February Hobby Wrapup

February is fading from sight in the rearview mirror, so before it's completely out of sight I thought I'd say a few words giving myself a hobby report card.

• Empire Swordsmen - A+. Nailed it.  I finished painting all six swordsmen and even got a blog post in about it that you can read here.
• Bloodletters - F.  I pulled these guys out of storage and then they sat on my desk scowling at me the whole month. I hear Khorne is intolerant of failure, so I expect some kind of retribution.
• Riptide - B-. I got some more paint on this guy and started in on his line highlighting. Not done, but not forgotten.

Riptide of Joy and Suffering

I started his line highlighting up around where the head attaches so I could get that bit glued in.  The arms and shield are being held together with bluetac for the picture.  I want to get them and the torso finished before gluing them on permanently.

For March, I think I'll leave the bloodletters on the desk.  There's really not that much left to do on them.  Of course I'll continue work on the riptide, but instead of thinking I'll get it done I think I'll set a more modest goal, like getting the torso and arms finished.

I've also got a band of Warhammer Fantasy Orcs sitting on my desk that just need to be based.  I'm thinking I'll just sprinkle some static grass onto them and call it done.

Waaaauuuuugh!!!

Riptide of Joy and Suffering

I remain, as always, a slow painter. Do you also paint slowly? I feel like a couple hours of painting only gets me through one little section on a large model or that I just get one color laid down on a squad of miniatures.  C'est la vie, I suppose.  I should give up on any dreams I had of being a professional painter.  It would take much too long for anyone to want to hire me.

I wouldn't want to hire me.

Clank Clank I'm a tank.

The base colors on my Tau are Bastion Grey from Privateer Press and Mecharius Solar Orange from Games Workshop. Both paints need two coats to get proper coverage, but for different reasons.  The grey is very thin and lets a lot of the primer show through so two coats are necessary to get a smooth finish.  The orange is extremely thick, and remains so no matter how much water I add.  My brush seems to end up pushing globs of paint around and it takes two coats to smooth it all out.

It's time consuming.

I might get one more evening of painting in on the Riptide before I set it aside to tackle some of this month's other projects. I pulled out a reference model from my empire army so I will go ahead and tackle the six empire swordsmen on this month's todo list.

Cairn Wraith and Riptide Wrapup

Well, January is all over except for the crying so let's wrap up this month's hobby goals. I wanted to get my Empire Engineer, Cairn Wraith and Riptide finished up in January and I met some of the goals.  You can see my engineer in this post and I also managed to wrap up the Cairn Wraith.

spooooky

I'm pleased with how he turned out.  I did try to put some nicks on the weapon haft but I don't think they came out very well so I'm going to go back and repaint bone over the top of them to smooth it out.  

The Riptide did not get finished, but I did make more progress on it than I thought I would at the beginning of the month.  It's a large model with a lot of pieces that took a long time to clean and assemble.  I thought that I might only get the subassemblies primed but I did manage to steal a few nights of paint time to get a basecoat on parts of it.

So many pieces...

So the Riptide will carry over into February. I'll also be looking to get a few more empire swordsmen painted up and to put the finishing touches on a big group of khorne bloodletters.  It's quite a mob of models, but the bloodletters are already halfway done so I don't expect they'll take a lot of time to finish up.

That's a lot of demons.

Painted: Battlesuits and Weapons

Last night I finished up the weapons for my Tau Battlesuit squad.

I magnetized all the weapon options that come in the kit so it took a little while to do all the fiddly line highlighting on each weapon.  Still, I think the overall effect is pretty good.

The magnets I used are a little bit small, and even though I doubled up the connection still feels a little wobbly.  I'm worried about the weapons coming off during gameplay and losing them. I'm not sure what I'd do differently if I were to do it all over again since the magnets were the largest I could possibly use on the small weapons.

One day left and one project to go to get my project list done for the new year. Harlan Versh here I come!