Tau Hammerhead Step by Step part 6

So, work begins in this step on the base. In my mind, I imagined the hammerhead emerging from the wreckage of a building that had been destroyed. One thing that i always find with 40K scenes is that there is never enough wreckage! In general WW2 models get it right - lots of rubble and wreckage - for example, just consider how much plascrete and other materials would be in even a simple small building.

Step one was to cut a piece of thick blue foam to the right shape. I wanted the front left to be a shell hole, with the wall / sidewalk and road and a slightly open area towards the back. The highest point was going to be the hammerhead hovering just above the ground. This gives a nice 3 level effect, which, again, is a technique I've learned from the WW2 modellers. The aim is to get three progressive levels of height moving backwards as the eye moves.

Once the blue foam was cut to shape, I then moved on to marking out the back of the building that had been destroyed. This was added with pre printed plasticard. The sidewalk was then added using a piece of scribed plasticard. Dont worry about the fact that there is a gap in the sidewalk, this area is going to be covered in debris!

Next the main wall sides were added. These were made from some off-cuts of plaster that i had left over from when i last tried casting. See here for more on that failure! Once they were stuck in place i stuck on some off-cuts of blue foam to bulk up the areas of rubble.

Finally I started to add the rubble. This is made from again the same plaster as the wall. In this case, I spent an evening in front of the TV breaking up blocks of plaster! Once i had a big box full of broken plaster I started to apply it to the base. Woodland scenics spray PVA was used to fix the plaster in place. I added the plaster in multiple layers spraying the area first, then applying plaster parts, and then spraying again. So far its had about 3 coats, I think it will need five or maybe six.

Tau Hammerhead Step by Step part 5

So, lots has been done for this posting, mainly because I got ill this last weekend and couldn't manage anything more than gently painting!

So, finally the oil washes were dry, so I moved on to doing the black lining - each recess line was fine lined using black oil paint. I find that acrylics are terrible for lining; They dry far too quickly and it means that if you make a mistake, you either have to over paint it, or you are stuck with it. With oil paints this isn't a problem, as the working time is so long. My normal working procedure is to very roughly put the black on the lines - being neat, but not worrying if i slip in the odd place. Then using a cotton bud and some clean turpentine i then run along the lines. If you are careful and have only a small amount of turpentine on the the cotton bud, you can generally get the line perfectly crisp - See the photo to the right for an example.

The main problem with Oil paints (and I urge everyone to go out and get some oil paints and have a play, they are truly wonderful materials to work with) is the drying time. Oils need to be left to dry for 48 hours once painted on (unless you use a drying accelerator, although i can't recommend this method, having never tried it).

So, returning to the hammerhead a day and a bit later (yeah okay, I'm impatient!) the next stage was the application of ink washes to the metallic parts. I use Dr. Ph. Martins Inks - I believe they are meant for calligraphy, but i find they work really nicely on models, especially for the effect i was trying to achieve, as they "crack" slightly giving metal a nicely worn appearance, see photo to the left for an example - here the aim was to make the metal look old, worn and pitted - almost as if the top layer of the metal was wearing away. Generally I mix these inks with Kleer to give a very high reflection finish. Sometimes I find i need to add a very small drop of washing up liquid to get a smoother finish.

Another short amount of time for the model to dry again and it was out with the pigments. As people probably know by now, I'm a big fan of Mig pigments, and they were used liberally for this project. First i dusted all the metal areas with a dark rust, and once that was blended in, I then hit them again with a lighter rust colour.

All the metal areas then had a graphite pencil (2B) rubbed along any prominent surfaces to give the impression of the metals wearing through the rust. Finally I gave them a gentle rub with my finger to bring it all together

The underside was treated with four or five shades our earth pigments, to give a dusty feel - this was carried over the edge and slightly up the sides, as well as the tops of the door hatches (because they fold down and would end up in the mud!). I made sure that the "mud" was firmly embedded inside any seams or hatch edges - these exposed openings just live to collect dirt! The flight feet were included in the mud application and then again had graphite added to them.

