Hi guys, my first post here aside from my profile post so I hope you go easy if I've unexpectedly broken any rules.

Last year a group of my friends got me back into 40k and I managed to score a pretty decent Tau army off one of my friends in exchange for a surplus video card. Anyway I've been slowly building on a pretty decent base of miniatures and essentially wanted to just show 'em off as I've received so much inspiration from this site and understand that seeing other people's ideas can spark your own unique ideas and get your creative juices flowing!

You'll probably notice some ideas from the site here used on these miniatures like the "drone heads" on some of my battlesuits and the modded jetpacks so I hope no-one minds if I used an idea I saw here (Been lurking for a while you see).

My army doesn't really have much fluff for it at the moment. Essentially it's a cadre led by one of O'Shovah's hand picked elites, O'Kara. As such she was allowed a group of Earth Caste Tau to build her the Dawn Spire, a larger but similar powered emulation of the Dawn Blade. The Dawn Spire incorporates 2 blades connected by a long staff, the increase in weapon size necessary to incorporate the energy systems required to power it.

They're not the best pics but pretty much all of these guys are still at least a LITTLE bit WIP(As in they need some clearing up of their paint jobs and glow effects and such added).

O'Kara and retinue


O'kara and retinue (Only the painted ones this time)


O'Kara charging into battle. Since this photo I've actually drilled through both dawn blade pieces and the hand holding the blade and extended the length of the dawn spire (and made it a million times more sturdy :p) using a long piece of metal from my pinning kit. It's also wrapped in green stuff to make it look like a grip rather than just a long rod. Will get pics soon I hope.


One of O'Kara's retinue




Other of her retinue that is painted so far



And the last of her retinue so far, not yet painted and is simply a counts-as XV-8 with Twin Linked Melta, just wanted to make my Farsight bomb look a little more menacing



Regular battlesuit squad



SDT with partially painted glow effects


Heavy support


XV-9 Gunbuster as was theorised in another thread on here. I'm a big anime fan so making one of these was not a question of "if" but rather "when"



Annnnnnnnnnnnd the beginning of a group of Special forces warriors

Errrr ..... These guys do look really mean. I mean that one with the chainsaw... that is a bigger chainsaw a Khorne Beserker could wield...
Where are all these big guns from? They look very cool and suit pretty amazing on that XV-9s!

Great work, keep it up!

They're all weapon option packs from Hobby Link Japan that I found thanks to whoever first came up with the idea for the Gunbuster (The anime reference keeps on making me giggle :p). The massive chainsaw and the weapon I used for the melta are in a different weapon pack from the railguns. I actually bought a few different weapon packs since my farsight bomb does get itself into CC usually and I wanted to mod them up with hand to hand weapons that look like they'd be suited for the job. Rather than having to imagine them bludgeoning troops with the end of their plasma rifles or something :p

Ideally I'd use the chainsaw as a power weapon but I'm not really that comfortable with diving in and creating my own rules as of the moment. But fluffwise it'd be a "Fusion saw" or something along those lines, essentially a construction tool modified for combat and jacked into the high power generator of the XV-9.

Im also a big fan of anime.
You did a verry good job with te guns and the chainsaw.
Keep them comming

I love the chainsaw battle suit, I think you should remake your commander with that same battle suit body as it can look a bit more feminine.

I hope this isn't considered thread necromancy since it has been a year since I made the thread but for a long while I was living in a small apartment with no dedicated hobby space so very little got done on my army. Anyhow I recently started collecting some of the new Dark Eldar and figured before I get too overzealous collecting a new army I really should give my Tau some love, especially since I now am in a different place with a dedicated hobby desk.

So while I was happy with the general idea behind my army's paint scheme (jungle camo with solid armour colours) my previous job on it just feels so sloppy now. The camo was way too bright and the solid colours weren't finished properly. Using Badab Black wash rather liberally and doing multiple coats for the solid colours (The Fortress Gray armour for example) has left me feeling a lot more satisfied and working out the best order to paint in has given me much more drive to get my force painted up so I can field an army I'm both happy with listwise and visually.

