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.


Those following this blog will know that I experienced an upsetting 'primer fail' which you can read about here.

It was a case of 'back to the drawing board', but not before spending a delightful Sunday stripping mini's. Not much fun, but all went well and now everything has been re-primed.  I think paint stripping probably deserves a post all to itself so I'll consider that for the future.

Priming Part 2

This time around I did a bit more research on using the Vallejo airbrush primer.  With aerosol priming, the advice is to 'mist' the model from a distance to prevent obliterating it.  It turns out that the opposite is true with airbrush priming.  You need to be firing the primer pretty close (I'd say about 3 inches or less approx.) when applying with an airbrush.  I was slightly worried that this method would endanger the detail but this was unfounded.  Even though the primer looked a bit wet on the mini, when it dried it kind of shrank and all of the detail was intact.  This, anecdotally, seems to be the experience of a lot of modellers and painters so don't worry if it looks a little bit heavy when it goes on.

Surface Primer... it primes surfaces.

In addition to the above technique, this time I applied two coats of primer.  The first primer I used was the Vallejo Surface Primer in Grey.  This is a lot lighter than the Panzer Grey I used in my first (ultimately doomed) attempt.  I will use the Panzer Grey for future projects but it was just too dark for the paint scheme I had in mind for these models.  So I took this opportunity to swap to the lighter grey and on it went.  I let this go off for a few hours while I went off and did something else.

The second coat I applied was the Vallejo Surface Primer in U.S. Olive Drab.  This was for two reasons, the main one being that the primary colour for this Tau army will be Olive Drab, so this would also act as my base coat.  The second reason was that I wanted to to have a distinct colour difference for the second coat of primer so that I could easily see where I'd painted and virtually eliminate 'thin' spots of primer.  This second coat was also left for a couple of hours.

This time everything has been a success and a pretty thorough 'scratch test' was passed with flying colours and now I feel like I've got a good base to proceed on (Phew!)

The next stage

Now I can apply my second colour to the Fire Warriors.  I'm leaving the armour Olive Drab while the material under-suit is 'very' thinned Citadel Charadon Granite.  This is going on nicely and I'll be able to hack through all 36 models in a few hours.  At this stage I think I've made the right decision about leaving the arms off the models to access the normally 'closed' areas.  This should pay dividend when we get to the shadow and highlight stages.  Time will tell...