WIP - Preshading + magnetic Devilfish

Welcome to another Work in Progress Report for my Tau army.  Now before you judge my pre-shading work, lets all remember that airbrushes are tricky things to master ok?...

WIP - Hammerheads, FireWarriors and army list

Some tangible progress on the Tau army I'm putting together... Both Hammerheads have received the first coat of primer! I've also taken a step forward with the highlighting of the Fire warrior squads and finalised(ish) the army list.

WIP - Magnetised Tau Battlesuit + video

Hi guys, I've been exploring the modelling possibilities of  magnets a lot lately and I thought I'd share where I'm up to with one of my Tau XV8 Battlesuit miniatures. Video and more info after the jump...

Creating the Tau Battleforce - Step by step Part 4

Welcome to the 4th and final part of my short series on assembling and painting my Tau Battleforce.

For this last instalment I'll be focusing on how I went about completing the Devilfish APC.

WIP - New Tau Army - primed again

Hi all, just a quick post to bring you up to date on the progress on my three Fire Warrior squads.

Happy to report that I'm back on track again and making some headway.

Creating the Tau Battleforce - Step by step Part 3

Welcome to the 3rd part in my short series on creating the Tau Battleforce.  Today we'll be looking at the Battlesuits!  I think the key driver behind most people wanting to paint or game with the Tau is the Battle-suits.  The manga styling and heavy weaponry appeals to a lot of people, me included.

They are pretty good models, although the Forge World versions have taken the key concepts and made something much more dynamic.  The original model which forms the platform for all of the XV8 variants still stacks up quite well I think and if you're willing to make the effort can be converted quite easily.  I didn't carry out any conversions due to time constraints but if you're interested in converting the model I've included some handy links at the bottom of this post.

Primer Fail

Darkness.  Then light. A door is opened and warm fluorescence cuts into the shadows.  A figure appears at the door, staring for too long into the freezing London night.

Unnoticed even to him, a low groan starts to emanate from his throat, imperceptible at first but growing louder each second.  He holds aloft an impossibly small plastic figure with both hands and at last the groan becomes a shout -"WHYYYYYYYYYYY ME?"

Yes folks, it's a primer fail. Read on...

Airbrush first test

As promised, a little post about how the very first firing of my airbrush went.  I predicted either a triumphant report of success or a comedy story of paint explosions and near death experiences.  Happily for me (but less entertainingly for you) it's leaning much more towards the former.

Details after, as they say, 'the jump'...

My DIY spray booth

It's my day off from my regular job tomorrow (sound of high fives all round). Thursday also marks the first time I will use my airbrush 'in anger' so to speak.  I'll be able to tell you more about my airbrush experience tomorrow, come-what-may.  It'll either be a triumphant report of success or keystone cops style tragi-comedy, but either way I'll let you know how I got on...

In the meantime I thought I'd talk about the spray booth I made specifically for the airbrush and share a few pics too.

Creating the Tau Battleforce - Step by step Part 2

Welcome to the second part of my short series on creating the Tau Battleforce.  You can see the first part here including the goal of the project and a list of paints, tools and materials.

The Kroot Carnivore Squad

I really like the Kroot Carnivore miniatures. The quality and sharpness of detail is far higher than the Fire Warriors in my opinion and a lot more thought seems to have gone into their design and realisation.

Work in progress - New Tau Army

I thought I'd post some pics of my current project, a new Tau army. It's a follow up to the Battleforce I completed recently (that I keep on going on about...).

This will be a much larger project in terms of force size and modelling challenges.  The pictures show the 36 Fire Warriors I've assembled.  You'll notice that most of them don't have any arms yet. This is a deliberate strategy to keep the models as 'open' as possible during the painting process.

Creating the Tau Battleforce - Step by step Part 1

When I posted pictures of the Tau Battleforce I had painted on various forums, I was asked a couple of times what paint colours, processes etc I used to achieve the result. So, I've put together the first of a series of posts which go throughout the paints, tools and materials I used to complete this project.

Tau Battleforce

Here's some pics of the Tau Battleforce I completed last month.  

This project was essentially an experiment to test my skills at producing a 'relatively' large batch of miniatures to a high standard 'and' within a specific time-frame.