So, as I mentioned briefly in the shoutbox, I painted up all my Tyranids yesterday. Here’s how it all went down.

I got up, milled about for a bit, and then set up my painting area by 11:30am. I had a better idea of how I wanted things arranged this time, so that helped. I looked over the Tyranid painting guide in the Battle for Macragge book. The ones in the book are painted up like those from Hive Fleet Behemoth. This means that their armour plates are blue and their skin is red. Not a fan of that combination, but I didn’t feel especially creative with the Tyranids, so I figured that was how I should proceed anyway.

Unfortunately, for the blue sections of the Tyranids, you’re supposed to use a turquoise colour. I have no turquoise. I figured it would be a simple enough matter to just mix up some paint and I’d be set. The fates conspired, however, and I couldn’t for the life of me get the colour I wanted. Worse yet, I was very nearly out of white at this point. So instead of doing it exactly like the book (which is even harder cause the foundation paints I have are not the same colours as the regular citadel paints), I just decided to dry brush the armour with a light blue. This, thankfully, turned out pretty good and I was getting energized about the whole thing again. Because I was already working on the Tyranids and would need to reuse all their colours for their scenery things (spawn points, whatever), I figured I’d do them at the same time. And the spore mines while I was at it.

After all the dry brushing was done, I set out to start doing the red basecoat. This was a bit trickier than I’d imagined it would be. For starters, the red I have is a bit duller than how they should look, so it was a bit difficult to eyeball, and having thoroughly destroyed all my brushes with my apparently-savage painting the day before, I had some trouble working it between all the highly detailed bug bits on the models. There were alot of black primer areas showing through the paint, so I had to do another coat. I eventually got it to look reasonable, though I might want to do some detail touch up later on.

I then moved on to highlighting. At first, I tried simply mixing white with red, but the pinkish mixture didn’t look so great. So I tried with a yellowish tinted mixture (can’t remember what I mixed now), and at first it looked better, but once I finished I wasn’t sold on it either. So, I then tried a dimmer pink colour for the edges and was pretty happy with that one. It doesn’t look AWESOME, but it looks decent enough, so I motored on. This is around when it became painfully clear that I need to really learn how to thin paints and apply more layers to achieve gradients. It’s all a learning experience and I’m glad I’m learning. The downside, of course, is that miniatures are expensive.

After that, I tackled doing the claws and teeth on the Genestealers. Only after I finished and looked at the book again did I realise that their claws are actually supposed to be a black/grey colour and not a bone colour. Oh well, I think it looks nice how it is. Artist license, right? I did the Termagants hooves and claws with the correct grey colour and it looked nice as well. I also did their guns in the same colour. In the book it looks kinda like their guns might actually be Boltgun Metal, but they’re supposed to be bio-engineered weapons, so I just made them a greyish colour. Somewhat of a half measure, if you will. As with the marines, the eyes and teeth were very hard to do. I had a decent time of it using a toothpick, but I imagine I might get better results with a pin. I’ll have to try that on my next mini-with-eyes.

Lastly, with the Oscars in the back ground and the hour getting late, I began basing all the minis. This was actually pretty fun. You “paint” some PVA glue on the base. This is basically woodworking glue. Then you just dip the mini in the sand and move him around a bit. Dust off the excess stuff and let him dry. Once dry, just paint it black and then once that dries, dry-brush it brown. It came out looking really nice, but I haven’t added any grass yet, as I’m not 100% sure how to do just little tufts of grass poking out of the rocks. I also took this opportunity to cover up some blemishes on the models with a bit of “mud” from the base. It blends stuff really well and looks really cool when it’s done. I finished this all by 11:30pm, exhausted and with the worst back pain ever. But it was very fun.

I don’t know why, but the time really flies while I’m doing this. I hope I don’t get sick of it too soon. Now all that remains from the Battle for Macragge is to do the scenery and then it’s all done. I also bought a Space Marine Commander for after that stuff so I have the bare minimum for a regular force (2 troop units and 1 HQ unit). I don’t know if I’ll blog all this stuff though, it might get pretty boring to read.

So much Warhammer, so little time! I actually finished all this earlier, but was too tired to post it until now.

I got up today at 8:30am, ate breakfast, and got set up to paint by 9am. I couldn’t wait to get started on my marines. At this point I was still a little worried about mixing my colours and whether or not I would use too much paint, or whatever else I might do wrong from the list of billions of things. I was determined, though, and got to it right away. I figured I’d use the instructions out of the Battle for Macragge book so I’d at least get somewhere to start from, even though I wasn’t going to be making ultramarines. So I started with dry brushing Boltgun Metal on their backpacks and their bolters. It was easy enough, and I wasn’t too worried about getting it in areas it wasn’t supposed to be as I’d be covering those later on.

