Fire Broadsides!

Greetings one and all! Well, they've been a little while coming but they're here and ready to follow the order: FIRE BROADSIDES!

Yep, finally joining their little autonomous buddies the Drones are their big manned (Tau'ed?) cousins the Broadside Battlesuits. I've talked a bit about the details of their construction and battle damage here so I'll leave that there. I will though mention a few thoughts about the models as they are the first Tau I've painted from the second wave of designs that came through, obviously there is now a third wave too but the point is valid. These are a huge improvement on the old "pin a pair of metal cannons on the back of a top heavy plastic model and call it good" school of Broadside. I will confess I was initially a bit "awww" that the client wanted the missile versions as I really like the "rifleman" railgun configuration. But these really grew on me and I can certainly see the tactical reason you would want them in this arrangement.

Painting wise, I was using the same mixes as the Drones and for the same reasons. I wanted the suits to look like they contained soldiers and bright saturated colours like Tau Light Ochre do not do that. Instead I kept the scheme down at the XV-88 end of the spectrum to have that military drab feel without losing the "Tau desert" scheme. I will say to anyone making one or more of these: Sub Assemblies are your friend as they are a beast to paint in one piece.

What do I mean by sub assemblies? Well, I'm talking leaving the arms, smart missile system and possibly the seeker missile off while painting and doing them separately with a view to adding them at the end. I very, very rarely do this as I think it causes problems with composition, shading, highlighting, all sorts. But once you've tried to basecoat the armour plates of one of these the with the three coats of XV-88 it takes to get a clean basecoat (assuming you want thinned nice flat paint with no brushstrokes) and doing so with all the fiddliness of getting around the obstructions? You'll wish you had left it in pieces. I certainly did. Lets just say XV-88 is no Tausept Ochre and draw a respectful veil over the loss of foundation paints once more.

Thankfully, once the basecoats were on the rest of the painting really was not that bad at all, even fun in places. The scheme complements nicely and I think using the green lenses as I went for makes for a more pleasing contrast than the red on the studio ones. The bullet holes (which I'm quite chuffed with) were built up in layers, first a pale version of the basecoat to look like chipped edges, then some dark brown/black/dab of plate mail metal to be the exposed and oxidised metal, then some shinier bits for the edges and finally a bright metal centre where the round impacted. I then got some Ammo enamel "Streaking Grime" and dirtied up the area around each impact to tie them into the armour rather than looking like shiny fried eggs on the surface. Some dusty weathering on the lower legs - careful washes of the basing colours - helped tie the model to it's environment and as usual helped with the "soldier not toy" vibe.

All in all, a challenging but not unenjoyable task. They are in their cardboard dropship now making their way to their new home and I wish them the best of luck getting past their shiny model syndrome as quickly as possible. As an aside, I've been reading Iain M Banks "Culture" series over the last few months and my view of the Tau is shifting in light of it. I love the idea of the drones having individual sentience rather than being slaved. It would make the Tau a really different race with machine intellect being granted equal status to organic. Ah well, in the Jeffiverse of the year 40,000 that is totally what is happening. Never mind what canon says eh?

TTFN

Droning On...

Hi folks, bit of a change of direction this week. I've got a commission for three Tau Broadside suits that I've made a start on. As a means of testing the colour scheme I started with the drones that will accompany them. Then thought... why should they not have a feature all of their own?

I've always been rather fond of the Tau drones. They speak to the high technology and more "modern" tactics of the Tau compared to the rather 40's and 50's approach beloved of the Imperium. For me, more than the suits, more than the tanks it is the drones that define the Tau as an army. So I was happy to be giving these some love.