Lastly for this stage I painted in the rear lights and the front view port. Again this was done using P3 heart fire. They were painted the same way that i paint gems, shading on the bottom right and lit from the top left

So, at this stage I'm gonna put the hammerhead aside and start to work on the scenic base, which is gonna involve me learning how to create a mold and cast it in plaster! But that's a story for another day!

Tau Hammerhead Step by Step part 5

Small update this time. Once the model had dried thoroughly from the last stage (I always like to give Kleer a long time to dry), I start to apply the "flashes" and colour blocks. Any "light" areas were painted using P3 Menoth White Base in the normal way with a brush. Then i masked off the nose cone and painted the stripes using P3 Heart Fire.

Once these sections were dry, I used a sponge to apply chips in Chardon Granite. There were applied lightly, and once dry, I corrected some parts by using either more granite (where the effect was too light), or the base coat (where the effect was too much). Finally the granite marks were highlighted with white.

For the next stage, I then washed the entire vehicle with various oil colours, but starting from a base of Burnt Umber. These washes were very thin - Basically they were coloured Turpentine. This kind of wash is often called a "Filter" in AFV modelling. The next thing to be applied (once the washes had been left to dry for a couple of hours) was "spotting" - this makes the final surface much less even, and gives nice graduation to the colours (I'm planning on doing a longer post about these techniques in the near future).

All metal parts were then drybrushed with Tin Bitz (or whatever the vallejo equivalent is called), followed by a dry brush with Chainmail. Once those layers were dry, the metal areas then got a dry brush of neat Burnt Umber and Black oil paints, to bring the metallic effect down a bit and to give them a "harder" look. Finally i recoated any areas that wold be solid black on the final model - The intakes for the boosters as the under carriage / landing gear.

The model was then set aside to dry for at least 48 hours before the next stage of weathering could take place

Tau Hammerhead Step by Step part 4

Lots of progress for this step... First, I fully finished the assembly of the model. The Tau vehicles never seem to go together easily for me, but with a lot of sanding it started to approach an acceptable level. I then mounted each of the separate parts on to styrene rods, for easier handling.

The next stage was to spray all the parts in Citadel black undercoat. I only have one hard and fast rule when painting - White undercoats for soldiers, Black undercoats for tanks! I find that by using black as the undercoat you can get great effects easily when using the airbrush.

I was aiming for a look of a Bull shark with this model , lighter grey underneath, getting darker on the top, and with a black "spike" on the "nose". Unfortunately the photos of this part didn't come out particularly well. In Real Life (tm) the blending is much smoother between the light under belly and the darker top. The darkest section is Tamiya German Grey and the lighter part is Tamiya Neutral Grey. These were airbrushed on in many light coats. Finally the black spikes were added. To finish the airbrushing stage the entire model was given a coat of Johnsons Kleer, to give a nice satin finish for the next stages - the weathering...

Tau Hammerhead Step by Step part 3

Not a vast amount of progress over the last couple of days, unfortunately. If I'm honest, its the part of modelling that I really hate - cleaning up and filling the gaps! I end up getting distracted and painting other models in the meantime!

Anyway, over the last couple of days, i managed to fill and sand the two side pods, quite a bit of the back and the nose. You can see this in the images included. For filling on vehicles i find that green stuff / pro create doesn't do a very good job, it doesn't sand very well. For tanks, i usually use Polyfilla Fine Surface filler, because it sands down well and becomes very smooth when sanded down.

In the image to the left you can see the contrast between the areas that have been filled and sanded - it is circled in red. The unfilled area still has an ugly misalignment, which will eventually be smooth. Just below that is a small area that still has a slight line in it. Although this looks in the photo as if it will cause problems, when the undercoat is on this should disappear.

The final image shows the side pod that in a previous post i pointed out still had scrape marks from the harsh sand paper i had used. In the new photo, it should be obvious that this roughness is now gone. Only about another 10 hours of sanding to go, at this rate!

On the rest of the vehicle I've put together and sanded down the turret and Rail gun, and the "boosters" are now glued together. The fit is really not great on the "boosters", which seems to be the same as every other Tau vehicle I've made. Is there some secret to putting this together that I've missed?

