After looking at my last post and noticing some areas of the Broadsides that needed clean-up, I spent tonight doing small touch-ups. Mostly, this involved breaking out the foundation paints and recoating all the areas that didn’t quite match. I even found a few spots on the SMS arms that, despite priming and painting, still had small spots of bare metal showing through. The bases got some cleanup as well, with a liberal application of Gryphonne Sepia wash followed by some drybrushing with Vallejo Cobra Leather. With them finally looking a bit sharper, I decided to break out the portable studio and snap a good picture of them.

I also managed to finish up the shield drones that go with the team leader:

Somehow, I managed to have a minor catastrophe with one of the suits while I was working. As I was doing my touch-up work, one of the railguns started getting a bit… wiggly. I worked the gun back and forth to see what the damage was, and the entire gun came loose from the body. My biggest fear was that the tab at the bottom of the gun had broken loose, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. The glue just gave up. Thankfully, getting the gun reglued was just a matter of cleaning up the area with my hobby knife and regluing it.

Now that these are complete (minus any decals I might apply), it’s onto my third Hammerhead next, as it’s already primed and basecoated, along with its Ion Cannon turret. After that, there’s a couple of Devilfish that need some basecoating. I’ve also been giving my Kroot a closer look. I might not use them much, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be painted!

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.

Last night I managed to get about three hours of painting in, which gave me the time to do the detail work and basing on my second team of Fireknife suits. There may be one or two spots of touch-up to do, but they’re pretty much done and ready for the tabletop. Next up on the list is my Broadside team, which has the basecoating done and is ready for cleanup and detail painting. After that, I have a pair of Devilfish that are primed and ready for basecoating. It’ll be time to break out the spray gun again!

Adding up everything I have painted, not counting upgrades that aren’t modeled on the minis (like Team Leader upgrades and vehicle upgrades for which there are no bits), I’m finally up to 1,689 points worth of painted Tau. When I finish my Broadsides, that’ll push me to just over 1,950, and the Devilfishes will take me over the 2000-point mark. It’s been a long, slow slog – I started painting my Tau in the early months of 2007 – but three years later, I can finally field an entirely painted Tau force. I’m hoping to pick up the pace so that the rest of my Tau, and my two Chaos Marine armies, won’t take another three years finish.

Here’s a cellphone photo of last night’s painting progress. I did some final touch-up on the basecoat to take care of some spots where my coverage was a bit thin, and then it was on to cleanup and inking. I also touched up the accent colors, as my paint was a little too thin last time. In the past, I’ve mixed up a darker shade of Goblin Green by adding a touch of black (usually about 6:1 green to black), but this time I decided to go with a pre-mixed color: Vallejo Model Color’s Reflective Green. The results are good, and it’s close enough to Knarloc Green that I think I can use it as a touch-up color on my Broadsides as well.

When it came to inking, though, I had a bit of a dilemma – both my micron pens were drying out. In the past, I’ve used micron pens for doing all my armor lining, and I’ve been pretty pleased with how my minis turn out. However, they’re sometimes hard to find, and the pen point is very delicate. Instead of fretting about finding replacements, I decided to try something new. One of the reasons I’d switched to micron pens was because I’d had poor luck with paint washes in the past, but that was before GW released their line of washes, so I decided to give washes another try.

With a pot of Badab Black, and a fine brush (I was using an Army Painter Hobby: Precise Detail brush, which is about a 10/0, I believe), I started washing the armor lines. The process and the results were nearly identical to using the micron pen, other than having to clean and reload my brush from time to time. Load brush, dab off excess, draw into line, wipe away overwash with thumb (or lightly with the corner of a paper towel, in tight spots), repeat. In fact, the coverage was a bit better than with the pen. With a micron pen, you only get ink precisely where the tip is, so if you want to get the walls of the groove you sometimes have to wiggle the pen a bit. The wash fills the groove and provides much smoother coverage.

There is a caveat to using the wash, though, and it has to do with your priming quality. If you’ve got a spot with rough priming, when you try to wipe off the overwash, it’ll instead sink into the pits of the primed surface. I discovered this on a couple of spots on my Crisis Suits where high humidity left me with a less-than-ideal priming job. When I wiped away the excess, I ended up shading the entire antenna that I’d been inking. Fortunately, a little Goblin Green on the same fine brush allowed me to touch up the affected areas. On smoothly primed portions of the mini, though, there was no muss, no fuss.

I still like my micron pens, and I’ll still use them for drawing on fine details, but I think wash is the way to go from now on for armor gaps. It’s cheaper, is just as easy to work with, and delivers results that are just as good, if not better.

Just a quick cellphone photo of my workspace right now. I’ve been working on getting paint on the Fireknives and Broadsides I recently assembled and primed. So far, so good. I’ve got the base color down on them all, and I’m starting to do the flats on some of the details, like rank markings and accent colors. The Fireknives are being painted in my standard Goblin Green, and I’m carrying over the markings from my other team of Fireknives to keep them consistent. Meanwhile, I’m going with a darker base on the Broadsides. I’m using Knarloc Green to give them a darker color, which will let me use Goblin Green as the accent color to bring them in line with the rest of my army.

