Oops I did it again! - Bolt Action

Off the back of my recent 'success' of aquiring, painting and storing an Army for NetEpic with relative ease, i was feeling gallus...

I had also managed to clear out a load more stuff via eBay with the help of £1 listings and same price courier collections.

I was in a good place. with a small 'to-do' pile, and a manageable collection of minis and terrain for the various games i play (or at least tell myself i play).

Then my human weakness was exposed.
In a casual conversation with a friend, he mentioned that he was getting into Bolt Action (28mm World War 2 platoon level game from Warlord).

We talked a bit about the armies we'd like to paint, and the possibility of maybe getting a couple of the small blisters that contain enough troops for a skirmish game...

24hrs later, i had around 90 infantry and a tank en-route to my house, and i was once again chopping up coir door mats for wheat fields and hedge rows!

I'm fairly sure i vowed not to do 'this' again, but here we are!

I'll say it now for the record, for what it is worth;

I'm buying/painting 2 small armies (1000 points in game terms)

British Paras/Commandos with a Churchill for late war europe, and some kind of Germans for an opposing force in the same theatre.

I'll have enough terrain for a 6x4 table, using what i have in the house already.


Lets see if i can stick to this.

I'm still testing out colour schemes, but I've ordered some specific paints from Vallejo as although i'm not too fussed about 100% accuracy, but not having to mix my own would be nice for such a large group.

The test model below isn't likely to look like the final product now.

Once more into the breach!

I've also included some final pics of my AT 2018 collection, as it has now been moved on, so keeping them here for any future nostalgia i may have.

Epic - Tau : Reinforcements

A few more additions to my rapidly growing Tau army.

The missing Tetra recon bikes arrived, i picked up a couple of Riptide battle suits from eBay, and kitbashed a Supermacy Titan Battlesuit from a 28mm Crisis suit.

I also picked up a full Forge World Aeronautica Imperialis Tau force, to use as my Air Caste.
I got them for what i think is a decent price given what the Manta alone can go for!

That said, they are a little bit bashed up, but i'll maybe make this a feature with some battle damage.
They also look to have once had a pretty awesome blue/black camo scheme with brown/tan camo accents, but at some point someone has roughly painted white, blue and black over the top of this for some reason!

As the nicely painted scheme seemed to have had a varnish top coat, i thought i'd have a go at rescuing them, using 99% Isopropyl Alcohol and cotton buds.

For the most part this worked really well, although i did lift some of the good paint, and dulled them slightly, but i'm going to keep the Manta and Barracuda fighters in this scheme, with the Tiger Sharks getting my grey/teal scheme.

I've included some work in progress photos too to help me reference the process as much as anything and on that note, the paints used are;

GW Mornfang Brown (primer)
GW Celestra Grey (base coat)
Vallejo Blue Green (Accent)
GW Drackenhof Nightshade (Shade)
GW Ulthuan Grey (Highlight)
Vallejo Black + Vallejo Silver (Metallics)
GW Evil Sunz Red + GW Wild Rider Red (lenses, Missiles)


I'm now sitting at around 7-8k points in netepic for this force.
One more small order to vanguard once they restock will allow me to field a load more units that are currently under strength (due to the pack sizes and my bad maths).

Then i'm done! the Joy of the Tau in Epic is that there simply aren't the hundreds of different units, so i'll be naturally reigned in soon enough.

Epic - Tau: start to finish

Hi Folks,
It's fair to say i didn't plan for this;

I went from boredom browsing Vanguard minis website one night before my last post, mocking up what a 4000pt Tau list for netepic gold would look like... Then my finger started clicking 'add to basket'...

Next thing i know, a few days later, they arrive at my front door on the 26th of May...

I sorted through them, cleaned off the flash, and started grouping them up into units...

I then glued the infantry in to their bases, took a breath and went to bed...

The next day i slapped some paint on to see if my 28mm test scheme would work well.
Looked OK, so i played around a bit with some techniques, washes, highlights, etc.

Ah! damn, I've painted all the infantry.

OK, i'll just base up the Battle suits and cavalry, and maybe do a base coat... and i suppose i could start the tanks too...

And done...

Dammit!

I had hoped to make this a bit of a blog series from unboxing > completion, and the photos are all here below, but why not just post them all at once? seems fitting for how this went.

a few lessons for me here, was that making up a jig with double-sided sticky tape has probably made this a week long project rather than a year!

There is still some work to do on them, a wee bit of highlighting/tidy up, banners for the HQs etc, but they are good to hit the tabletop as it, with the irony being that they can't at the moment of course!

In other news, I've picked up a few more addtions for this Tau force, in the form of some Forgeworld resin! I've also gutted my 28mm 40k and AoS collections, as well as selling a bunch of surplus epic, so i'm not feeling too bad about adding a new army now, as it all fits neatly into a reclaimed storage box.

Anyhoo, photos below.

I'll start with the finished article, with some photos taken as the light fades now, and then below that is a dump of the whole process in chronological order... hopefully.

A Few Days Earlier...