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Well after taking a couple of years off from gaming I decided to throw my hat back into the ring. I have always loved the Tau and their fellow kroot. When the Tau were originally released I put together a small 1500pt army. Here are some pics of that army:




Unfortunately, I sold this army in 2001 to pay for rent. Now that I am currently financially stable and have a little more painting experience, I decided to revisit the Tau. I really did not want to do any major conversions to the models because every model in my previous deathwing army was converted and I did not want to spend the same amount of time converting. I did decide to convert the suits using a design I saw on the Advance Tau tactica forum and utilized magnets to allow the flexibility of changing suit and hammerhead/devilfish weapon systems. Since I am a big fan of the Tau vehicles, I chose to put together a 2000pt Mech Tau list. The basic break down of the list is as follows:

5 Suits
5 Stealth Suits
24 FW
3 Devilfish
6 Piranhas
3 Hammerheads

I liked the colors I used on my previous Tau, but did not like the "gundam" mech feel with bright and crisp colors. I do like the more recent turn that some gamers have taken with the Tau, painting their models with more "realistic schemes” with camo and battle damage. Using similar colors from my previous army I wanted my new Tau to look a little battle hardened. Enough of my blabber, on to the models: (as always suggestions and comments are appreciated)

Full Army so Far


Hammer Head





Stealth Suits


FW


- Still working on the guns

Piranha


Devilfish-


Using magnets to convert devilfish into a hammerhead


The damaged engine was actually my attempt to cover up a mistake. Word of advice: Don’t handle your model after spraying it with sealer until you are sure it is dry. If you look closely you can see some fingerprints.
WIP pictures of the Suits




WIP Commander

Beautiful work. The weathering is just sublime. Wow.

May I please, please, please request a tutorial.

Infact, if you'd like to we could make this a Dakka feature on the site. You could do a tutorial and such- be the Tau painting flagship for new users AND veterans like me.

This content makes forums worth visiting!

Sweet jobs, welcome back to the fold.

Welcome back Gaalsien, great to see your work again. The dark green is very nice with the grey, and love the posing on those crisis suits. The flamer bitz are particularly well placed.

- Salvage

I love the poses for the suits. Usually I hate the suits but those are sweet.

ender502

I thought someone already had a tutorial for this type of weathering? I do think it should be a sticky if it isn't already.

Nice.

Tau are one army that is very easy to over-weather and make them lose the advanced tau technology feeling that they have. Your minis are great though and have managed to get the perfect balance between active combat and advanced military technology so congratualtions and thanks for sharing it with us!

Thank you for all the positive comments.

A lot of the ideas on how to weather the vehicles I got from the Piranha masterclass article found on the GW site.
http://us.games-workshop.com/games/40k/tau/painting/piranha/default.htm
Instead of using oil paints for the rust streaks I used ground pastels mixed with water. Pastels were also used for battle damage and exhaust stains.

I also used some techniques I found on the Testor model workshop website
http://www.scaleworkshop.com/workshop.htm
This is a great site with step by step video guides on everything from weathering to how to put decals on your model.

I just bought the Rapid insertion force, so I am going to have come up with 9 more different poses. Any Ideas?

By the way, if any one has any extra tau flamers please PM me. I would be willing to buy or trade for them. I need about 12 flamers to finish the nine suits.

wow, really nice models. i love the action you capture with your suits

very impressive. I am looking forward to seeing the suits painted up.

Ditto the others on the sweet suit action. The best part of it is that the poses you chose minimize the silly chicken-leg effect that the standing poses give them.

Can't wait for an update!

I love the blending of grays on the vehicles. Any chance you can let us know what greys are invloved?

The Crisis suits dynamic poses are divine, hope to see some paint on them soon!

One thing I really like is the green undersuit on the fire warriors. it adds just enough color to an otherwise color-less scheme, but it still makes the whole thing feel very militaristic without being gaudy. nice touch.

I have to leave now, otherwise I will want to start working on my Tau and not my orks.

In terms of the colors I used, well they are not GW or Vallejo, but rather good old Delta Ceramcoat craft paint. I used mostly Quaker grey and then Dolphin grey for the camo and trim. The paints are very thick and need to be watered down with a mixture of water, extender, and a flow enhancer. Given I was going to have to paint a lot of vehicles I decided to use these "cheaper" paints. I did discover a new technique in the process when I picked up a semi-opaque bottle of white paint for my highlights. The semi-opaque quality of the paint makes blending highlights extremely easy.

Grimteef

Glad to see you picked up on the use of the green for the skin suits. I knew that there was not a lot of color in this army so I tried to use green to bring some contrast. My only regret is that I should have made the camo scheme stand out a lot more by darkening the dolphin grey. Once I sprayed the sealer the Quaker grey darkened two shades almost blending with the dolphin grey.

Here are some pictures of the two other Hammerheads on one other devilfish. With these pictures you can actually see the camo scheme with the two tone greys.

Give me a guide

Try PMing the useer. He is not active on the foums.

Locking thread for Necron.