Things have been a little quite here on Miniature Miscellany for the last few weeks. However, I can now reveal the reason for this. Five weeks ago I started work as a Warhammer World studio painter on a temporary contract to paint the display shown above. As you can imagine, this was a very exciting opportunity for me and it was great to work alongside talented colleagues on a project of this scale. The display went on show at the weekend as part of Warhammer World’s 40k Open Days meaning that I can finally lift the veil of secrecy.
Working on a display of this size was a real experience and I painted literally hundreds of the models on this board. It took a team of six of us five weeks to paint all of the models on the display. The terrain was started before I joined the project so I’m not sure how long that took to build. I was painting 40 Skitarii a day and even batch painting Riptides! I can safely say that I have painted more models in the last month than I have in the rest of the year. My personal favourites of the models I painted are the Kastellan Robot punching a Crisis Suit in the face and the Y’Vahra Battlesuit blasting the Reaver. I also painted my initials onto the Fireblade’s knife using the Tau alphabet. No one will ever notice it but I know it’s there.
The key to painting this many models quickly was a simple colour scheme applied neatly and consistently.The Mechanicum models were airbrushed silver and then basecoated, washed with Nuln Oil and given a single highlight. The Tau were a bit more complicated and time-consuming. They were airbrushed Tau Light Ochre over Zandri Dust base and then shaded in the recesses and edge highlighted. The Tau took about twice as long as the Mechanicum stuff and I was averaging about 20 Fire Warriors/Breachers a day.
If you have any questions or comments leave them below and I will try my best to answer them. Enjoy the pictures (if you look closely you may even spot some as-yet unreleased models).
