The Special Edition Tau Ethereal.
I love this model and he’ll make a great objective marker (you catch my drift). The model is surprisingly quick to paint as it’s not very complicated or large. Smaller models can often be more fun to paint because they’re quick so you don’t lose interest. Sometimes larger models that take longer tend to bore me as I am staring at the same model for too long.


The color scheme on this uses cool colors offset by the warm colors of the skin and gold bits. It never seemed right to me that a race originating from a dry arid world of savannahs and deserts would have evolved bluish-grey skin. Instead I took inspiration from Babylon 5 aliens and went with warm colors.

The formula for my Tau skin: basecoat with Vallejo Model Color (VMC): Gold Brown. Wash with Ogre Flesh Wash. Highlight again with VMC: Gold Brown. Then add Bleached Bone to the gold brown successively for highlights. Then mix golden brown with a little black for paint the spots and marking on the head. Start large and get progressively smaller as you get closer to the face.

The off-white of the inner robes was achieved by using white mixed with VMC: Stone Grey and purple and brown washes mixed together for shading. The cape is simply Shadow Grey highlighted by adding white.



In game terms, the Ethereal is rather disappointing. You get a large boost to your leadership but this is only important if you are fielding lots of Fire Warriors on foot and other static elements. Unfortunately, adding an Ethereal to your list builds in a serious liability. If he’s killed, your entire army must take leadership tests or fall back as per The Price of Failure special rule. That coupled with his poor armor, low toughness and lack of an invulnerable save, you’ve just purchased yourself a 50 point weakness that could lose you the game. Even in Imperial Guard Codex fluff, there is a story about a Ratling Sniper defeating an entire Mobilized Hunter Cadre with one-shot to the head of an Ethereal. Ridiculous! Who would go to war with such an important figure as that walking around? It’s not like George W. Bush went to the front lines in Iraq, did he? Why would an Ethereal?

Looking very gangster, the pose, the bright loose clothing and bling, very nice, I do like the Narn or to say it as a pun the N'aun. They are a great race in both aesthetic and character, it's nice to see how well they would translate.

Just to add a tiny piece of advice, you could reduce the image file size by cropping the large empty parts of the picture, this would help members with data caps or slower connections.

O'Shatta Hens,

Me likes!

I absolutely love your Tau's skin. The amphibian (or Narn) look really suits the Tau. Wish I'd thought of it!

Lovely work, great run down of your process and colour choices also.

In future could you crop the image closer to the subject before posting? the image size is a little large for ATT forum frame, cheers!

As for your sentiments, gaming wise, I tend to agree on their rather obvious lack of immediate utility. Gorgeous miniature though

- Tael.

O'Shatta Hens:

That is a paint job worthy of being found on a Limited Edition model. Excellent stuff. Well done indeed.

E.

At least it's not as bad as the Space Pope.

Wow, I really like the Narn inspired skin colouration.

G'Kar was one of my favourite characters from Bab 5. It was a sad day that I learnt he, Andreas Katsulas, and Dr Franklin, Richard Biggs, were now "exploring beyond the rim together."

Previously I was adamant that I would never model a Tau without his helmet, I am now inspired by this to also do any future Etherals and specifically do an unhelmeted Shas'ui with this colouration.

Very, very nice work!

On a fluff note - the Tau have blue to grey skin because their blood is largely composed of cobalt as opposed to the iron in human blood. The colour of an environment doesn't always play a role in the colour of a species- we evolved on a mostly green and blue world but we're not green or blue

Keep up the good work, duder - I'm yet to paint any Kroot or Ethereals yet so any inspiration on how to make non-bodyarmour look good is welcome and you've deffo done that!

Thanks for all the comments everyone! I'm still figuring out the cropping. Without photoshop, I can't figure out how to do it. Any suggestions? It'd be great to know as I have much more to showcase. I'm working on a whole set of new XV8s and 88s.

The Narn! That's who they were! I had forgotten. Only thing I remembered were their heads

Interesting note on the reasoning behind them having blue skin...cobalt, eh? Nice.

Download and install the GIMP. Just use the Selection tool to mark an area, then click on "Image" --> "Crop to Selection".

There's also a portable version that you can keep on a USB flash drive or other media (portable apps run great from a CD-R, too).

You can also use MS Paint, select the area you like, drag it to the top left corner of the image, and then scroll to the bottom right corner and 'drag' the corner marker up and left.