WIP: Drone-ing On

After having fun painting up the base, the main body of my re-posed XV8 is slowly receiving base-coats and mid tones. Currently he looks something like this...

...which is to say slightly like a blue clown suit. The legs and feet have a solid mid-tone on them now, the chest needs another pass to solidify the colour and the rest just has the dark blue base on. It's not terribly exciting at the moment, but if nothing else i think this brings out the pose a little more than the earlier "all black" shot.

What I have achieved is finishing his drones. These have a lot more dark blue on them, as when I have a stab at a full-on Tau Vehicle in this scheme I expect I will want it to be darker overall, as the light blue/white may be slightly too bright.  So here they are:

Any Tau army must swarm with these little guys, I have six already!

First Base

Some months back an article on the always excellent From the Warp talked about painting bases first on a model, not last. Now I've always treat bases as a little bit of an afterthought - sure they need to look good, and I've always tried to make sure the figure is blended into the setting and it looks like I've made some effort there, but it's never been a focus for me. With this XV8 I wanted it to have a more interesting base, so as you can see from the previous post its striding over a load of Imperial Rubble.

Now I'm not sure that the base comes out well on the earlier pictures, but taking after Ron's suggestion I thought it may be worth tackling it first, especially the plate elements where I wanted to do a fair but of dry-brushing to get the metal effect I wanted. So a couple of hours work later, the base is mostly done, and looks like this:

I'm quite pleased with it, but comments, as ever, appreciated.

Baby's First Conversion

I like the Tau, for all they've not had a new Codex since forever, and their kit line needs a revamp, and from reading around the web, they're a bit of a forgotten army at the moment all around. I played them a lot in Dawn of War, which is what got me back into 40k a few years back, and whilst I've not painted much Tau since getting the painting bug I've done some Fire Warriors and a solitary XV8 in a nice electric-blue-and-white scheme. I especially like the XV8 family, but my big frustration with them is that the figure itself look stocky and a bit gormless, compared to how dynamic the battlesuits are supposed to be in comparison to their Imperial counterparts.

Now, the other thing I've not done yet is any sort of conversion work, so my desires all sort of rolled together. After hacksawing part of a finger, and getting blood all over the kitchen, I have a reposed XV8 ready to go. I'm quite pleased with him, even I've not actually changed that much.

Blood Ravens Devastators COMPLETED

Well, it took me a while longer than I expected but the rest of the Devastator squad is now complete. Like the rest of my non-veteran Blood Ravens they've got 5th Company markings and are fairly unadorned, because, well thats how I see non-veteran Marines looking. Of course, this is pretty much a mess as far as a proper table-top squad goes, due to the mixed bag of weapons, but I wanted to try some different things with different weapons, and besides, looking cool is more important than battlefield efficiency, right?

Pictures below the cut.

Paints?!

This is an expensive hobby sometimes, especially when you're starting out. This last week or so its brought home in a couple of ways.

Firstly, paints. A bunch of the first paints I bought when restarting the hobby are now running out of life, and need replacing, and I've been thinking about moving from the Citadel Paints (with their fairly well documented problems) to another brand - probably Vallejo given their decent reputation and availability. The problem, mostly, is cost - sure, they're cheap on a pot-by-pot basis but it adds up quickly once you consider how many colours I end up using on even a simply painted model. and of course now GW have refreshed their whole line, which has put me back into "wait and see" mode for the early reviews.

The other thing comes from the much better place that my ongoing painting hobby has spiked the interest of my eldest child, who has co-opted the Orks from my AoBR set, painted them up, and we've started doing battles with them. This is, of course, enormous fun, even if it's often unbalanced and we get the rules wrong a fair bit. But I've got a decent number of Blood Ravens now, because I've been painting them predominantly over the last few months, and most of them I can't use because I'd just crush him. Picking up a couple of boxes of Orks (a horde army, at that!) us again, a costly investment. Maybe ebay is the answer, for just knock-about forces?

There's no real conclusion to this, but it has reminded me that this must really bite on kids, often with less disposable income, trying to get into this for the first time!