselves are. These three are painted a bit differently from my standard suits. For one thing, I didn't use much Goblin Green on them. Instead, they're mostly done in Knarloc Green foundation paint, with just a few areas (heads, middle armor panel, thigh armor panels) done in Goblin Green for contrast. I did this to distinguish the Heavy Support suits from the Elite suits. Just as my Hammerheads have more Knarloc Green showing than my Devilfishes, the Broadsides are generally in a darker shade of green than their Crisis Suit counterparts.

One downside to this is that Knarloc Green, while being great for basecoating, is not a good color for minor cleanup work due to the thickness of the paint. It's easy to thin it too much, though, and make it runny and hard to control. As a compromise, I tried to find a standard paint for doing the little touch-ups, and settled on Vallejo Model Color Reflective Green. Preliminary tests on the palette looked good. However, when actually applied to the model over Knarloc Green, the Vallejo color was noticeably darker. Because of this, there are small areas here and there where the color doesn't match. I tried mixing in some Goblin Green, and that helped somewhat, but it's far from perfect.

To be honest, it's not my best paintjob. The lenses don't "pop" as much as I'd like, some of the highlighting work is messier than normal, and even the back, where I have blue shining through the heat sink vents on each suit, don't look as clean as I'd hoped. I imagine I could spend more time cleaning them up - and I might - but not right now. They're definitely done enough to play with. Modeling-wise, they're a bit below my preferred standard as well. There are a few sprue marks still visible on some pieces, and the railguns are slightly bent/bowed on at least one of the suits. Even the priming was a bit rougher than I'd prefer, as there were still a number of silver areas showing when I was done. Those were all covered with the appropriate base color paints, though.

They'll still look good from the tabletop, of course, and I may yet add some decals to them. I'm also happy with how the blue lining on the railguns turned out. It's a minor effect, but one that keeps them consistent with the Railheads I've put together. They may not be perfect, but they'll still look good alongside the rest of my army.