May 2005 - A Choice of Colours

Month two of twelve and I’ve got an army list, some cool ideas and I’m not gonna lie to ya, things got freaky, two Hammerhead gunships stuck together.

Time to make some decisions, specifically related to colour scheme. Since the Tau army was released I have painted a grand total of two Tau figures. One was a Crisis Battlesuit in an orange and bone colour scheme, and one Fire Warrior in a turquoise and white colour scheme. Neither scheme particularly inspired me at all and I’ve been struggling to figure out one that I would want to paint an army in. But inspiration comes from weird places…

I was sitting on a platform waiting for a train one day and I saw a billboard advertisement for a range of bread loaves and I was blankly staring at it daydreaming. I then noticed the colours one of the bread wrappers was. A medium green, bordered by dark green and finally bordered by white. For some bizarre reason that bread spoke Tau to me?

So I stuck together a Crisis Battlesuit to try out the colour scheme. When I try out a colour scheme I normally paint a unit leader or my army commander to set the tone for the army. For me, Battlesuits embody the Tau fighting forces and so that would be my benchmark model. I painted one leg in Snot Green, Dark Angels Green and Skull White colour scheme and was quite pleased with the result. I showed it to Alex Murray of GW Parramatta, who is an excellent painter, to see what he thought. He suggested that I should try substituting more military colours, i.e. Camo Green, Catachan Green and Skull White. I tried this on the other leg and it looked good also. Damn suggestions had put another choice before me. With all these choices slowing me down I decided to get others to decide which colour scheme I’d choose and I would stick together fire warriors instead.

Alex took a tally of people’s opinion on which colour scheme I should paint in the Parra hobby centre and I went home. After a week, the more traditional, Snot/ Dark Angels combo just won out, and I had got together 11 Fire Warriors, 7 Pathfinders and a Devilfish. It’s almost starting to look like an army.

I finished painting the entire Battlesuit, with a lot of going over bits as I worked out what colours should go where, and finally I have a Tau model that I am completely happy with. I have also now done a Fire Warrior and have started a Hammerhead. This will give me one of each size of model in the army as a basis for the rest. This could actually work out pretty good?