Citadel washes (and how to make your own!)

So by now, I'm sure that everyone has heard of the Citadel washes. They are similar to inks, except they dry with a very soft satin finish, rather than the annoying gloss finish of the old inks. They only require a small amount of thinning to use in most cases, and they are almost exactly the right consistency for detailed painting. All in all, they are one of the few GW products that are genuinely worth every penny of the cost!

But what do you do in those cases where you want a wash that isn't in the range? Well, here is how to create your own "Citadel washes"! Unfortunately, it does require the purchase of some specialised paint items, specifically:

• Liquitex Flow Aid. This is an additive that stops the formation of "tide marks" (well mostly). It also extends the drying time of acrylic paints. Please see later for a correction. I paid about £8 for a 110mL bottle. That will be enough to last me a long time. Make sure you read the safely warnings, and only add a tiny amount. Ill talk more about amounts later
  
• Liquitex Glazing Medium. This, again is another additive for normal acrylic paints. Essentially it is the medium that normal paint is suspended in. In a normal acrylic paint you have glaze medium with particles of paint suspended in it (that's why when you mix water with paint, sometimes it will split - the paint particles become suspended in the water rather than the glazing medium). Please see later for a correction. I paid about £10 for a 230mL bottle. Again enough to last a long time. One thing to remember is that by itself this glaze medium has a very satin finish (its almost gloss).
  
• Vallejo Game Color Glaze Medium 69. This again is another Glazing medium, but with slightly different properties from the Liquitex one. It almost acts as a drying retardant in my experience. Don't add too much! You can pick this up pretty much anywhere for usually a pound or two.
  
• Revell Aqua Color Clear Matt Varnish 361/02. This a bog standard matt varnish. I just happen to like it's consistency. This is the only varnish that i have used in this technique, so i can't vouch for any others...
  

So here is how the technique works. First, take the colour you would like to turn in to a wash. Remember that the final colour will be slightly darker than the original colour. I also usually find that strong colours work the best for washes (Orange or strong yellows are good, but colours like Bad moon yellow generally don't work as well). After a while of working with this technique you will find that you learn intuitively which colours are going to work and which wont!

Once you have your base colour you can begin to mix your medium. The first thing to do is to decide how much you are going to make, then make a mix in the following proportions:

• 4 parts Liquitex glazing medium
• 0.0001 part Liquitex flow aid (basically it should be a tiny spot of flow aid. For me that would mean if I was making 3 drops of glaze I would add one pin heads worth of flow aid. Its not a total disaster if you add too much, but your paint will be wet for a long time - The first time I experimented with it, I added it to black, 50% mix. The black stayed wet on my palette for about 3 days!)
  
• 2 parts Vallejo glaze medium. This is purely to tone down the very satin finish of the Liquitex glaze. Experiment, because in certain circumstances this satin finish can look very nice
  
• 1 part Varnish. Again, this just adds a toning down to the final result. Be careful adding the varnish. Too much and the glaze will pool in an ugly way. Less is more in this case.

Mix that concoction with your paint. I normally aim for about a 50:50 mix, but depending on what I'm painting that can change. You should be left with a lovely thin mixture that flows in the same way a glaze does. I would always recommend thinning your final mix 75% with water (that is 75% water, 25% paint / glaze mix). It makes it flow nicely from the brush and makes doing blending very easy, as the paint has a nice transparency.

Whilst playing with this technique, remember to experiment with the ratios above. They are not hard and fast rules, but merely a jumping off point. In the same way you learn how much paints need to be thinned intuitively you will soon learn how much glaze / varnish etc. to add for the effect you want. The only thing i would recommend keeping to a minimum is the Flow Aid. Unless you like waiting for your model to dry, that is!

Edit: AoM Posted this in the comments section, and I thought it was important enough that it should be included in the main text. It includes corrections for sections that i got wrong. Many apologies for getting this info incorrect...

"Matte medium is uncolored binder, not glaze medium. while flow aid helps the paint flow smoothly off the brush, the glaze medium is much more useful in avoiding the drying rings with washes.

