Epic - Tau : Reinforcements

A few more additions to my rapidly growing Tau army.

The missing Tetra recon bikes arrived, i picked up a couple of Riptide battle suits from eBay, and kitbashed a Supermacy Titan Battlesuit from a 28mm Crisis suit.

I also picked up a full Forge World Aeronautica Imperialis Tau force, to use as my Air Caste.
I got them for what i think is a decent price given what the Manta alone can go for!

That said, they are a little bit bashed up, but i'll maybe make this a feature with some battle damage.
They also look to have once had a pretty awesome blue/black camo scheme with brown/tan camo accents, but at some point someone has roughly painted white, blue and black over the top of this for some reason!

As the nicely painted scheme seemed to have had a varnish top coat, i thought i'd have a go at rescuing them, using 99% Isopropyl Alcohol and cotton buds.

For the most part this worked really well, although i did lift some of the good paint, and dulled them slightly, but i'm going to keep the Manta and Barracuda fighters in this scheme, with the Tiger Sharks getting my grey/teal scheme.

I've included some work in progress photos too to help me reference the process as much as anything and on that note, the paints used are;

GW Mornfang Brown (primer)
GW Celestra Grey (base coat)
Vallejo Blue Green (Accent)
GW Drackenhof Nightshade (Shade)
GW Ulthuan Grey (Highlight)
Vallejo Black + Vallejo Silver (Metallics)
GW Evil Sunz Red + GW Wild Rider Red (lenses, Missiles)


I'm now sitting at around 7-8k points in netepic for this force.
One more small order to vanguard once they restock will allow me to field a load more units that are currently under strength (due to the pack sizes and my bad maths).

Then i'm done! the Joy of the Tau in Epic is that there simply aren't the hundreds of different units, so i'll be naturally reigned in soon enough.

Epic - Tau: start to finish

Hi Folks,
It's fair to say i didn't plan for this;

I went from boredom browsing Vanguard minis website one night before my last post, mocking up what a 4000pt Tau list for netepic gold would look like... Then my finger started clicking 'add to basket'...

Next thing i know, a few days later, they arrive at my front door on the 26th of May...

I sorted through them, cleaned off the flash, and started grouping them up into units...

I then glued the infantry in to their bases, took a breath and went to bed...

The next day i slapped some paint on to see if my 28mm test scheme would work well.
Looked OK, so i played around a bit with some techniques, washes, highlights, etc.

Ah! damn, I've painted all the infantry.

OK, i'll just base up the Battle suits and cavalry, and maybe do a base coat... and i suppose i could start the tanks too...

And done...

Dammit!

I had hoped to make this a bit of a blog series from unboxing > completion, and the photos are all here below, but why not just post them all at once? seems fitting for how this went.

a few lessons for me here, was that making up a jig with double-sided sticky tape has probably made this a week long project rather than a year!

There is still some work to do on them, a wee bit of highlighting/tidy up, banners for the HQs etc, but they are good to hit the tabletop as it, with the irony being that they can't at the moment of course!

In other news, I've picked up a few more addtions for this Tau force, in the form of some Forgeworld resin! I've also gutted my 28mm 40k and AoS collections, as well as selling a bunch of surplus epic, so i'm not feeling too bad about adding a new army now, as it all fits neatly into a reclaimed storage box.

Anyhoo, photos below.

I'll start with the finished article, with some photos taken as the light fades now, and then below that is a dump of the whole process in chronological order... hopefully.

A Few Days Earlier...

Epic - Imperial Guard and Ad-Mech: Armies On Parade

Powering through the re-basing initiative and it's pretty satisfying to see the end result.
Today's post covers off the Imperial Guard and Adeptus Mechanicus forces.

In other news;

I'm starting a new army! (yeah, pretty sure this breaks about 3 of my hobby goals, but screw it! Also, i'm eBaying a tonne of 40k stuff that i'll never use, so it's hopefully going to cost me 'nothing')

I've ordered a bunch of Tau proxies from Vanguard/Onslaught Minis and i plan on blogging the whole process from unboxing to finish.

The Tau were too late to the game for 2nd Ed Space Marine, but there are rules for Netepic and the other systems.

Force composition wise it worked out well (considering what was left in stock). I think I've got around 4000pts of legal Netepic, with little wastage, and i'll likely just paint everything all at once just in case the numbers required for the other systems doesn't match up.

I've picked a colour scheme of Teal/Grey which hopefully doesn't match too much to any of my existing forces (see a 28mm sampler below).

Depending on how long it all takes to arrive I've also got some other stuff on the table...

Eldar infantry! - I've counted out what i have left and it's enough for a guardian host and some aspect warrior units, these will be done in my blue/white scheme and then i'll try to get all my Eldar on the same basing scheme.

Blood Angels Land Raiders and Rapiers - doing some more Land Raiders for the terminators in the old camo scheme.

30k Stuff - I've also got a Fellblade and some Sicarian tank proxies coming. I had to stop myself from starting a new Emperors Children legion, and instead i'll probably add these to my Iron Warriors for use with Imperius Dominatus.

Anyhoo! Imperial Guard and Ad-mech;