Tau and side project pics.

Alright the stuff you folks have been waiting for pics of my Tau accompanied by notes and thoughts.I'll start off with the test kroot.


Here is the more or less completed test kroot. Hes a little darker then what my plan was but I like the over all direction and color scheme. The gray shoulder pad is to tie him to my army. I might do some "war paint" on him but I am not 100% certain i want to take that root.



The stealth suits are done aside from touch ups and gluing the guns on. I figured I needed something that looked at least somewhat out of the color scheme just so my army dosnt look like just a tide of hawk turquoise . Its simple coloring but I think it looks good.



The Battle suit is assembled aside from the "ear" bits , the pose is a bit generic but as I am not yet comfortable enough to do some heavy modifications on something I acctually intend to play it will have to do. The drones are finished ...pfft like any one cares about drones....


And now for some stuff none Tau related!




Yup the side project the basic part of him is finshed I need to do some highlighting touch ups and all the free hand stuff I have in mind ( god help me) I am digging the way he looks though the left arm ( facing arm) was a bit of a pain though as I had to trim the shoulder a bit in order to get it to set properly. If i didnt his arm would be pointing a bit to the left....which looked goofy.

Also A pic of my IG comander and commisars. Im planning to pick back up on thies guys shortly, the commisar on the end just needs the sword on the sword arm painted before i glue it on. I am also working ( after a recent green washing) on Usarkar Creed he was almost finished but the coloring and look to the face and hair bothered me to no end. As for the state of the IG in general I need to base all my basic infantry ( ugh) build and paint a standard leman russ and a demolisher ( double ugh) and 6 heavy weapons teams ( Face palm).

Well thats the update for now. Now for a little bit of a treat for myself , If you folks read one of my previous post you know I have some necrons sitting around, well one of them is a necrons lord and seeing as i'm on unpaid leave for about two weeks or so ( I work at a school cafeteria and the normal confrenses we have over the summer of them most have dropped out due to the economy....) I figured I would try out a basic paint scheme idea I had for them....Snot green with scorpion green highlighting. We will see how it goes once I get around to it. Till then, cheers.

Painting experements ( insert evil doctor music here)

Alright as stated in my previous post I was wondering how I should go about painting my Kroot. After much simple green washing , testing and beer I came up with something I like , but as I want to impart my knowledge to those who have an interest in this blog I will share my process and my conclusions on them.

The final choice first. Hawk turqious with a heavy asurman blue wash: If I was to compare the end result (pics will come) I would say the skin tone is like that of the WH fantasy lizard man color and for the kroot it acctually looks mighty good as an alternative to the typical brownish tanish look on the Tau box.

Flex's suggestion green using blue wash: A good idea that just didnt quite work for me or turned out the way i planed the problem i would guess is that green and blue are so close in color that the blue was just dosnt seem to take as well as I would have hoped, HOWEVER it seems like a great means of doing slightly darker shades of green and might work for those playing orks.

Gray with blue wash: kinda the same as the one above it just wasnt turning out the way i hoped it would.

Gray with Ogryn flesh wash: this will be going on the belly portion of the kroot it gives a nice flesh tone that seems to work well. A tip for those folks who hate painting faces.Ogryn flesh is an excellent wash to use over tallaran flesh foundation paint.

The question of Kroot

Alright so aside from basing my tau and some clean up work on them the tau them selves are more or less done. Now the question ....what should I paint the kroot? At first I wasnt going to even bother with them, with the mind set that they were not so much worth fielding however after reading blogs and my own personal pondering. They may in fact be worth the time of day ( such as putting them in transports for use as scoring units while my fire warriors would be better used else where. As far as I have seen in the rule book or codex there is nothing that says they cant go into a devilfish, heck there isnt even a counts as two note on the krootox.)

So what am I asking here? Well its sort of two fold. One is for those with experiance playing tau and is how would you best utilize the kroot? The other is for any one out there and it is what color scheme should I paint them? I want them to be a bit diffrent from my Tau but not so diffrent as there to be such a color variant as for them to look like two seperate armys. Im thinking possibly a combination of Regal blue and a yellow or tan of some sort. Anyway post your thoughts. Thanks

Alright I promised some pics and here we are, my ( for the most part) finished Tau fire warriors. I would like to note that I unfortunitly got the camera late in the evening and so I had to use a desk lamp to even get a remotely good picture



My battle suit painted up, ive been slacking on putting this guy together, since i cant decide on a suitable pose.



And my Devil fish, you can see where I need to put the green stuff on the thrusters but still looks good so far.

Alright and now fo an advanced look on what I'm working on for the Jawaballs painting comp next month.



Ugh honestly the picture dosn't do it justice with all the color blending I did in the deeper areas of the robe. which to me says either I need a better camera (easyshare my Anus freakin auto focus makes me want to rip my hair out) or a natural light. The guy is going to be death company maybe ill name him and throw in a backstory for fun. I have a plan in mind for doing a free hand blood angles symbol on the left lower robe ( the second pic, god help me on this one its sounds cool but im not sure i have the skill to pull it off) and some "scrible" writing on the other side and the chest. Im trying to challenge myself on this, even if nothing becomes from it ill have some more experiance to work with. Worst case scenario I some day make a chaso army and use this guy as a Khorne lord or something. Any way im making this guy out of left over Dark angels vet sprue i picked up to practice painting robes ( might post thies some day as well as explain how I did it) the twoarms had hand swaps. the pointing hand came from the BR seargent the other one is from a SM bikers arm I had lying around from way back when and one of the DA hain swords.

