Warhammer 39,999

I met Rob from Warhammer 39,999 last Friday, and we got in a fun game in using the battle missions book. I learned quite a bit about Alaska, before getting thoroughly stomped by my Dark Angels. Rob schooled me using an army with funky old rules, a pts deficit, and with poor rules familiarity on both of our parts. I'll leave the battle report to him, since he has the play by play. Suffice to say, I had a great time, and look forward to a rematch in San Diego!

In other news, I'll need to post images of my Tau at some point. I have been painting gun drones by the bushelful, which is not particularly interesting, but does make the vehicles look much better. Next up is a small dark eldar force. Yes, I bit the bullet and added yet another army to my painting table. The new plastics were just too good to pass up.

Tau Artillery

I had painters block for a while, hence no updates, but fortunately it has passed. My Tau are progressing along now, with my first heavy guns painted. I really liked the way the grey pre-shading turned out on the suit, so I decided to paint in some highlight colors. I think the suits will be darker like this. Once I can't decide if I should paint up the 3 other devilfish chassis assembly line style, or if I should pause, finish off all of these pieces and then move on.

While I was traveling my HQ choice arrived, and I think a clean white battle suit with orange and red shading will really make her stand out! ;)

Washed and Weathered: Beat Up Devilfish

Here is a quick update to the devilfish. right before this step I hard lined the blue and orange areas and was really pleased with how the thing was looking. Then I tried shooting sepia through my air brush. That did not work out so well, so I had to resort to a brush to finish off adding the wash. Post wash it was two quick spongings and voila!

I have the forge world tau transfers, so I think I will try to get them on tonight. The gun drones and turret will be a combination of red and orange, much like my red fire warriors a few posts ago.

I got my mojo back, and painted up two piranhas with my base color scheme since I first posted this. I went with a red body and green wings for these guys. I also finished off the devilfish by adding the turret and hatch thing.

Tau Devilfish Airbrush Only

I took the nozzle off of my airbrush today and experimented with finely controlled airbrushing. I have a lot of tau tanks to paint, and I wanted to get the base colors laid down quickly so I could focus on weathering, transfers, and all the little grit and grime that I think will make these tanks shine. This tank goes with my turquoise squad. My next devilfish will have the turquoise and the rust red swapped. I think the devilfish will help to tie the army color together even though they are not going to be painted identically.

It was a pretty good experiment. The lines are nowhere near as crisp as painting by brush, but I kind of dig the soft effect. I think the next step is to put some shading on the thing, and then add the transfers. Post transfers come chipping, followed by gryphon sepia wash.

5 Devilfish, 2 Piranha, 5 Battle Suits

My plan was to take this long holiday weekend and paint up all of my tau tanks. The goals was to push my tau force over the minimum pts limit so I could play a game.

I managed to build all of the kits, trim all of the flash, and prime the devilfish and piranha chassis, but it is 7:00 PM now and I am beat. So my new more managable goal is to paint up at least one of the vehicles tomorrow. A speed painting freak I am, but I bit off much more than I could chew this time around. I managed to make my hobby as fun as installing kitchen cabinets!

-john

More Painting With Washes...and a Photo Booth

I painted this tank commander a while back as a potential color scheme for my Death Korps of Krieg army. I think I am going to make my own washes for the army instead of using sepia. The miniature was fun to paint though, and will probably find service in some tank from my cadian force.

I used my new light box to take the photos. I think the problem is that I was lacking a good source of frontal light.

Tau Color Scheme Photos Using a Light Box

I ordered a light box setup from Amazon a while back and decided to give it a spin today. For my tau I've decided to paint them in three different color schemes, blue, red, and black. The blue and the red squads have orange accents, while the black squad has purple and blue accents. I am considering a green and orange color scheme for my pathfinders. I love the way the two squads. are starting to look together, especially the gun drones. My goal with Tau was to create a super easy to paint set of recipes that I could use to quickly paint up and weather a force. You might have noticed that my tau are beat up. These are dirty tau, who have been on campaign for a long time, not the super clean tau normally seen. I hope my heavy handed weathering is serving to unify the the force.

FW Krieg Tank Bits on New LR Kit

I've been buying DKOK stuff for a while now, and am only now getting started building it. My first task was to build the single LR chassis that will be part of my 1500 pt force. I am going mainly with centaurs, but want one LR. The old FW kits do not fit on the new model without some work. The good news is that it is not particularly difficult. The engine filter requires a portion of the back engine cover to be sawed off. The trench rails simply do not fit. It turns out the FW full kit has a resin engine area. The tank gunner works, just not with the cool FW hatch because the new LR kit has the turret modeled on. I am luke warm about losing the more interesting turret, since it has more detail, and helps make the tank look more interesting. In any case, I am happy I bought the upgrades. I think they add a lot of character to the tank.

My plan is to run this as a regular old LR with battle cannon, hull las cannon, and bolter sponsons. It will support a static line of 2 teams of 3 heavy stubbers. Grenadier squads in centaurs, hq in centaurs, and quartermaster in centaurs work as my ultra fast open topped gun platforms. A single squad of engineers and death riders bulks out the army. Most of the army is made up of AP3 weapons, so it should be pretty fun to play SM. The centaurs have a built in gun mount so the heavy weapon from the squads embarked can fire. That gives me 2 heavy stubbers per centaur.