Finished Tau Squad

Just finished a unit of Games Workshop Tau figures. Pictures below...

I painted these figures a few years ago, but was never happy with the colour scheme. I dumped them into Dettol sometime last year, and they recently stopped smelling enough for me to be able to face painting them.

The Dettol did a good job and, while there were still a few bits of paint stuck in deep crevices, they didn't cause too many problems. The original bases were just coloured texture paint, but I scraped all that off and replaced it with a couple of layers of sand.

I have always liked the Tau, as they are a reasonably humanoid alien race, and their troops have managed to avoid the worst excesses of Games Workshop's design strategies (although a lot of their recent larger figures and vehicles haven't fared as well). However, while I've never wanted to paint them in standard GW colours, I've never been happy with any colour scheme I have tested. I painted up a couple of test figures at the end of last year and found that I quite liked the chosen colours. Before I changed my mind I decided to paint the rest of the unit.

The main colours ended up being Vallejo Khaki for the uniform and Vallejo Olive Green for the armour. They were washed with Citadel Washes Agrax Earthshade and Athonian Camoshade respectively. Unfortunately this left them darker than I really wanted, so I had to go back over with the base colours before highlighting them.

The flesh was a base of Vallejo Pale BlueGrey, washed with Citadel Wash Druchii Violet. I had expected that the flesh would need more work, but I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome from the wash and left it as it was.

There are three metal Scout figures in the mix (yup, Citadel did produce a few metal Tau at one time)

The rest are plastic, including the drones

I have another box of these and quite a few other Tau figures to paint, so hopefully I won't decide to change the colour scheme again when I get around to them.