They each have their uses, and work nicely together, but they are for different things. For regular painting, try a drop of flow aid with your paint, and then thin with glaze medium instead of water. I think you'll like the results."

Tau Hammerhead Step by Step part 2

So continuing the Hammerhead walk-though. Not a vast amount of progress today, but a very important stage - Part one of the cleanup process.

Now that the hammer head had dried over night i visually inspected the body for where mould lines were very visible. Often i find that these only become truly visible once construction has started (as they end up being disconnected in odd ways, making the effect even worse!

In the two photos shown here i have circled the main areas of mould lines that needed to be removed. I never use a knife to remove mould lines on vehicles, the scratching leaves a very telltale mark! So its back to our friendly 800 grade wet'n'dry, and an hour or so of slowly buffing away the lines. I find that it helps to do this whilst watching TV, or chatting to the wife etc! Take your time, moving slowly through the affected areas.

The aim is to achieve a smooth effect, without damaging any major surface detail. I normally dont worry if there are a few lines showing where the sand paper has been (as generally these areas will be re-sanded later, once any gaps have been filled, but I always try to move the paper in the same direction if at all possible.

Here you can see the result across the nose of the Hammer head - notice that the major lines are now gone, and that the sanded section is fairly smooth. On the side "fins" it was much harder to get a smooth finish to the plastic, because of the difficult shape.

However, there is a large gap in this area that will need to be filled in later, so I'm not too worried. (As mentioned this will be filled and then re-sanded).

More progress reports soon. For the moment I'm off to prepare the Bad Bay Hackers for another defeat on the Blood Bowl field!

Tau Hammerhead Step by Step part 1

So after my last post, i wanted to start a new post with something 40K related - i opened my cupboard and what did i spy - The hammerhead that I've been meaning to paint for a while!

I'm going to present it as a series of linked posts, each detailing a small part of the project. Hopefully that way you guys can give me suggestions along the way, and so that i can have something to write about on the blog!

So today, im covering the basics of construction...

The first thing that i did was to remove all the parts from the sprues and ditched them all in to the box lid. Do not do this unless you have built a tau vehicle before! Its sad that ive made so many devil fish now that i dont need the instructions any more!

Once i had all the pieces i started to clean up the major components. This is quite a long winded process. First each piece has the moulding lugs trimmed down carefully using a sharp craft knife - making sure not to mark or "dig-in" to the plastic. The aim is a smooth finish, but if there are some small marks there, dont worry...

Then 800 - 1600 grade wet'n'dry sand paper is used to smooth off any bumps. When doing the sanding, you will never get all of the injection points completely smooth, usually I find that I get down to a small indentation. These are taken care of later with the help of some model filler.

One of the big problems i have with the Citadel flyers is the pitiful bases they supply them with, especially given the tiny lug they expect to hold the weight of a large plastic model.

For this model i wanted there to be a large stand for them to be mounted on - the final aim for this model is to place it on a small cityscape terrain base, so something solid would be welcome. In the end i decided to use a piece of Evergreen strip styrene. A hole was drilled in the base piece of the Hammerhead and the strip was then glued to the inside of the chassis (is that the right word?)

From the photo, you can see quite how far in to the model the stand extends - hopefully this will give extra sturdiness to the model. I have a feeling that more support may be needed in the future... but for the moment it at least makes it easier to work with!

So at the end of the first day, i have a partially constructed hammerhead. Next stage is the gap filling, which will be tackled on a future date...

On a slight aside, im testing a new blogging client, so if anyone notices anything wrong with this post (beside my usual awful spelling!) please let me know.

Riveting stuff

So i thought i would write a tutorial about how i do my rivets. A few people have asked me about them recently, so i figured other people might be interested. This technique was originally presented in the Forge World Model Masterclass book (a book a definately recommend). The text and images are my own though.

Let start with the tools - this technique needs a very specific set of tools

 

 As well as the usual super glue, pencil, ruler and the plasticard that you want to rivet  you will need a pin vice with a very thin drill bit (the one i used here was 0.5mm) as well as some very fine tweezers.

