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So over the course of the years I've gone through 4 different armies, I started with tyranid, then switched to black templars moving on to the vanilla codex, then finally I've arrived at Tau. One thing that has held steady over the years though is that my painting skills have been TERRIBLE. I grew sick of looking at others' models knowing that I was nowhere near their level; so I hopped on down to the carkeek plaza GW store in seattle and the wonderful manager there spent about an hour teaching me all the finer details of basic technique, So I dedicate this blog to him (james I think it was) as none of it would be possible were it not for his painstaking paint tutorials.

So I begin the painting of my tau army with my kroot squads. Tbh I'd have an entire army of kroot if they had a codex, I love the models and the rustic native-americanesque vibe they give. I started off by coming up with a color scheme. I wanted them to have a nocturnal theme to them and so immediately I thought black. Black, however, seemed too easy to me as all i'd have to do would be to grab a can of black primer and bam! So I decided that their main color would be a darkish purple. So I did in fact start them off with a black primer and proceded to base coat them with a hormagaunt purple foundation. Now in my years of playing and noob painting I've always been a "straight from the pot" painter. I never knew about thinning them out with water until james helped me learn the technique so here are a few pics of my progress.





Now after they had dried I wanted the skin to pop out a little. I'd tried and failed miserably at dry brushing before, however, james taught me about using washes. I'd never even heard of washes before and I was pleased with what he showed me. I decided to give it a try with leviathan purple to try and get the desired effect I wanted, first time washing so hopefully it turns out well. I'm actually typing this while the wash is drying so we'll see how it goes but it looks like the hounds are doing the best with the wash.




Now here's what a kroot looks like after the wash had finished drying. I also began on the hair but more on that later.



Well I hope you've enjoyed everything so far, much more to come.

you're off to a good start my friend, cant wait to see more painting on these kroot

Like them so far-keep it up. the metallic sheen on the pruple from the wash is pretty cool. Or is it the camera... idk but I like it!

Nice to hear you got some help! Haven't seen your previous models but that looks like a good start on those new ones. You can also try adding another layer of wash after the frist has dried. It can give you a better result.

But good luck with your tau project! I'll be following this.

Looks great so far

Thanks for all the support so far! Here's another update!
First I simply just started painting the gun with a base coat of thinned Calthan brown foundation.



So from here I wanted to choose a color for the clothes, I ended up going with a base coat of knarloc green as I thought another brown would be a tad redundant with the guns being brown. I also decided that a little color on the body was needed so I drybrushed the "abdominals" with codex grey. I also put good ol' boltgun metal on the rifle barrel, grip and rear blade, and painted the strap green as well.


From this I thought it was looking pretty good, the fact that I hadn't started the hair yet though was a bummer to me and I tried all sorts of colors to try and see which would look best. Green, red, yellow, gold, silver, grey, black etc etc etc. I ended up just mixing the hormaguant foundation with about 2x as much skull white and it left a favorable result.


Then I simply just rewashed it the purples and the tummy with more leviathan purple, the gun and silver parts with badab black and the green with thrakka green!


I didn't really like what it did to the grey on the stomach so I'll probably redo it. But does any1 have any suggestions on what to highlight the beak portion with? And what color to make the eyes?

Very nice work. Did you do the bases as well?

I have a few of the bases done. That was probably the easiest part of it. I used a lot of premade/prepainted stuff.

Nice! I always find it more inspiring to paint when i learned a new technique or trick, and to see the result. Keep it up!

Purple and green is one of the best combinations of color, imo. Your painting looks nice. For the beak you could use a bone or parchment type color and then highlight that with a brighter white. For the eyes you might be able to get away with just a black wash on the face, that is if you like me and afraid to paint faces.

Also i was just at the Carkeek GW yesterday buying the eldar codex and james was super nice to me telling me about all the noob friendly stuff they do.

hey there guys, it sure has been awhile since I last posted, fyi newborn babies can take a lot of your time! So this is what I've been working on lately. I decided to start painting the tau portion of my army and after having failed miserably at trying to copy the white scheme on the GW website (the army feature one) I reprimed my army black (rather than white) and decided to come up with a scheme of my own.
Well the main idea I had was to try something metallic but in all honesty I've seen a bunch of metallic green tau and a tooooon of silver/gold combinations. I also wanted to see if other non-GW acrylic paints would do a good job in covering models, so I popped down to the hobbystore near my apartment and low and behold they had oodles of options which is nice cause I didnt want to spend the time painting inks or watered down paints over mythril silver. I decided to go with a blue/gold theme and grabbed a bottle of tamiya color metalic blue as well as the typical GW shining gold and ran home to test it out.



So here is what I've done so far with my piranha which is the first model I tried (I wanted to test it out on a vehicle first rather than a firewarrior) because I have plenty of them in my army and they're much easier to strip the paint off of than a hammerhead due to their size.
So first thing I learned is that metallic paints dont go so well on black, but the tamiya brand blue was wonderful and as you can see catches the light very nicely. I'll probably only have to touch up the blue but the gold will probably need a whole second coat (which now makes me wonder if tamiya makes a gold paint because it seems to go on better with one coat, is cheaper, and comes with a lot more compared to the GW paints. So at this point I'll probably finish the wings with the blue and the panels with silver and gold. Not really sure what to do with the "hood" of the piranha or the engine areas, or even the guns. Any suggestions there?



Here i quickly painted the drones, the gold has had a second coat and I covered the "thruster" area with mythril silver. I'll probably leave the body part of the drones black but once again, not too sure what to do with the guns. Sorry for the dim lighting btw, but I think the second coat of the gold makes it catch the light well like the blue does and they look pretty good together imo.

So what do you guys think? I'm always up for advice because this is first army I'm really trying to paint well. Also, what color do you think I should use for the sept markings?

For my golds and well all my metallics i choose a basing color similar to that of the metallic. For my golds i use a base of citadels foundation iyaden sun. for my grey metals i use astronomican grey. Other than that, looking good.

rokitchikin wrote:For my golds and well all my metallics i choose a basing color similar to that of the metallic. For my golds i use a base of citadels foundation iyaden sun. for my grey metals i use astronomican grey. Other than that, looking good.

Brilliant! I even have a pot of that lying around somewhere! i could base the blue areas with a blue too but i feel that its turning out well. but for the gold the iyaden it is!

Hey so I've been doing a bit more work and I just wanted to share it. I'm almost done with a squad of firewarriors (painted very briskly, trying to get it done before 'ard boyz).

But here's a good picture of my pre-highlighted scheme and modded finger :-)