One thing so far lacking for my fledgling One Force is any kind of heavy support or significant heavy firepower. I do have my Rifleman Contemptor but as the sole source of anti-anything more than a marine, its definitely in need of some help. What could be better than a lovely old Vindicator lobbing those S10 AP1 pie plates all over the battlefield. I had left one of my old Space Wolves Rhinos part glued so that I could swap out the front plate and top hatch to a Vindicator, so decided to make the conversion complete. You can see it as I was starting to block in some colours below.
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| Starting to change the colours You can see some experimental work on the scheme on the dozer blade. |
Although I don't have an airbrush, I hoped that I might be able to produce a similarly shaded effect if I was clever enough with washes and dry brushing, and this seemed a perfect test piece. I've decided that I'd like to try switching around the colour scheme of my force for things like tanks, which is why this is mostly Desert Yellow, with only some small spots of the green. You can see next how it looked after the base-coat had been applied, and a first stage wash of Agrax Earthshade.
Next up you can see after its been give a very heavy dry-brush with the original colour. I made sure there was plenty of paint on the brush, but that it was all dry too so that there wouldn't be any streaking. It looks almost as if its back to the starting point on this pic, but in reality there's already quite a decent amount of shading achieved.
This next shot has the tank after a second round of wash and heavy dry-brush on all the yellow areas, and you can see that the shading is much more pronounced. As well as this, its had a first highlight drybrush of a mix of Dessert Yellow and Administratum Grey (the very light grey colour), to begin to pic out the armour edging. It'll get a second lighter highlight again to really pic out the edging.
I've also worked on the "metallics" and got a starter grey on them. It's a similar process, with a dark grey base, dry brush of light grey, wash with black and then re-dry-brush with the light grey. I think for these I'll darken things down with a second wash and very light dry-brush as it looks a bit too light at the moment.
After that, just the greens to sort out (same process as the rest), and then detailing, damage and weathering.
The tank's come together nice and quickly, and was very enjoyable. I'm pretty pleased with the result so far too. Can't wait to get this guy out on the game table, I've never actually used a Vindicator, and although I expect it to die horribly in most occasions, for those one or two times it drops its plate on a squad of termies or similar, I'm sure its worth it.
Cheers - Andy