On the right of the picture above you will notice a container. This holds the contents of a Brita Classic Water Filter Cartridge. Water filters are essentially made up of small plastic balls and small shards of charcoal. Simply get hold of a water filter and carefully cut the top off it (I used a small razor saw). Empty the contents in to a suitable container and you have a supply of rivets that should last a long time!

Here is a closer photo of the plastic balls that are inside the filter. It is these that we are interested in

Once you have collected your tools and have a suitable piece of plasticard to work with we can begin the rivetting work. First stage is to mark out the location of the rivets on the body work. Care must be taken at this stage as poorly aligned rivets looks both awful and unrealistic.
I find that for 28mm or 1/35 scale a spacing of about 5mm looks good. But you may find that others work for you.

After the positions have been marked out you can begin the drilling. The aim here is to make a small indentation where you want the rivet to be. You definately dont want to drill right through the plasticard! (Note in the picture below i would normally have a ruler placed so all the rivets are aligned, but i ran out of hands to hold it with! hence the wobbly rivet line!)

Once the holes are dilled, take the drill bit out of your pin vice and replace it with a short piece of fine wire. I use florist wire for this work. Put a blob of super glue on to a scrap piece of plasticard. Then dip the wire in to the glue and quickly transfer some glue to one of the holes you drilled.

Once the glue is in place grab your tweezers and pick up a plastic bead from the water filter. Place this in the super glue (the capillary action will draw the bead in) and then quickly wipe down your tweezers. If you dont wipe down your tweezers very quickly they will become a gluey mess! Here is what you will have at the end of this stage

Now simply repeat the whole process for all the holes that were drilled. Generally i try to work on groups of rivets in 10's, so gluing 10 in one go. Once you have got the hang of the basic process you can quickly speed up. I would also recommend choosing a whole load of size matched plastic beads before you start - the beads are many different sizes and some will fit the scale of your model better than others.

Here is a door i am working on at the moment for a diorama that shows lots of rivets in place pre painting

And here are some rivets in place and painted (in case anyone is wondering... its the inside to a chimera for a diorama based on krieg that i am doing. All parts were scratch build)

Blood Bowl Pitch Tutorial

I'm a big fan of Blood Bowl. I really do consider it to be one of GW's finest moments - Games are fast and furious and always fun. One thing ive always been dissappointed about tho, is playing on the Cardboard pitch - It always felt lacking to me. So i finally decided to bite the bullet and build myself a pitch!

The first step was planning. In reality i've spent over a year now considering various ways to put together a pitch. The key problems are marking the squares, so that the grid is the same size as the standard pitch. Many options were considered, including marking out spaces with map pins, using tile spacers in each corner, as well as more esoteric options, such as using square monster bases!

The first practical stage was to gather together all of the materials required. Last thing i wanted was to run out of the necessary parts half way through! You can see all the flocks / static grasses and glues that i used in the photo below:

 

I used two types of glue. The first is normal PVA glue. Generally this was watered to about 75% water to give a very thin consistency similar to skimmed milk. The second glue is Woodland Scenics scenic cement. This is a very thin, ultra tacky glue which can be sprayed from a spray gun, or used on a brush. I'm a very big fan of this glue - although normally used for model railways, the sticking power for use with scenic materials is immense. You use it in two passes. The first sticks the scatter material down. The second is applied after the first is dry and is simply to seal the flock or scatter material in place. Because the glue dries absolutely clear and matt you get a good hard finish, but without any adverse changes to the flock colouring...

For application of the scatter materials I used a Noch grass applicator and a spray gun, again from Woodland Scenics. For areas where i wanted extreme control i would load up the end of the steel ruler in the picture and gently tap over the area to be covered.

The other important thing to mention was the material i used for the base itself - this was Dow Corning Blue Board ("Blue foam"). The board is approx 0.75" thick. I bought a big sheet of the stuff (2' x 4') and then cut down the board to a suitable size (obviously having measured the squares on the main blood bowl pitch)

Sooo... Firing up the airbrush i dived in. The first job was to airbrush the entire board in GW Goblin Green, leaving patches clear where mud would be. These remaining areas then recieved a coat of Vallejo "Earth" again via the airbrush to give basic deliniation to the dirt / grass areas.