A couple things I’m noting as I keep working:

1. I am not a fast painter. In three hours, I did the base coat on two Broadsides, and did the accent colors on the Fireknives. I’m not meticulous; there’s still several spots where I’m going to need to do cleanup. I’m just… a bit slow, I suppose.
2. I hate painting red. Even with Mechrite Red, a Citadel Foundation paint, I have to put down two to three layers to get anything remotely resembling a strong red. Note that I didn’t say “solid coat”. Even painting Mechrite Red on top of Knarloc Green (such as on the markings on my Broadside team leader), two coats still leaves me with patchy, streaky color. I wonder if this is why I haven’t gone back to my Berserkers recently.

Once I get these two teams finished up, I’m going to try to finish up the rest of the Tau I have primed, which includes:

• 12 Kroot
• 3 Stealth Suits (and 1 Marker Drone)
• 2 Devilfish (probably next on the list)
• 1 Sky Ray
• 1 Ion Cannon for a Hammerhead (not a separate mini, technically, but big enough to be one.)
• 8 Fire Warriors

If I can get this painted by year’s end, they’ll earn me (along with the Fireknives and Broadsides) another 68 painting points. Along with the 22 I already have, that’ll put me just 10 points away from my yearly goal. Hopefully, I’m not too slow to get it done!

EDIT: I just realized this is my 100th post on this blog. Hooray!

I finally made some noticeable progress on my Berzerkers tonight, as evidenced by the picture above. First of all, I’ve experimented with how much I was thinning my Mechrite Red, and I think I’ve found just the right balance to let me get a good coating in just one or two passes. I also got to work on finishing up my first Berzerker and getting his color balance just right. I was worried that the Badab Black wash had darkened the mini too much, but after building the color back up I got just the effect I wanted. My process was:

1. Put down a layer of Red Gore, making sure to leave some of the washed edges showing for contrast.
2. Then, put down a 50/50 blend of Red Gore and Blood Red, although not quite as broadly.
3. Highlight with Blazing Orange.

I’m still working on getting my highlighting properly thinned; I think it was just a bit heavier than I would have liked in this case. Still, for my first attempt, I’m pretty pleased. I’m also happy with how the brass turned out. Highlighting the Dwarf Bronze with Shining Gold gave me just the effect I was looking for: something not as bright as gold, but that had a similar look from the right angles. After that was done, I dotted the eyes with Scorpion Green (or the Vallejo equivalent, Scorpy Green), and I ended up with what you see above.

There are still a few details left, like the hoses on the backpack and some cleanup on the bolt pistol, and I need to paint the base. Other than that, though, I’m pretty much done with this one. Now that I have my Mechrite Red technique figured out, I can get the other three (I tested on a fourth) basecoated and get this unit cranked out in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve been working on each of the four Berzerkers one at a time, and each one’s in a different stage. One just has Mechrite Red, one has some Boltgun Metal details, one has the metal details and some Bestial Brown where I’ll be laying down Dwarf Bronze, and the final one has been bronzed, followed by a wash in Badab Black. Speaking of the Bronze, I’m still unsure of how it’ll look for my brass, but I’m withholding final judgment until I start getting some Shining Gold highlights onto it. I’ll try to get some pictures soon, both of my Tau and of my Chaos Marines, as I’ve finally resolved my lighting issue. I recently picked up this studio-in-a-box kit from Amazon (for about $20 less than it’s currently priced at), and I’ll be trying it out either tonight or tomorrow. I’m very excited to see what a difference it makes.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and during a little bit of downtime between holiday outings, I figured it would be proper to put down some red paint onto something. Fortunately, I had some Khorne Berzerkers primed and ready to go, so today kicks off the start of my second army painting project. I’m breaking the army down into small, manageable chunks, rather than trying to paint whole squads in one pass; I’ve done that before with units of a dozen Fire Warriors, and it nearly burned me out. For Berzerkers, since I run them in squads of 8, doing half-squads at a time seemed perfect.

Here, I have three normal Berzerkers, and a Skull Champion (he’s the chap with the power fist). They’ve been primed in Duplicolor Black primer – a fantastic primer, by the way, and reasonably priced – and a basecoat of Mechrite Red Foundation Paint has been applied. I’m going for an inside-to-outside paint job, so I’m going to get the base armor painted first before I start painting the brass details. Sadly, GW no longer has Brazen Brass available, but I think a combination of Dwarf Bronze with Shining Gold highlights should give me a similar effect.

It’s been a busy couple of painting days, but I managed to complete my Piranhas in time for the tournament! I managed to snap a couple of quick pictures this afternoon of the finished product. I still might throw some decals onto them later (although not before Saturday), but for now, I consider them done as far as painting goes.

This was a fun pair of vehicles to paint thanks to the open-top construction. Once upon a time, I was intimidated by the idea of painting the cockpit, but when it actually came down to it I just decided to enjoy myself and have fun painting sensors and buttons.

Besides these two (and their drones), I also managed to finish up two shield drones and four burst cannons (for my Hammerheads). It was a frantic pair of painting sessions, but I’m really happy with the results. I’m especially amazed at getting the drones/cannons done; they were just last-minute additions to the army, and I was able to knock out everything in time. I’ll still have four models unprimed at the tournament, but everything else will be completely painted.

Painting points: 10 (for the Piranhas), and 6 (for the drones and guns – they’re equivalent to infantry, size-wise). 16 for this project, and 22 for the year. I’m off to a great start!

A quick cellphone picture of last night’s painting accomplishment. The lighting isn’t the best, so you can’t quite make out the edge highlighting on the suits. I’ll break out the real camera before the tournament and get pictures of the entire army.

Tonight, it’s all about Piranhas and drones.

EDIT: 6 painting points for the year.