Fleet Parade

It is a happy thing to reach a milestone when involved in a large painting project. Today I feel as if I've reached a decent milestone.

I now have enough versatility in my painted PHR fleet that I can field a variety of options, including more frigates and different configurations of troop landing ships.

I do feel a bit short on Medeas though, really I do need two more to round out the fleet number to a healthy eight.

1500pt PHR Dropfleet Armada!

I managed to get 2 Calypsos done in 2 days during the work week, so I'm pretty happy with being able to have that progress. With the Scipio that I completed last week, I'm now able to field a 1500pt fleet for the gaming session that I was invited to on Thursday. VERY much looking forward to being able to play!

I'm horrified at the thought of how many damned gravity nullifier panels I have painted in this fleet.

I'm also thinking on whether or not I want to get a pack of the normal Echo corvettes. I am not in love

Close up of the Calypso

with the aesthetic of them, kind of preferring my weird Alien-esque scratch built ones but I'll admit, they are a horrific pain to build and the thought of building another 2 to 8 of them just exhausts me.

What do you guys think? Do you like the weird Echoes or should I be a conformist?

The Scipio is a nice centre piece model, which I'll admit, I feel like I was lacking a little bit in my Adepticon list last Spring.

What are you guys interested in seeing me paint next? I have the following on my plate:

• Finish the PHR fleet.
• Start the Shaltari fleet.
• Start the Shaltari ground forces.
• Start the Warhammer 40k Tau.

I'd love to hear your comments.

The Problem with Army Painter Spray Can Varnish

Notice the milky varnish on the helmets and gun points.
Fuck you, Army Painter!

Oh man, I'm royally disappointed.

In my last blog post I talked about how rarely I ever use a dullcoat varnish but that in the case of my Tau painting project that maybe I should break tradition because I didn't like how the gloss varnish was taking away from the weathered look of the models.

The truth is I got burned pretty hard using a matte varnish at one point where I spent almost an entire year painting up a Flames of War British desert themed army. If any of you have painted any kind of desert camo you know just how invoved it is to bring a model up to a nice cream colour that isn't ghosted by whatever you have as the underlayer.

Anyhow, I used an Army Painter spray can and almost immediately could see my models starting to fuzz up. In the end the entire army was ruined.

Flash forward about a decade and here I am looking for matte varnishes and I again got myself an Army Painter Matte Varnish thinking that it was surely a fluke last time.

The moment I started spraying I figured something was up and unfortunately the varnish came out all super milky and inconsistent on the models.

While they aren't completely ruined this time, the detailing on the models is very much lost. Truth is that at tabletop level they'll look just fine, but I certainly wouldn't enter them into any painting competitions now and again I find myself wondering why the fuck I went with Army Painter brand again.

All my crisp, clean lines are lost for the most part. So I think it's back to using Testors brand, which has been such a great and consistent brand for me.

Given this setback, I think I'll wait on finishing the rest of the Fire Warrior squad for now and instead work on something fun, like the Stealth Suits.

The part that really pisses me off is Army Painter looks like they've raised their prices on their varnish to $17 Canadian a can! If I'm paying $17 fucking dollars for a can of varnish, I expect some quality!

First Fire Warrior Done!

First Fire Warrior fresh from training.

How exciting! A new painting project! As with all painting projects, getting the first model finished takes a hell of a lot of time I find. Figuring out colour schemes, what exactly do you want this or that part of the model to do? It takes some time!

In the end I did a modification of StrikingScorpion82's Tau scheme. In this first test model I followed the majority of his scheme, though I did gloss over the weathering stages quite a bit with the Seraphim Sepia and now I kind of wish I hadn't.

I also did some of the paint chipping, which I think helped bring up some of the details in the lower parts of the model. I liked his scheme because you can bang out quite a few models in a relatively short amount of time while being conscious of attracting the viewer's eye to areas that you want to highlight as focal points. This is perfect for me because I've managed to acquire a decent chunk of a starter army with a nice starter boxed set, a pathfinder set, stealth suits and a firewarrior squad that a buddy of mine was getting rid of!

Another angle of the Fire Warrior.

I really don't want to fall into the trap of playing with unpainted models, so choosing a scheme that looks good but also paints up fast is very important.

For the first time in forever I'm really not sure if I like the glosscote on the model. I think I'll end up
going with a dull or a satin coat. Likely a satin because I wouldn't want the metalics to get lost underneath a dulling varnish.

I also opted to go with a fairly heavy style of base. In my mind I liked the contrast of the model's orange with a swampier looking base full of green mosses and bull rushes.

Anyhow, I will modify the scheme a bit I think, find places where I can speed up the process somewhat and focus in on the areas that will make the models look better. All told though, I'm pretty happy with the look! Let me know what you think in the comments!

A New Project: Robots of a Different Make

Starting with some Fire Warriors. Always a good choice.

It's been a good while since I've updated the blog. I went into a bit of a busy period just after Adepticon having changed employers and we had a garden to build.

Now that the dust has settled though I have a chance to update you all on some things that I'm doing:

• Adepticon: It was amazing! I'll definitely aim to go back next year. All told I came in about middle of the pack for both Dropzone Commander and Dropfleet Commander. At one point I was competing on the top table for Dropfleet but got my ass handed to me by a (Ahem) fairly beardy Shaltari list that really focused on gate spam. I met some really truly great people though and had some excellent games! Well worth all of the effort!
  
  In the end I got Best Sportsman in both tournaments! So I'm pretty chuffed about that!
  
• Dropzone/fleet Campaign: My friend James and I have decided to make a little bit of a campaign for ourselves utilizing some of the campaign rules for Dropzone/fleet. We play our first game on Thursday. I'll post separately on this as James has written the first scenario and it's pretty awesome! We're starting off small and then escalating into full scale tiny war!
  
• Robots of a Different Make: I LOVE DZC/DFC but I'll admit, it's pretty hard to find a community of regulars and I miss the hell out of being able to drop into a store and get a pickup game on the fly. After doing quite a bit of reading and hearing some seriously good things about the new 8th Edition coming out for Warhammer 40k I have decided to pull the trigger and get back into the hobby! After quite a bit of deliberation I opted to get back into one of my very favourite factions: The Tau. I LOVED the Tau when they first released and seeing their range of models now has only solidified that for me.
  
  I have started off with the basics: Troops and transports. Since I don't know what the options are going to look like for the Tau going into 8th, I figured that you can't really go wrong with painting up a bunch of troops and Devilfish. One would presumably always want abundant amounts of both! Plus troops can really wear on a person after a while so I figured I would get a head start and work on them in earnest while my enthusiasm is high. That way I can reward myself with the cool robots later.
  
  It's always such an agony picking out colour schemes. In this instance I have opted to do a variation of StrikingScorpion82's scheme. I'm still undecided if I'm going to go with an orange or a turquoise scheme at this point. My original Tau way back in the day were turquoise and looked fantastic but I've also never really used orange as a main colour before and in keeping with my projects over the last few years I've been trying to use colours that I don't usually use.