 

 

You can probably see in the above images that the airbrush coat doesnt completely cover the blue foam underneath, but tbh its really not that important. The green is just there so that any areas that start to shed scatter materials after some time wont show through as stark blue.

Once the basic areas were mapped out, i then masked off the pitch area (it doesnt show on the photos, but this area was actually marked on the board in light pencil), and applied spray glue to the dirt areas. Dont worry about being too neat for this, grass / mud is not regular in nature, so hard edges are very rare. Try to feather the glue spray across the boundries.

 

Once you have applied your "dirt" scatter material to the glue (I used GW sand as a base) allow it to dry fully. Once it has dried apply another coat of the Scatter Cement and now leave it over night. Although doing it this way does take time (about 2 weeks in my case) you will end up with a very strong board surface to play along.

I continued applying scatter materials in this way, working from the darkest grasses up to the lightest, making sure that I feathered the edges of the areas the scatter covered. Finally the scattering is done:

After having applied all of the scatter material, and letting it dry thoroughly, I masked the main pitch off and applied a uniform flock to outer area to delimit the pitch from the "table". Once that was dry,
i then went back with my initial sand and dirt materials and applied an extra coat in the end zones and along the edges, where most of the combat usually happens. This gives those areas a more recently churned up feeling

 

The next stage is to begin to mark the pitch out. To achieve this i took a packet of small panel pins and working from one corner moved around the outside of the pitch pushing a pin in to the foam at each junction. I ended up with a pitch surrounded by panel pins at regular 30 mm spacings

I then took some thin cotton thread and passed it between alternate pins giving a grid. This was the worst part of the whole project in all honesty - It relies on you keeping tension in the string at all times the moment you release the tension the whole lot collapses and you have to unthread a big chunk and redo it....

 

  

Once the grid was marked i grabbed a new sharp flat brush and using thinned Vallejo white paint began to mark the intersections of the squares, the end zones and wide zones. This was slow work. I tended to work on blocks of four squares at a time, complete them and then move on. I found the best technique to use it to dab the paint on. If you pull the brush around the paint smears and lifts the flock from under it...

Once the markings were finished, I removed the cotton, leaving a (hopefully) perfectly marked grid...

 

  

 

The pitch was then given a very heavy coat of the scenic cement to seal it in place. Heavy = about half a bottle sprayed on! I left this for about 48 to dry completely.

In the mean time, i moved on to the score board. The score board was built from some scrap balsa wood i had lying around and an old fridge magnet. The first stage was to cut a main piece of balsa wood and sand the edges off to be rounded:

 

I then cut two strips of the same balsa wood and filed them so that they curved in opposite directions. These were glued to the score board to provide the legs and two small balsa triangles were glued to the front of the legs for stability. This whole assembly was then glued to a spare strip of foam board to provide a base

Whilst the glue on that was drying i cut out 12 squares from a thin piece of balsa. The whole lot, plus the score board were then undercoated with Vallejo "Earth" and dry brushed with Vallejo "Kahki". The base was painted in Goblin Green and then flocked with the same flock as was used on the board surround. Notice in the later photos that i also did the edges of the foam board aswell to make sure that they blended in with the pitch.

Finally i painted white lettering on to the score board and numbers on to the "score cards"

Next i took the fridge magnets and cut 12 squares from it, just smaller than the "score cards". Each score card then had a magnet stuck to its back. Similarly i cut two slightly larger pieces that were stuck to the score board. The later were painted with Vallejo Earth and had "0" painted on them (so when there is no score you dont put a score card on). To change the score you simply take the old one off and put a new one on. The magents grip each other just enough to hold the score card in place, but not enough to make it hard to remove. Here is the finished Score board:

All in all i think the project went really well - the board looks great, it has room for placing dugouts (of which more in a later post) and a magnetic scoreboard!
Here are some pictures of my undead team taking to the field. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial... Comments and questions welcome as always