I wasn't able to attend
the mid-year Fratris event in 2013, so we move forward an entire year now as my
2013 Standish Standoff army comes together. As you can see each year I try and
build a new army then change it up adding in new units for each Standoff. It is
the deadline to force me to complete projects by. This year I took a major
shift and changed up armies completely. Originally I wanted to do a nice winter
camo style theme for the army. I wanted to use a Space wolf grey type grey/blue
coloring for the armor. The new Badger gaming line of airbrush paint had just
come out when I started the project and I promptly ordered several bottles of
"Werewolf Grey" thinking this would be their version of Space Wolf
grey. Boy was it not. It turned out to be more of a robin’s egg blue or UN blue
than anything else. It was a nightmare to apply via airbrush requiring several
(read 6-7) thin coats to get a good solid color down. It’s not all the colors
in the range, in fact I find most of them to work wonderfully. Just this color
is so thin and light it takes tons of coats to go down.
So after spraying down a
number of models and not seeing a great way to change them up quickly I decided
instead to run with it. Most everything I had painted up until now was dark. I
used a lot of washing to help shade models and this inherently darkens the
models. So I set myself some painting goals for this army. After seeing Steve's
Daemon army and how bright it was I wanted to paint much brighter. Also as
bemoaned several times in the previous articles, I needed to learn how to edge
highlight my models (thanks Tony). So I set forth with those two goals in mind
for this army. Something I will rue (the very hard to base blue) as I go to add
models to the army in the future, but for now I wanted to improve my painting
skills.
Today we are going to go
over the first half of the Tau Force and the painting formula and techniques I
used. These days I prime basically everything a nice mid tone grey. Since I
airbrush on my base coat after that I wanted something that I could get even
coverage with most every color. My base coat for these models is Minitaire
werewolf blue. Once this was laid down nice and smooth across the model. I
start inking the recesses in the model black. I used a mix of black paint,
black ink and thinner at pretty much a 1:1:1 ratio. This gave me a deep dark
black that ran along the recesses. I found that if I first traced out the
recess with water in the brush I could get the ink/paint mix to flow along the
recess without coming out. This is how I got all the black lines along the
model. Then I edge highlighted using a mix of Snow Shadow and Pure White from
the reaper master series. This gives a nice cool white paint that matches
nicely with the blue base. 
For lenses I did your typical gem effect using
greens and reds. For a nice detail contrasting color I ended up settling on a
pumpkin orange. I really felt this helped the model to PoP! It also helped fall
into the brightness color style I wanted to do with these models. So I picked
out all the missles for the missle pods with orange, as well as some sensor
nodes and details across the army. Of all the choices I made this orange really
helped to bring the army to the next level and just give it some flair and
style. As you can see on the Commander I also painted up a set of Flamers for
him to swap out with, I didn’t end up using them at this point with the army
but they would be used later when I would run a buff commander version of him
rather than a Farsight enclave Commander.
When building my crisis
teams I gave each unit of three a different shoulder mounted wargear option
bit. This was to help mark units, they would all have the same bit. This helped
in case I got them all into a large mixed melee bash or clustered together on
the table. Join us next week for a list break down and the second third of the models, Riptide, Broadsides and Kroot.
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