November Commitment "Complete"

Okay, that's a lie - it's not 100% finished... but it's damn close!

I was more or less finished but then decided to go all-out on the decals and use the Forge World 'wings'. This has turned out to be a pretty lengthy, painstaking process and, because I'm away now until December 1st, I will technically fail this months commitment...

However, I think it's looking pretty damn good so far and with all the time I've been spending playing XCOM this month... it is not a bad achievement.

PEWPEWPEWZOOOOOOOOOM

Remaining to-do items are:

1. Apply wing decals to left side.
2. Smooth out some dodgy decal work and seal them all with varnish.
3. Finishing touches on the various lenses.
4. Glue the crew in (plots and door gunners were painted separately).
5. Add some scorching around the weapon barrels and exhausts.
6. Matte varnish the whole thing.

Probably a couple of evenings work in there plus some daylight for the spray varnishing!

For December, since unfortunately there will be no 'Nidsmas, I'm going to be a bit non-committal. What I end up spending time on will totally depend on what I pick up over the holidays. I was thinking that I would get some of the new Tyranids and commit to painting them up but alas... that will have to be a side-project for the new year.

Most likely I will start working through my various 'minor' character models over the course of December. If I can get a HQ choice or two done, I will be only one troops choice away from a fully painted legal army.

November Update

Since it would appear that the Chaos gods have something other than painting in mind for me tonight (a broken dishwasher is surely the work of Tzeentch)... I thought I'd post a quick update.

I've gotten one LRBT turret pretty much finished, with some very basic weathering:

Not sure how well the effects show in those pictures but basically I added soot around the gun barrel, 'distressed' the larger decals a bit and sponged some metallics around the sharp edges and protrusions like handles etc. I've yet to do much with the powders - looks like I'm just going to paint everything to this stage and play around with more advanced techniques some day in the future. My goal here is to get a painted army, need to focus on that. It wasn't a total waste of time but really the main thing I've learned is that it's a whole other exercise learning to do this properly.

Also got the flyer base pretty much done, apart from grass:

Apparently I suck at painting concrete.

The crew are also taking shape - I'll do a few more details on them but they're essentially done (the pilots will be almost invisible anyway so not spending too much time on them...):

And the colour white.

I thought my pilots should have brightly coloured helmets, like in Top Gun... I might add some decals as I think that's actually the effect I had in my head :/

I really like the Pig Iron heads on the gunners. There was a time when the whole army would have been these heads on normal GW Cadian bodies... then I discovered Forge World and my fate was sealed... curse you Elysians!

November Commitment Decision

So, I've decided to go ahead with the Vendetta as my hobby commitment for this month. It's a much bigger task than a squad of dudes but it's (roughly) 50% done already so it should be achievable.

Next step: Err... paint things.

The crew aren't glued so they'll be pulled and painted separately, along with the door gunners.

Painting giant vehicles is hard... at least there's a nice interesting (and easy) base to paint.

I'll also be progressing work on my weathering experiments, seen in their 'pre' state below:

Extra armor and random bits - that's what building tanks is all about!

While I work on these, I'm going to get the flight stand and the crew of the Vendetta done (in that order). The weapons are already finished painting and are magnetized, though I won't be painting any of the other weapon options right now. At some point I'll devote a months commitment to magnetizing and painting all of the extra weapon options that I want for all three of my flyers...

At the very least I plan to have the Vendetta painted, with decals and a coat of matte varnish applied by the end of the month - any weathering will possibly have to wait until I've gained a bit of confidence on the various techniques (I don't want to ruin such a large model...).