Diesel DM

After an exemplary showing in a 25-pt tournament, I felt the Long Gunners deserved to be up next for paint.  They set up on top of a hill turn one with pStryker providing Snipe and proceeded to make dual-shots all game long taking down a number of support models.  At 25-pts I had only used the minimum unit of 6, but I have 10 and the UA, so for consistency I wanted to paint them all at once.  I still haven’t decided for sure if this was a mistake.  Painting 12 models at once is a little much and it’s hard to feel like progress is being made.

12 Long Gunners on the Assembly Line

I’ve been using the “assembly line” technique where you paint the same color across every model, then start back with the first again for either a second coat or the next color.  When painting up units I prefer to lay down all the base colors first.  The more accepted technique is to paint the inner-most, hardest-to-reach spots completely then move outward.  By base coating everything first it’s easiest to clean up any mistakes made as it only requires re-applying a single base coat color to cover the misplaced paint.  If you make a mistake and hit something that was already completed, you have a lot more work to fix it.

Nearly done with base coating

Once I get all the base coats down I go back to the more traditional approach of working inside to out, typically starting with the faces.  Of the 12 Long Gunners only 4 have visible eyes, so I catch a bit of a break there.  Currently I’ve completed almost all of the base coating, with the blues needing one more coat.  Then I will being painting faces.  Painting flesh tone over the black primer will undoubtedly take a few coats, so I’ll probably continue them on the assembly line for that.

Sure is a lot of brown on these guys

Whenever I do a unit I try to pick something new to either learn or getter better/faster at.  With the Stormblades I chose two-brush-blending, for the ATGM I tried to work faster and skip the blending.  For the Long Gunners I am working on using a larger brush, which currently is a Raphael 8404 Size 1 (which is closer to a 2 or 3 for many other brush sizes).  So far I’ve done all my non-metallic base coating with it and it’s working great.  It holds more paint and doesn’t dry out as fast as using a smaller brush and I’m still able to paint the same detail as with a smaller brush due to the great point that the Raphael’s hold.

Also new is that I took these photos with my iPhone 4S.  With the automatic Photo Stream syncing through iCloud it was a little quicker than using the regular camera and the pictures are pretty good quality, so for WIP shots this may be the way to go.