Tau Kill team

1st Concept

The Tau in the 40k universe are often jokingly refereed to as space communists, and I wanted to capture that with this paint scheme. In this concept, I was looking at how camo green would look with red shoulder pads or highlights. I ended up dropping this paint scheme in favor of my second concept.

2nd Concept

In this concept, I wanted to draw from the traditional communist colors to a cartoonish degree. I ended up choosing this concept because of the nice contrast all 3 colors supply to each other while still allowing the yellow to function as a striking highlight. Also, real life communism is horrid, and this makes the model more of a caricature or cartoon villain, which is what I was going for in the first place.

Priming

The first step was to prime the models in white. Although a lot of each model is black, I went with white to make it easier to get bright reds and yellows.

Base Coat

With just the base coat on, everything looks very bright and toy like, but I plan on applying a wash later, which will bring all those colors down. I’ll keep the wash off of all the colors I want to keep bright, like the yellow rails in on this model.

Wash

This is the same model with a wash of Agrax Earthshade applied. I’m not a fan of most of Game Workshop’s paints, but they excel at creating useful washes and technical paints.

Basing Texture

This is another GW paint, which does a good job of creating a gravely texture. I wanted to create a tundra battlefield with the basing of these minis so that the model contrasts nicely and doesn’t blend in with the base at all. This does mean that most of the base will end up covered, but I don’t know what parts, so the whole thing gets the texture.

Basing details

To get the snow effect, I used GW’s snow effect paint applied with a sculpting tool. The blood effect was applied with the always excellent Blood for a Blood God paint, also by GW. I always like weaving little stories into my art, and I think this is a good example of that. The warrior’s left foot has been injured and is bleeding. You can see this both on the foot and in the bloody footprint he leaves as he rushed forward into battle, heedless of his injury.