Well, it’s not the best photo, but I’ve finally gotten ’round to painting up one of the many Privateer Press miniatures on my to-do list!

To start things off, I’ve photographed a couple of models I painted up for this weekend’s Cities of Death / Combat Patrol tournament held by The Lost in Trenton, ON.

I’m quite happy with how they turned out, especially the camo. I did a lot of web research before starting in order to pin down at least an approximation of historical accuracy. The Panzerfaust trooper has a crest painted on the side of his helmet; I’m not sure how accurate that would be, but I saw it in a reference piece and thought it looked neat.

Since I didn’t have any experience painting at this scale, I decided to try the whole base start-to-finish before adopting a more factory-style process for the rest of the infantry; this allowed me to get an idea as to how hard it is to get detail on these models, and how long they take to paint overall.

These guys were painted in a base coat, black-lined (allowing a thin line of the black primer to show through at seams - effective and fast shading) and then spot highlighted on certain edges. The camo got a thin wash of Vallejo Smoke to bring down the contrast.

Another unit for the Urban Combat Cadre; a Sniper Team! Though proving to be an early & easy target for the Ravenwing opponent I played, the Sniper Drones do pack quite the punch! Honestly, I think that Broadsides or Hammerheads would be better suited in games of 1,000 points or more, but under than The Snipers do make an effective yet inexpensive heavy support choice! Though limited in their usefulness versus ‘nids and other horde-ish armies, they’re more than their points worth versus heavy hitters like Terminators and the odd Dreadnought.

Here we have the Stealth Team (sans Drones) that was responsible for a lot of Deep Strike-y goodness in my matches! These guys were originally painted up for the regular Tau force, but I liked the colour scheme enough and decided to try doing more models along the same lines - and so the UCC was formed! I only had two of the newer XV25 suits remaining, and so I ended up filling out the unit with one of the older XV15’s (I had a blister lying around from my Shadowsun conversion project).

The unit was looking kinda plain, so at the last minute I decided that, like my plan for the Fire Warriors, the Stealth team leadres will have white/bone “helmets”. The resulting contrast was strikign and really worked well on the tabletop - I’m quite happy with the way these guys turned out.

I’ll be employing tactics that include a lot of pinning and therefore have forgone the usual mixture of carbines and pulse rifle for a full unit of pinning shots! Whether or not this works in my favour remains to be seen… but if I decide to add some rifles back into the mixture, I can always build another 8 Fire Warriors and mix the models to form two units.

So with less than two weeks to go, I started putting together an Urban Combat Cadre (UCC). I don’t expect we’ll be using Cities of Death rules, but since I was hoping to get a CoD cadre together anyhow, I figured this would be a great time to start. One of the first models I had contemplated was the Broadside, and I decided to build a conversion using one of my leftover Crisis Suits and a load of Imperial Guard and Tau bitz (Those Tau do come with a lotta extra bitz).

Of course, you can imagine my dissapointment when I realized that - unlike XV8’s, the Broadsides have a 2+ Armour Save, making them illegal in Combat Patrol games! Now I’ve wasted a good weekend working on a model that won’t be needed until much later!

I’m still very happy with how the conversion turned out (especially the scratch-built Railguns). I drew a lot of inspiration from Sebastian Stuart’s site - He’s got a great portfolio of Tau conversions; a real inspiration!

As for the Combat Patrol list - I’m going to move onto some Fire Warriors next, something I’m positive can be taken to the battlefield!

I just couldn’t pass up the chance at painting up an undead pirate… The model was an absolute pleasure to assemble; considering the degree of frustration I was feeling with GW’s Horrors of Tzeentch I was building at the same time, it was a nice change. The level of detail on the model is quite high as well, and although that means painting him is going to take a bit longer, it’s going to look all that much better in the end.

Looks like I’m pulling ahead in the Challenge, mateys!

I finally got around to finishing my commitment for the Grey Knight’s tables at GamesDay! As previously blogged, I had two units to paint - Chaos Marines (below) and Horrors (above). While the paintjob on the marines ended up being somewhat pedestrian, I’m quite fond of how Tzeentch’s little Horrors turned out!

Here’s a shot of my German Armoured Panzergrenadiers in the process of being assembled. So far I’ve only got a single PzG platoon with halftracks, a couple of Field Cars, two HQ transports and a Tiger… but the force is growing with every paycheque!