After painting up the guns and backpacks, it was time to move onto the base coat of my custom brown. I knew from the Games Workshop website that I would need a 1:1 ratio of Cathan Brown and Codex Grey to get the shade I was looking for, but mixing it was another matter. I poured a little bit out of each tub onto a paper plate. What a mess! It sort of dribbles down the side of the tub making a huge hard-to-remove mess. I also think I poured out a bit more than I needed. Regardless, I tried mixing with this giant wooden toothpick I had, but that was a no go. It just sort of created these nifty swirls. So I tried mixing in a bit of water to help it mix. No, that just loosened it too much and made water swirls in addition. So I then mixed it around with this big brush I have. Still, the viscosity was kind of low, but I figured it was good enough and started painting away.

I painted up all the armour on the marines in one go. By the time I finished the last guy, the first one was dry, so I could start on the next step. Next I painted up their shoulder pads with a basecoat of Cathan brown so that when I painted them white later, it would look a little worn in the edges. After doing this, I looked over their armour and it looked a bit thin. I could see alot of the black primer, so I redid my paint mix. This time I mixed it in a tupperware container and didn’t add any water. I think the water bit was the most crucial. Leaving it out allowed the colour to flow a bit and get better coverage when it dried. Once I’d done the armor over, I mixed the paint again, only this time with white instead of grey to get a lighter shade. I used this to dry brush the highlights at the edges of the armour. I’m still kinda sucky at it, so it’s not pro quality or anything, but it started to really make the figures look complete so it was exciting all the same.

I then moved on to the shoulder pads. I painted them with a lighter beige sort of colour to get a gradient sort of effect for when I was going to dry brush them white. This didn’t work out so good, though. The problem being that my paints are foundation paints. You’re not supposed to layer them, so when I painted this beige over top, the colour underneath completely disappeared. It didn’t show at all. So I decided to immediately go back over them and just paint them solid white. It was a bit tough though cause the brush strokes were completely visible as I went over the shoulders. I had to add a bit more paint to get them to look clean. They’re not perfect, and they made the resin seam (that I forgot to shave off) really stand out, but they look snappy just the same.

I then trimmed the shoulders in gold and poked the brush between their arms to paint their chest eagles. This took some doing though, and I got a bit of paint on parts of the armour where I didn’t want it to be, but it really made the white shoulders look nice.

A couple of more passes of my custom brown to touch things up, some red for the eyes, more brown to touch up the mess, and some skin tones, and I was essentially done by 5pm. I still need to base them, and my back is really killing me, but it was great. The time just flew by really fast. Faster than most of my other hobbies. I can’t wait to paint up my Tyranids.

So, last night I spent some time assembling the Tyranids. The geneastealers were actually pretty easy to assemble. The Termagants, which you would think would be easy because there’s only two halves to each one, were not. This is because there were very slight variations between each one, particularly where their arm was, so that they would not easy fit with the wrong pieces. I only figured this out half way through forcing them together, but I eventually got it all sorted out. Even the ones that clearly were meant to fit together, didn’t really fit that great. I had to file the little peg down so it would fit in the matching hole. The other issue with gluing the Termagants is even when they were fitted up and glued together, their arms still didn’t quite reach their weapons. I didn’t want to spend the entire night holding their arms together, so I put glue between the joints and hoped for the best. I figured also that the basecoat might help unify it a bit better anyway. We’ll see how that works out later.

One thing that really stuck out was how they give you JUST enough bases, with one extra to spare. I thought that was quite odd. You’d think for how much you pay that they’d have the resources to give you at least a few more bases just in case you lose any. I didn’t lose any, thankfully.

After assembling everything and stretching my back (which had started to hurt something fierce from all the leaning over everything and focusing on tiny little creatures), I took everything downstairs to be sprayed. I’d never really done any spray painting before, so my parents were nice enough to show me how it’s done. I felt kinda dorky painting my Warhammer 40k stuff with my parents but whatever.

To basecoat them we set up a cardboard wall and some newspaper for them to sit on. We put them on used drink trays so they could be rotated. At first I was a bit worried that I was going to end up with too much paint on them, but pretty much regardless of how I sprayed them, they all turned out with a nice even coat. I had to lay the termagants on their sides to spray them so I’d get all the detail on their sides/underbelly. I left them there for a good 15-20min before flipping them over and spraying them again. Then I left the whole lot of them to dry overnight.

There’s really not much more to say about part 2 than that, so here’s some more pictures.

So, with the cancellation of Star Wars tonight and the fear of incurring back pain by spending any more time on the computer, I decided to take a crack at getting started on putting together all the fiddly bits from the Battle of Macragge box I bought the other day.

I also decided it might be fun to blog about the whole experience, beginning to end. Hopefully it’ll be fun. If not, then hopefully there’ll be pretty pictures along the way. Failing even that, then at least there’s other neat stuff on the intertubes.

First things first. As I briefly covered in my comment earlier, I went to Heroes World in Markham at lunch time the other day and looked over the 40k stuff. I’ve always been interested in getting Warhammer, but never got into it for various reasons. Now, though, my interest was greatly rekindled by reading a bit of Dark Heresy, the 40k RPG. So, I went into the store with the intention of finally getting some miniatures. I was looking to get the Battle of Macragge Hobby Set. It’s basically the same as the regular starter set, only it comes with a set of paints. Unfortunately, they didn’t have it in the store, but they had the regular version of the starter set.