At the moment I've only painted up 3 firewarriors and this Hammerhead in the new scheme. Also the XV9 "Gunbuster" in it's own custom scheme.
I think the pics worked out pretty good for phone camera pics





The Hammerhead was a secondhand, barely painted, model when I got it. As such though it didn't have its burst cannon turrets so I had to ebay for the actual burst cannons, then kitbash some regular gun drones to operate as mounts. I think the result is pretty great, they still rotate vertically thanks to those little domes on the carbines fitting perfectly into the mounts on the burst cannons.






I tried to convert the Firewarriors a bit to make them look a bit more interesting.
One here is equipped with a charger pack that uses a fusion blaster canister to provide a power boost and mounts a spare carbine on a charging rack.
The other converted one has a ridiculously long custom pulse rifle and advanced optics to aim it.





And here's the XV9 "Gunbuster" custom Broadside.

Just looking at all your models and how you have put them together and modified them is giving me the Modelers Itch, I had it all last night leaving me with a very strange and modified broadside of my own which is now painted (pictures to be delivered soon). I love all of it and must thank you for a website to pull "toys" from.

Oh and if you had not resurrected this post I would probably never have found it so thank you again.

Very well done! No need to worry about resurrecting your old post; there is no issue if you were the original poster.

I really like the guns you used for the XV9 at the bottom. The other models look good too, although I think you should brighten up the highlights on the gray a little bit.

Cheers guys!
Glad to know my models can inspire like so many of the other frankly ridiculously well painted/converted models on this site. Seriously some of the stuff on this site leaves me gobsmacked!

Oh and while I had seen HLJ before seeing links on this site, the links to the railguns are thanks to paulson games and his mockup in this thread.

Heh, there actually aren't any highlights painted on these guys Wolfs16. I might go back later and add some but this much painting is already quite time consuming so I'll be working through the meat of my army before any highlighting occurs. I'm just not very well practiced in highlighting you see.

Edit: Added link

Please watch the size of the pictures; there's some lateral scrolling necessary, I'm afraid. And no, it's not threadomancy as it's your own thread for one thing and we allow threadomancy as long as the additional posts add something of value to the previous ones.

Welcome back to the world of model building, btw.

E.

So I finished painting and basing my Firewarrior squad. Figured I'd grab the dodgy old digital camera I have lying around my room and take some macro shots of them outside.

Will try and keep the pictures smaller this time, resized them to 640x480 on Photobucket (don't know why that first one is staying so big though :/ )

Anyway, hope you enjoy the pics!

Very nice! They look great in the field.

I really like the little conversions scattered throughout. They're all done well and I'm sure I missed of few of them because they blend so well with the models.

My favorite part about your cadre so far is the skin on you FW. How did you paint that? It looks fantastic!

Wow, mate, those came out very nice.

The XV9 looks great!

I missed your work the first time around, glad you posted again to bring the topic back up!

It is enjoyable to work through your collection and see all the subtle to overt conversion work which makes this Cadre your own. It is really in contrast seeing some Original Battlesuits in amongst them, let alone on ATT (I can't recall the last unmodified suit I saw)

The Pathfinder sniper with modded helm was a smart conversion, and though I'm no major uber-suit mecha fan, your choice of parts was fun to see put together.

Solid collection of personalised figures, certainly look forward to you expanding the cadre.

- Tael.
The RSPCV states : Many Vesa were taken offline in the production of this cadre

Thanks guys!
I've got to say conversions are one of my favourite things about making a 40k army. From many years ago when I was collecting Ultramarines to now with my collecting Tau, and also starting a DE army which I've just been working on a paint scheme for, I've absolutely loved the creative freedom of conversions. It also means you don't waste all those little random bitz lying around!

With our Firewarriors I felt they lacked a bit of character (don't get me wrong, the base models still look great), all lined up in gunlines with little variation, so I wanted to try and give them different battlefield roles and a look as if they've customized their own gear loadouts and weapons over time. At the same time I didn't want to make them look crazy different from each other, a force still needs unity!