Well I hope you enjoyed the pics. Next time im planning to show some of the equipment I use , how I use it and show how i utterly destroy brushes ( cheap five dollar for 12 ones but damn they look like they went through a meat grinder)

Jawaballs up comming painting comp

Well as some of you folks know Jawaballs ( see link on the right) is going to be having a painting competetion coming up next month. Looking at the folks on his blog roll (hell Black Matt says it all for the most part) its gonna be brutal despite this I have decided I would take a crack at it. Do I expect to win? Balls no but I am taking this as an opportunity to try some things out that I wouldn't ,at this point, try on my regular armys such as some slight converting and parts swaping as well as fiddle around with some painting techniques.

Tau army progress update

Well I am almost through my first battle force set of Tau ( excluding kroot...) the fire warriors are painted up, the battle suit is painted and need to be assembled ( gonna wait till i can get some magnets for the weapons) the devil fish just needs some detailing work and some green stuff. and the stealth suits are next on the plate to be completed.

I hope to have some pics up soon I am currently debating if I want to go for the standard basing or go for some Jawabases (shameless promotion) we shall see.

Chernobyl

Thoughts on the various armys

Alright, a little history on Chernobyl time.

When my bud expressed interest in starting up 40k again I was all over it. the problem was I didn't really research the armys before I kinda just bought a battle force of Necrons, being a big fan of the Dawn of War games and the necrons being my favorite it seemed like a good idea, ...Until i discovered the phase out rule...and that more or less killed Necrons for me the idea that an opponent just needs to kill a certain percentage of units in order to just poof wipe out whats left didnt sit well with me. Since then i have bought various codexs of armys the intrested me and aside from tyranids,ork,eldar and dark eldar I think I have the rest. As you guys know I now play IG and Tau but I figured since im still in the process of finishing up my tau battle force and i havnt posted in a little while I would throw in my thoughts and opinions of why I picked the ones I did and passed some of the others.( by the way you know the saying about opinions and A holes that applies here so dont take offence.)

IG: Honestly this was my number two pick for my intial army, I am somewhat of a tread head and was kind of inspired by the russian scenario in Call of Duty WaW to try thies guys, that and they have some cool named characters.

Tau:Was my third choice. The fire warriors , the basic infantry of the Tau, are possibly my favorite models in the GW line up. The sleek look of the transports was also a big draw for me, my only real complaint are the heads on the battle suits for something with such a big body it has an awfull tiny head.

Necrons: My first choice intitaly, the models are mighty cool looking and fairly easy the paint if you want to go with the straight metallic look. Although Fritz at Way of Saim Hann ( link to his blog on the right) made thies guys look good I just still do not like that blasted phase out rule, maybe once they get a new codex ill look into them again until then my battle force is sitting up on a shelf.

Chaos: I like the looks of a number of units in this one and honestly might have passed the Tau if it wasnt for one thing, metal models, It seems to me that the majority ( or at least the stuff I would have wanted to use) is composed mostly of metal figures which is kind of a downer.

Generic Space Marines: I think its because it was the most played army that i didnt want to play it, that and my buddy is playing Crimson Fist so...

Dark Angels: I like the honor guard units in the robes but of course if you play Dark Angels you do so to play either an all terminators or all bike army...pass

Black Templars: Some cool units and abilities I might look into them again later on but until then Space marines with some diffrent tricks dosnt do it for me.

( thies last couple are based soley on opinion and looks as i dont have the codex for thies ones)

Eldar: Honestly with the exception of the warlocks i dont care to much for any of the other stuff in this army.

Tyranids: Well it was a toss up between thies guys and IG for my horde army despite how cool the carnifex looked I myself like tanks better.

Orks: I love the sheer funny and random nature of thies guys honestly reading my friends codex (the orks being his secondary) makes me laugh every time, that being said it is another horde army and well...go puny 'umans

Dark Eldar: thies guys need a codex update something fierce, that aside i just didnt like the overall look of the models.

So what was the overall point of this post? None so much , maybe to get folks possibly thinking about getting a secondary army something to think about and to have my own thoughts displayed before me. At any rate I am wondering what you folks think so please feel free to share your thoughts and opinions.

Chernobyl

The Pros and Cons of building two armys at the same time

Well as some of you folks may be aware I am currently in the process of making two armys, Tau and IG. I know im not the only person who does this but I thought I would give some insight on why I would do such an insane thing and why at time i kind of regret it.

Pros.
Releaves boredom: Painting the same thing over and over again, IG imparticuler, Can get painfully boring having some uniquely diffrent gives you something to switch too when you need a break from painting the 40th odd guardsmen.

Gives some variety in play: after playing a few games with one army you might wanna switch it up a bit having a secondary army going along with your current lets you switch it up a bit even its on a smaller scale.

Cons.

Money sink: doing this is not cheap nothing involving GW stuff is so seriously consider your finances ahead of time before even considering it.

takes a long time to get even one army done: fairly obvious if you split your attention you double your time. If your a fast painter , which i am not, this isnt a big issue.


There are some other pros and cons but thies seem to be the biggiest ones for me. feel free to share your thoughts.

Chernobyl