78 - Tau Fire Warrior

Day 5, model 4. As you can tell, I'm one miniature behind, but since the rules I established for myself allow me to miss a day so long as I finish the week with 7 painted models, I'm still on-track, I think. I have a day off from work today and it's snowing/ sleeting like the dickens in New York, so I should have enough free time to get my fifth miniature painted up before I go to bed tonight.

So, what we have here is a Tau Fire Warrior painted up in the "dress colors" of the army. I chose the Fire Warrior as my next model because I thought the simple color scheme would make for a fast paint job; I was wrong. While it's true the miniature pretty much uses 2 basic colors (a dull orange and a dark brown), the fact that I had never painted a Tau Fire Warrior before conspired to slow my progress down. Unlike painting Cadians or Marines, my hand had to adapt to new brushstrokes as I worked my way around the model's armor plates, trying not to get too messy and painting over the brown fatigues underneath. I also had to find a color match for the Vomit Brown GW uses for their Fire Warriors. Since I use craft paints bought cheaply at Michael's and A.C. Moore, I couldn't quite find a single comparable color match, so I settled on a dark yellow/ orange called Marigold and then gave it a liberal Gryphonne Sepia wash after finishing up the basecoat. Overall, I was quite pleased with the color match.

Some of the highlights on the Fire Warrior are a bit harsh and messy. At some point, I'm going to really have to learn to either a) become much more steady-handed when applying stark highlights or b) become adept at blending. The former obviously is easier and will be the path I'll go down in the near future. Blending, I think, will come much, much later in my development as a figure painter.

No conversions at all with this model. I did realize, after painting up the model, that I forgot to attach the communications antenna to the side of his helmet. Bleh, I always seem to forgot some little thing. Oh well, I'll fix that after I finish my 2nd model for today which I've decided will be an Ogre Kingdoms Leadbelcher.