The client has chosen a very missile heavy Broadside squad with seeker missiles attached so has wisely opted for a markerlight drone to accompany each one. The scheme for these are the classic sandy-Tau. This starts, oddly enough with a lot of black. Most of the machines and suits are actually painted black with just the armour panels in the distinct Sept schemes. Black, drybrushed grey with a black wash covers this nicely.  Then we move on to the sand, I'm not fond of the very, very bright sand colour that the studio use, shocking news to regular readers I am sure. Instead I kept it more to the XV-88 Base-paint end of the spectrum. My Tau Sand therefore is XV-88, a highlight mix of XV-88 and Tau Light Ochre and then Pure Tau Light Ochre.

A word on panel lines, they are very important to the look of the tau army. They are also a swine to paint neatly. There are a bunch of different ways ranging from the simple (just leave the base colour in the cracks, tricky to keep neat), through the complex (use an enamel paint to darken the panel lines and then use odourless turps to remove the excess) but my preferred method is to use very, very carefully applied washes. Agrax Earthshade, thinned a little is painted into the lines cleaning up any overspill with a clean damp brush as you go. Best way in my opinion.

I'll talk in more detail about painting when we get into broadsides but I felt that the little dudes needed some love too. Until next time folks

TTFN

On the Workbench: Bullet Holes and Broadsides

Greetings one and all, today we get to riddle things with holes and set stuff on fire, ooooh yeah!

Y'see, I've been asked to do a trio of Broadside suits for a client and mercifully, he wanted them modelling distinctly "mid-battle". Dirt, grime, fired missiles and that can also mean, battle damage. Now this makes me very happy as grimy Tau are best Tau in my opinion. But it also made me realise that this was a perfect opportunity to show you my method for making bullet hits. You'll need a source of heat (I used a candle, yeah, that's what we're setting fire to, sorry to lead you on but heck, you're reading now...) a couple of thicknesses of wire and some pliers or other wire-holding, hand-protecting gubbins. You'll notice there isn't that perennial go-to of bullet holes, the pin vice. That's because sadly, they don't work for this job. Bullets are not neat hole-generating devices, unless they go clean through thin materials, instead a survived hit on metal tends to look like this:

image source

So how do we create these? Well, in the bad old days of metal you had to drill out a bigger hole, fill it with green stuff and then shove something in to distend the "metal" out from the impact. When plastic is the material?

some of this will not be the best photography as I'm shooting one handed

Just heat a wire and stab the model. No really, it is that simple. You will need to play at getting the right temperature and practice the timings and such (sprue is great for that) but it isn't much more complex than that.

A good trick is to go in fast with the hot wire and then pause, wait for the wire to cool enough for the plastic to solidify again and then wiggle it out. You will leave streamers of plastic every now and again but they can be trimmed later, the upshot though is you are left with:

Gorgeous, damn near perfect bullet impacts for practically zero effort. You can push all the way through a plate and leave a crater in a surface behind it. You can push through across a corner or along a plate to leave a ricochet scar or a through-and-through. You can even use a hot knife to create claw marks where some metal-chomping Tyranid beasty has got at it. It's very versatile and will really reward some experimentation and practice.

The finished squad, all battle damaged and mid-combat. I've tried to change up the poses as much as I can but those legs are limited by the pins holding the ankle and the solid posed knee (would a two part leg have killed you GW?) make it tricky. After two variants of the pose I knew I had to do some modelling jiggery pokery on the third or look like a line dancing set. I removed the ankle pins and turned the - admittedly nice - braced pose into a stride. It's not easy though, and I suspect with the locked legs GW were trying to avoid this:

Being necessary while the glue dries. I get the impulse, but seriously, a deeper ankle joint and a hex shaped connector in the knee would have allowed for some more freedom in pose. Ah well, minor grumbles. But while we are talking modelling and modifying the GW kits, all of you should click on the picture below and check out what fellow Beard Bunker dweller Charlie has done with a Leman Russ:

I love it, gives the Russ a much, much more satisfying set of dimensions. Really inspired to retrofit all my company of Russes with the better true-scale battlecannons. Even found a company in Poland who make 1:48 scale Firefly barrels which will hopefully make nice Vanquisher cannons.

Well, that's all for today folks, happy modelling and

TTFN