June 2005 - Big Tanks and Tiny Details

I’m a big fan, Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Plant sized big fan, of the Tau tanks. Not only are they awesome to look at, but they are relatively easy to assemble and are quite effective in the game. If they have one flaw, it’s that they’re so nice that I found myself taking longer than expected to paint my first one. In my army list I had planned on taking 2 Hammerheads and 4 Devilfish, but after taking about five and a half weeks to paint one, somehow I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

“Why did it take five and a half weeks to paint a tank?” you ask. Once again, I have a few reasons for you. Any tank has a lot of flat panels and I find large flat panels the most difficult type of surface to paint. This is because I undercoat in black, so that I can work up from dark to light, and our paint is opaque, which means you can see what’s underneath it if it’s thin enough. This combination means that the colour looks “dirty” after one coat, unless it’s a really thick coat. If you do a thick coat the paint goes “streaky”, which to my eyes is worse than “dirty”. So the solution to get a nice, smooth, solid colour is to do several thin coats, each one drying completely before starting the next.

Secondly, Because I have chosen a three-colour pattern I had to use a large brush rather than a tank brush, so that I could keep the colours neat. This more than doubles the time it takes to paint a tank purely because of the amount of paint delivered in each brush stroke.

Finally, life. This month I visited my family in Mackay, North Queensland for a few days and I also spent 9 days in England for work. For these two weeks I did no work on my Tau at all!

So, I think I’ll cut back and aim for 4 tanks (2 Hammerheads and 2 Devilfish) and maybe throw in some Kroot instead?

One thing I have done with this tank that I have never done before is use a lot of transfers. Normally I just paint icons or symbols on my miniatures, but the Tau transfers and bonza and I’d have a hard time painting all those perfectly straight lines. Transfers are quite tricky for the unexperienced but I got some advice from some more enlightened than myself. They recommended decal softener as essential, especially for surfaces like the tank’s doors because of their curved shape. So I learned how to use transfers and am now a 747 jet engine sized fan of them as well.

Something I’m less of a fan of, maybe the size of a pinwheel, is filing off mould lines. In fact, I can’t think of anything more boring! This month I have assembled another 24 Fire Warriors, 6 Stealth suits and a Commander in Battlesuit. This is a lot of mould lines. Normally if I’m making a gaming army, which means not for a tournament or Golden Demon, I don’t bother filing off all mould lines, just really obvious ones. But, as this is a tournament army and will be scrutinized by expert judges, I thought I’d better get filing. My suggestion to those of you like me who find filing similar to visiting the seventh plane of hell is to set up in your lounge room with all your bits that need filing, a tray to file over and The Lord of The Rings trilogy playing to take your mind of what your doing.

I now have 1500pts of miniatures assembled and a few painted, enough to have a game. Time to find out how the blokes fare in battle…