Tolk'fre Tau

It occurred to me this morning whilst doing some hoovering (gets you good brownie points with the wife!) that i hadnt actually put up any pictures of my Tau army. So here we go - the entire army in one post!

The original idea behind my Tau was to put together a 1000 point army as quickly and simply as possible. With previous armies i had always fallen in to the trap of trying to paint every model up to a display standard - this just doesnt work, mainly because its not unknown for me to spend upwards of 15 hours on a single model! Multiply that up and it means that you never finish a squad!
So for Tau, i chose a very simple paint scheme - Each model was undercoated with Citadel White Primer, then airbrushed with white Vallejo acrylic for a flat base coat. Each model then had certain key areas blocked in with Vallejo Cold Grey and finally the piping and edges were given a thinned coat of Stonewall grey. Tints were blocked in with Vallejo Scab Red. Each unit took about 6 hours of work, including sticking together and basing.

Now that the army is painted, and i've had some time to let it grow on me, i think the paint scheme looks good - although individual models are not even close to even my worst single miniatures, as a whole the army looks good. At some point in the future i'm gonna do a longer post on this subject (Painting vs. Army Building), but for the moment, enjoy the pictures..

HQ

 

Elites 

 

Troops 1

 

Troops 2

 

Heavy

Krieg trench

For a while ive had some of the wonderful Forge World Krieg models hanging around. I didnt want to waste them on a single unit for my guard army - they are such nice models they deserve something special!
Eventually i decided to put them together in a small diorama in a trench. Before i commit to the larger trench network however, i wanted to paint a single model up to see what the pit falls are, what works well and most importantly, what colours to use!
So here is my Krieg guardsman in his trench. Its heavily influenced by WW1 models by Richard Windrow (especially those in the book Advanced Terrain Modelling). Its also the first time i've used model snow - I think the effect looks good in "real life" (tm), but on camera it looks like dessicated coconut (or so my wife just told me!)
Comments as always welcome on painting and photography.

War Builder

So after my bemoaning the fact that GW doesnt make software for Mac for building armies (in this post) I felt that i should "put my money where my mouth is".

As some of you may know, by day i am a software engineer (I write music software), so i figured that i could write this as a little side project. And thus "War Builder" was born! At the moment its not quite ready to go (I'm still fighting a few small issues), but its all basically there.

War Builder lets you build 40K army lists, in a classic Mac OS style (i.e single window, lots of drag and drop etc). Its written in pure objective-c / cocoa, so unfortunately it will only work on OSX, but im sure there are lots of OSX users out there who would be interested in this application.

I intend to release War Builder (once finished) for free on this blog.

But at the moment one of my big problems is my lack of design skills! So im asking for help from the OSX wargaming / design community. What i need is a talented individual to draw me some icons for War Builder! There are a couple of limitations to this - I need the icons to be in the same style as other OS X applications (ie ultra glossy, hi definition etc) and they have to use no IP of Games Workshop (so no using the GW logos for Troops / HQ / Elites etc...). Once someone has stepped forward, i can give them a full list of all the icons needed. For a few examples of the types of icons that i would like, take a look at any of the Apple 'iApp' icons (such as iCal, iTunes etc), Firefox, Netnewswire etc...

I would also be interested if any budding authors out there would like to help me with designing some documentation (again, leave a comment on this post, and if possible a link to other technical documents that you have written).

I cant pay for this work (free application, coded in spare time == no budget!), but you would get a full credit in the about box, and a warm fuzzy feeling from contributing to the greater good!

If it sounds like something you would be interested in, leave me a comment on this post and ill be in contact (if possible please also post a link to some of your design work. I have a very specific vision for the graphics for this project, so apologies in advance if i turn someone down because their work doesnt match what im after)

And just to tease a little bit, here is a screen shot of War Builder running on my dev machine

PS - Just in case any one was wondering, no this wont replace your codex. War Builder (for obvious reasons) will not ship with any codex data - YOU WILL STILL NEED YOUR PAPER CODEX. Nor do i have any intention of providing this codex data, again for the obvious reasons. Everything within War Builder was created by myself and contains no IP from anyone else, I'd like to keep it that way!

PPS - If anyone would like to help me to test this, leave me a comment along with a system spec. Please note that War Builder needs Leopard to work properly. As far as i know it will work on a PPC machine (its built universal), but i dont have a PPC machine any more to test on, so its currently unknown as to if it will work properly...

Salute 06

So for a while i've had the free miniature given away at Salute 06 hanging around. I always liked the pose of the two models, but the casting was terrible on the one i recieved, so I'd never quite gotten around to painting it (and in the end it took a lot of work to get rid of the moulding errors)
Over christmas i had a bit of a dirth of miniatures to paint (shops closed, waiting for presents etc), so i decided to paint some of the models that i already had.
I'm sure that originally the two models were meant to be set in a specific time period, but i just painted them in ways that looked correct to me (so apologies to any "classical wargamers" who might have problems with the paint scheme!)
I've placed the models on a small piece of dirt surrounded by water. I wanted to give the impression that the two soldiers had fought their way to the waters edge and the one on his knees was preparing for his last stand.
I'm quite pleased with the way the model came out. The ground especially looks good (imho!), and the water effects turned out quite nicely (although it doesnt look quite as good in the photos), despite a near disaster with my masking tape breaking and the "water" leaking everywhere.
Comments welcome as always on both the miniature and the photography...

Forgeworld Ork Bust

Second attempt at painting this particular bust. I have to say, i really love this Ork model - Its quite an old resin piece, that i dont think they make any more. I picked it up many years ago when i still worked for GW. This particular model was stripped of paint and then re-painted recently when i ran out of things to paint over christmas.
I wanted to try to convey the power and brutality of an Ork, but also the stupidity, hence the "dribbling" effect around the mouth (this was a small amount of gloss varnish applied after the main face was painted). The only thing that im not 100% sure about is the gloss varnish on the antlers - I was attempting to make them look like heavily polished pieces of horn, but i think they look a little odd next to the completely matt skull.
Comments welcome as always on both the miniature and the photography...

 

 

 

 

Changing blog name....

I wanted to ask the advice of the blogspot community - has anyone changed the name of their blog? I want to change the name of my blog, but im worried that all my old posts / images / comments and readers will be lost - can anyone confirm what happens when you change your blogs name?

Aquila Folder

Recently ive been sorting out my mac file system so that things are a bit more organised and i found i needed a folder icon for my "wargaming stuff" folder. Once i'd created it, i figured that other people may like it. Here is what it looks like:

And you can download it here. The download includes all the PSD, PNG and ICNS images. Enjoy!