First Foray into Airbrushing

I finally found some time to sit down and run some paint through my airbrush a few hours ago. This is the first time I've ever used one, so I have to admit I've been a little nervous as I wasn't sure what to expect.

I thought I'd start with something relatively simple for my first attempt - I've spray coated the interior detail of the Land Raider Terminus I've been working on, and decided to paint it Desert Yellow as a base coat.

First off, thinning - to begin with, I decanted the brand new pot of Desert Yellow into a dropper bottle, and cracked open my dropper bottle of Windex (which a number of painters I've spoken to swear by as a thinner - no, it doesn't tint your paint blue!). Since I usually brush-paint with a 1:1 mix of paint to water\flow-aid, I thought I'd start with this ratio as I've read that you want your airbrush paint to have the consistency of milk (which would be thinner than my normal mixes). Well, let me just say that this simply didn't work for me. After filling up the paint cup on the brush with a 1:1 mix and spraying the first piece (the larger roof panel), I found it way too thin to work with - coverage was horrible, exposing black undercoat at every edge, and running the air over the painted piece with no paint spraying out created pretty little explosions of paint as it sprayed to the edge of the piece and beyond.

Right, back to the drawing board. Much mixing and experimenting later, I found a 2:1 paint to thinner mix to be about right. All in all, it took about 30 minutes to airbrush the 8 pieces that comprises the interior. They've been sitting for about 2 hours now and are mostly touch-dry.

That's all for my update for now - nothing terribly exciting, but my first real air-brush experience. I'm looking forward to testing it out in much more depth over this weekend.

Back to undercoating the rest of the tank :)

Busy Weekend!

So, after waiting almost a week for it to stop pouring, I was able to get the Dullcoat on my Devastator squad to finally complete it.

Let me know what you think :)

I haven't been letting the wet weather completely stop me though, getting to work on my Land Raider Terminus Ultra as soon as I found the time over the weekend. This anti-armour specialist is one of five Land Raiders in an Armoured Spearhead and since it doesn't have any troop carrying capacity I thought I'd use the internal space to model a power generator to feed the massive 8 Lascannon's this beast drags around the battlefield!

After much cursing and finger slicing, I'm pretty happy with the result. The generator is made from the Hurricane Bolter arms of two Ironclad Dreadnought kits, clad with plasticard to hide the asymmetrical shape of the arms they were originally sculted to represent, and adorned with the missile launcher covers and Assault Drill chassis from the same dreadnought kit. The thickest wire I could find in a Bass Guitar String set provides the finishing touch. I'm yet to decide if I'm going to add more wiring - I had originally planned a far more complicated setup, with a number of pieces sitting on the floor in front of the generator, all wired together using thin wiring, then using the heavy cabling to run a wire from the centre to each Lascannon (representing the power feed to each gun). Each of the 12 bolters was also going to be wired into the pieces on the floor. However, I just couldn't jam that much stuff into the small space I had to work with, and I got the impression it would have been way too busy with that much wiring anyway. Will throw on a coat of paint and figure out whether I'll leave well enough alone, though comments would be greatly appreciated.

I also made some plasticard covers for the inside doors to finish off the internal space. I used a sharp needle-tool to etch some rudimentary armour coverings in the visible space to make it look like the same as the doors on the inside of weapons sponsons - it's pretty rough but you'll hardly be able to inspect it closely once the tank is built anyway. I spent the remaining time I had to put as much of the rest of the kit together ready for a primer coat once it stops raining.

Airbrushes Away!

So, after receiving my Iwata Eclipse HP-CS recently from Dick Blick, I had another 2 week wait for a compressor - very painful waiting on something you're excited to receive.

After prayers to the Emperor went ignored that it'd arrive on Friday in time for the weekend, what should appear first thing yesterday morning but my brand new Iwata IS925HT compressor! :) I have to say, while the shipping wasn't super-fast (a week and a bit from Adelaide), it was nicely packed and the guy even threw a few lollies in the box (an odd, but nice touch).

Fired it up for the first time last night, and whilst I didn't manage to get any paint through it, initial impressions are that the compressor is surprisingly small, very quiet, and sits conveniently on my painting desk without trying to escape via vibrations when it's filling the tank.

I'll play with it more on the weekend and post some first impressions once I run some paint through it.

In terms of hobbying, I've had a couple of really slow weeks. The Devastator squad is so close to finished I can almost taste it - threw the final Dullcoat on 3 of the guys last night and re-glued the annoying banner on the Sergeant. All that's left now is to put squad-number decals on the Sergeant and the Plasma Cannon marine (again...I hate decals falling off after they are perfectly placed!), then Dullcoat them. Once they're dry, 10 minutes, some PVA glue and some static grass should see them finally completed.

Then, on to my custom generator build to go inside the Terminus Ultra :D

Devastator WIP

Had hoped to finish these before I went to Auckland for a week, but what can you do eh? Still needs some finishing touches\tidy-up, then recoat Dark Angels Green and highlight Snot Green, and finally some static grass to tie the new resin bases in with the rest of my army.

Oh, and I'm pretty darn proud of the standard - the pic is blurry and whilst it's not perfect, this'd have to easily be my best freehand attempt at the DA logo. Final pics will come as soon as I get back and polish this unit off - then I can finally start on my Land Raider squadron :)

25k Apoc Army List

So, my Devastator squad is almost done, and I'll be posting pics no matter what state they're in today. In the meantime, I've just published my 25k apocalypse army list I'm building towards - I've got about 4000pts collected so far, but I've got no plans to rush purchases much faster than I can paint what I'm buying :)