WIP: Assorted Grey Knights Projects

Not a massive amount of painting progress this week, but I thought it was an opportune time to show some of the tricks and tools I've picked up over the years- hopefully excusing my glacial painting pace.

Spent a lot of time over the last few weeks moving my girlfriend in to my place, so i didn't even have a table to paint on for a couple of weeks there.  Still have yet to set up a proper painting den, but at least the dining room table is a temporary option. I was really excited to get back to work on my Terminator squad after fielding them (half finished) in a game last week.  Exciting prospects of having a whole new codex to explore after fielding nothing but Tau for the last year.

First order of business was the shoulder pads for those Terminators.  There's a ton of details and freehand on these so I've been putting them off, but no longer. Painting the individual knights' iconography gets pretty difficult at this scale.  So hard to keep things even, and sharp corners are really a pain.  Even using some pretty high quality automotive pin striping tape doesn't yield perfect edges on these surfaces.

I'm going to have 2 knights with the signature Grey Knights crenellations pattern. This was my first attempt. Like I said, it's a royal pain at this scale. Still have some cleanup to do on it, but in case anyone is curious how I (sort of) pulled it off, here's the gist.

You'll also see in the pictures below, I pulled out my Scibor Templar Knight and started basing the non-metallic parts.  Might as well while I've got these colors out.  He'll be my defacto HQ unit until I decide who to buy for realsies.

Finally, here's a couple of methods I've picked up for holding on to all these tiny parts.  First step is to build a board to hold all your parts.  I found a scrap of plywood and drilled ~3/16" holes in a grid pattern (freehand because I'm lazy) about an inch apart.  You want a nice heavy piece of wood, because it's going to need to hold parts at weird angles without tipping over. It also needs to be fairly thick- mine is about 3/4" thick, with the holes drilled at 1/2" depth.  Be sure to set the block on your drill press or you might drill all the way through, and that's no good! If you don't drill deep enough, your part could come tumbling out at a really bad time, so just set the block already. 

Next step is to make some paint sticks to hold your parts.  I've got 3/16" wooden dowel cut in to various lengths from 6" to 12".  I tapered both ends on a disc sander (be careful with that!).  Then all the sticks got an alligator clip on one end.  You can pick those up on ebay or at a hardware store.  They're invaluable, especially if you are going to be airbrushing parts.  To paint larger parts where there's hidden areas to clip on to (somewhere that will be inside or have a part glued over it later), just grab on with the clip.  For smaller parts, I put a hobby knife blade in the clip and poke it in to an inconspicuous place on the part.  You can hold surprisingly big parts like that without having to push too deep. 

For these shoulder pads, I thought up a new way to hold parts.  When I was basing my knights, all my clips were used up by the rest of the body parts.  I didn't want to have to run all 3 base colors through the airbrush twice, so I opened the bathroom drawer and took out a bunch of q-tips.  Cut in half with a little wad of blue tack, they worked perfectly for these parts. 

There it is.  Nothing mind blowing, but it gets me through the day.  I had one suggestion to share those q-tips, so there you go. Shared. BOOM!  Droppin' knowledge, y'all.

~Deet