I decided to look around for a bit at the various sets until Andre (the guy who runs the store) came over and asked if I wanted to try a demo. With some humming and hawing (I only have so much time at lunch, right?), I agreed to a quick run through. They have this cool battle board with the ruined buildings that you can buy, all painted up and everything. The miniatures they had in play were actually the ones from the set I was looking to get. Andre gave me the quick run down on the rules. I knew a bit, but I learned quite a bit more. For starters, even though it’s kind of obvious from Dawn of War, I didn’t realize that you’re actually supposed to move your marines (or what have you) as whole units. Basically they can all move 6 inches, but must end up no more than 2 inches apart from each other. If they are separated, then they need to spend a round regrouping and can’t attack anything. To be honest, I felt a little silly standing there, in my nice work clothes and coat, playing Warhammer on my lunch hour. But more importantly, it was fun.

I asked a few more questions about painting and army creation and everything before finally buying a starter set and a foundation paint hobby set. All in all, it was about $150 ($75 for the starter set, $65 for the hobby set), which is honestly quite a bit of money, but I don’t intend to pay that very often. I’m not amassing a huge combat force. Besides, it comes with 10 marines, which on their own would have cost $30. To be honest, I was most surprised about the paint set costing so much.

Andre eased the pain by tossing in a few free White Dwarf magazines for painting tips and such. Of course, I realized later that they were from last year, but whatever. This stuff doesn’t change much anyway, so I’m not too bothered by it. One of the magazines has this huge section on the revamp of the Dark Angels, which is cool. I’ve never been big on the idea of all-green armour, but I’m tempted to get some of their cloaked marines and incorporate them into my custom-army-with-no-name-yet.

So, as I mentioned before, I decided to get cracking. I’d already opened the box and fondled everything when I got it, but I really wanted to start putting things together. All of the pieces in the starter set are resin and attached to big sprue sheets. There are no pewter models here, which is a bit odd for me. The last time I tried painting a marine he was all metal and much heavier, so it’s a bit jarring to have the marines be so lightweight.

Using the handy-dandy clippers from the paint set I got, I began carefully cutting the marines and their accessories from the sprues. The starter set has simplified things by having the marines already pretty much built. All they need to have done is their arms and weapons glued on (and the arms and weapons are attached to each other, for the most part), and their backpacks glued on. I imagine the whole process is a bit more involved with a regular set of minis.

After separating just what I wanted to start with from the sprues: all 10 marines and the imperial guy, I began filing off the flash from the sprues where I couldn’t quite get close enough with the clippers. I used a snazzy purple nail file that was on hand. I felt so manly. I then set about gluing them to their bases. While some people paint all the parts individually before assembling the minis, I figured I might as well try it the way most people do it and assemble them before painting. After gluing them to their bases, I glued their backpacks on and then their arms/weapons. All in all, it was a pretty straightforward process. I was actually pretty impressed that I didn’t make a huge mess with glue everywhere. I only had a couple of cases where there was a bit of glue that needed to be wiped away. Of course, only after I’d glued most of them together did I start to worry that I was maybe not using enough glue, but a slight tug on the earliest glued bits and they were fused firmly to the body of the marine. The glue’s so effective, in fact, that it appears to have cracked a bit of the nozzle on the glue container itself. That’s tough stuff.

I did all of this on a few sheets of parchment paper (you know, for cooking) that did a good job of keeping the mess down. Of course, I’m not painting (yet!) so the mess was pretty minimal to begin with, but there were a couple of drops of glue on the sheets by the time I was all finished.

I often forget as to how small the little guys are. You see all kinds of macro pictures online and you start to think they’re action-figure sized or bigger. But they’re not. They’re minuscule little guys.

I actually took a handful of pictures last night, but I haven’t gotten them off the camera yet, and I’m at work. I’ll put them up when I get home. They’re not alot to look at, as I realized only after I’d assembled my first marine that it would’ve been good to start taking some pictures at the very beginning. Worse yet, the camera ran out of power after only a few shots, so I didn’t get to take a picture of all the marines standing at the ready. I’ll have to take some tonight when I get home.

Next up, I’ll be gluing together my Tyranids and priming my marines. I was originally thinking of forgoing the whole priming process, but I think I’ll do it anyway. It’ll help with shading and hiding my mistakes. I’m sure to make mistakes.

UPDATE: I added the pictures from the camera. I’ve also uploaded the rest of the images but will make the post regarding stage 2 later.

This is just plain cool. Check out this Space Marine Painter on Bolter and Chainsword. There’s also a bit of a how-to here.

What do you guys think of the paint scheme I’ve concocted? It’s a far cry from the days of the Panzies of Death, and only a slight improvement over my Gryphons.

I’m REALLY thinking of picking up the starter set now.