Concept Tau Firewarrior

With the arrival of the new Codex Tau Empire, my (creative) juices started flowing and I just needed to have a new color scheme. The current color scheme is too red for my tastes and the only completely painted model in the army is (unfortunately) my hammerhead... What's the best way to get paint off of a tank?

So in this post, I will show you what I have in mind for my Tau.

I recently ordered some paint to use for my Legion of Rust Nurgle marines and among those colors was the VGC Violet Ink. Inspired by Dries' way of painting his Hive Fleet Ozymandias, I decided to give it a go myself.

The complete tear-down of the painting techniques used by Hive Mind Dries I will leave to him to explain in a future post. The only thing I will say about it, is that it consists mostly of drybrushing and washing to get the overall look and then (of course) some detailing.

This is Shas'la S'mik after the first couple of stages, just to get the overall look of the armor:

Notice that I was over-eager and also painted the undersuit and parts of the rifle. These parts I wanted darker but I wasn't sure what color i wanted them to be. So the next step was:

Painting the darker parts black and I decided I would be 'highlighting' the undersuit in dark brown. My idea is that these guys are in a night fight, so they wear night 'camo'. This includes very very dark brown undersuits, so the only color you see is in the raised folds of the undersuit.

Then I tried some different contrasting colors on a patch of violet I painted on the newspaper. I tried orange, turquoise and white for the sept colors, and the white came out best, so my army will be from T'au sept. Simple as that.

This is where I left Shas'la S'mik last night. Things I need to do:

• Paint the lenses (first figure out what color... any suggestions?), maybe add some glow
• Paint the round metal thing on the rifle
• Figure out how to base them (suggestions appreciated!)

In conclusion: I wanted the paint scheme to be (in order of importance):

1. Easy and fast to apply
2. Look good when fielded on the tabletop

And I think I've accomplished both objectives. I really like the deep violet, and it contrasts well with the white sept markings.

I also have a second color scheme in mind (a lot brighter). Maybe I'll need another S'mik, just to figure out which one I like best.

So what do you think? Does the violet look good? Any suggestions on the lenses and basing?