My 2 favourite conversions in the group are the sniper with the modified helmet and the FW with the charger pack. The modified helmet is made out of a battlesuit target lock and some greenstuff to smooth it to the helmet lines, along with 2 small barrel stubs from the end of a burst cannon as extra antennas... Or ventilation... Or something
The FW with the charger pack is meant to provide in the field recharging of rifles/carbines and has a pack mounted plug for charger of larger equipment such as drones or even battlesuit systems in an emergency. The pack is built from a standard FW pack retrofitted with a modified battlesuit weapon system power supply. The charger rail the spare carbine is mounted on is built from the underslung rail/grenade launcher thingy from a carbine.

Tau really lend themselves to conversion though. All those clean lines and flat panels are quite a contrast to other armies, which are rife with little random details, and are just begging to have custom detail added. Battlesuits are especially perfect for it as it's so easy to make added bitz and conversions look like a natural part of the mini!

Lynu: The skin on the FWs was really quite simple and easy to achieve, so glad you liked it. When I was doing it I wasn't sure if it'd be enough but I was quite happy with the result. Can't remember the paint names right now, but when I get home I'll chuck another little post up with the paint names. Anyway I simply painted the heads a dark blue, then washed with Badab Black, then drybrushed over the face and head with a light blue. It's probably too hard to see from the pics but I painted in the eyes with Liche Purple. I felt the single eye colour worked with their "alien-ness". Personally I don't like standard white with black pupils type eyes on Tau, even if it might be more in Canon (I don't know if it is honestly?).

OK, I painted the heads Enchanted Blue, then washed with Badab Black, then drybrushed over the face and head with Ice Blue.
And yeah the eyes are Liche Purple -_^

So I mentioned I've also started collecting DE, well I'm not especially planning to focus on them right now but after finishing this Firewarrior squad I couldn't help but want to have a go at one of the excellent Wych minis that I'd already put together and undercoated. So after a LOT of drybrushing (most of the colours have been drybrushed onto here, at least before the wash) I now have a paint scheme I like for my Dark Eldar. One which seems to be relatively speedy compared to painting my Tau







And this last pic is one I took to remind myself of the paints I used/order I put 'em on in. So essentially it goes left to right, with only a few of the colours re-applied after the wash to brighten them/hilight bitz...

Since for now I'm working on this squad of Wyches I figured I'd better start up a separate thread for my Dark Eldar. After all it'll eventually be filled with pics of an entire DE army!
So for pics of my Dark Eldar go here!

I added pics of my first painted Wych and these guys there...



I won't be posting any more DE pics here, only in that other thread. Stay tuned here for more Tau! (When I actually finish some more that is )

Created a FireWarrior Field Medic with Medical Drone last night to go with my FireWarrior squads.

The Medical Drone is equipped with 2 surgical lasers, one of them multifunction to allow other functions from cutting, such as anesthetization. It also has an emitter stem at the back allowing it to dispense various medicines for use by the Field Medic.

The Field Medic is holding the miniaturized handheld Medical Drone controller in one hand and a multifunction "Medic Gun" in the other hand. The Medic Gun features a jet injector in the top section and a multifunction surgical laser in the bottom section. The medic can use items from the drone emitter stem in the jet injector, they also have numerous pouches on their armour to hold extra tools and items.

I am lovin the medic man!

Cheers dude!

So my commander O'Kara (Commander Farsight counts-as) mini has been mostly painted up for a looooooooong time, I think I even considered her finished at some point, there's some pics at the top of the page of how the unit was before. Anyway since then I decided I was not happy with the paint job and also wanted to change some of the details, so I did!

Previously the "Dawn Spire," designed with Tau technology to provide equivalent power to O'Shovah's Dawn Blade, wasn't as long and was just glued together. Now I've gone ahead and made the handle longer and more sturdy by making it a single rod. The whole weapon is much more sturdy as I've drilled through the bitz it connects into and kept the handle as a single metal rod. There were also some other small additions.

ANYWAY, On to the pics!!

Commander O'Kara





Detail Shots!

Shield Generator


Jetpack


Wrist-mounted Compact Plasma Blaster



Dawn Spire blade


Charred remains of a marine


Directional foot thrusters for increased maneuverability