Speedy Crisis

Heyho,

as far as I know most of the showcase-painters are not playing any tabletop game at all. Maybe I'm one of these lonely wolves who does! You probably inferred from my past postings about the mycetic spore that I'm a proud owner of a Tyranid army. My second army is an honorable force of the TAU empire.


In my two weeks of summer vacation I 'speedpainted' seven of my Crisis battlesuits. I bought those guys years ago on ebay. Already glued and ugly painted they vegetated as a memorial on the battlefield. Therefore I decided to strip the paint and re-arrange all legs and arms.

To strip the paint I used a mixture of denatured alcohol and sodium hydroxide. Both are rather cheap, easy to acquire and more or less safe to use in contrast to other alternatives like brake fluid. The sodium hydroxide is only solvable in the 5 % water part of the denaturated alcohol. Never ever solve the sodium hydroxide in pure water as this becomes a strong leach!

If you don't know what you are doing you are better to use products like airbrush cleaner from Revell to strip your plastic miniatures.

After the stripping I ripped all arms and legs from the miniatures. Sometimes an arm or leg was destroyed in this step which is always a problem if you buy already assembled miniatures in boring poses.

After the usual two-component priming (priming the kong-way) all crisis suits were pre-shaded with three shades of blue using my airbrush.

Then I added some tau'ish white markers on each suite, added some highlights with Shadow Grey and finished the weapons and suites with a plasma effect using only three colors (Catachan Green, Putrid Green, Skull White). No smoothing and no blending was done ... rather hard for a showcase-painter, but there is no other possibility to finish my army in an acceptable amount of time.

All crisis suites are equipped differently in most games of Warhammer 40.000, so I magnetized them as every other TAU player does.

I will never buy already assembled and painted miniatures from ebay again! In the end you don't save any money this way!

Regards,

Grumbler