WIP: Tau Crisis Commander

Time to make a commander for those two bodyguards I made in february!

I had to get around to this at some point! I put the cart before the horse in february, and made two bodyguards for my non-existent commander. I try to avoid finecast whenever I can, but in this case, it was finecast or the shitty, stylistically and technically outdated plastic crisis suit.

Tough call.

I grabbed the finecast commander from the website and picked it up at the local shop. Everything was in good order, with the exception of some bent guns, which could be easily fixed with the hair dryer.

NO! Don't touch me!

I cleaned the model, and began to assemble it when I realized that is has possibly the worst pose of any GW kit ever. I'm sure that he's meant to be landing from a dramatic entrance, but he really just looks like he's flinching backwards in fear. "AH! Spiders!"

I chopped the rubble off of his left foot, and cut his right foot off at the ankle. Using a pin vise and a paperclip as a pin, I repositioned his pose to be leaning forward, stepping onto a large rock. (a chunk of tree bark) Much more heroic! I turned his torso to give him a more dynamic flow, and based him with cork and sand.

I applied liquid mask to the sockets. When assembling finecast, you have to use superglue. Often, when superglued models break, the glue simply sheers off, removing the underlying paint. Because I've masked the sockets, when I assemble the parts, the glue will make a clean, resin on resin contact.

I primed the model using white aerosol primer. I often use airbrush primer, but aerosol primers adhere to the surface of the resin much better.

Once the primer was set, I airbrushed vallejo beasty brown on the sand, and burnt umber on the rocks, A little overspray on the feet is fine - we can clean that up later.

With the colors laid down on the basing materials, I brushed a mix of black and vallejo gunmetal on all the support structure parts. I've left the hand and elbow of the right arm unfinished for now, as I've got something special planned.

Using a plastic bag and some masking tape, I've masked the model except for the right arm. This will allow me to apply a paint color to it using the airbrush, without spraying on the rest of the model.

With the arm masked off, along with some other details on the legs, I applied vallejo gory red, then vallejo blood red to create some interesting color breaks. Again, there's a little overspray here and there, but nothing that can't be quickly touched up.

Not bad for a single day's progress, yeah? I should wrap this model up during the week, and have more in progress shots on friday.

-trip