My New Tau Colour Scheme

As you might have guessed from recent posts I'm having a bit of a Tau revival recently. I'm planning on taking them to Jolly Toys in mid-February so I need to get them painted up. I originally went for the standard T'au sept scheme that GW normally uses - the browny-yellow one. However, I've always fancied the idea of doing white Tau so I went and bought myself a can of Skull White and sprayed up a piranha as a test piece.

I realised pretty quickly that the reason I've never done a white army is because I'm shit and painting and have no patience. Each model would require several thin coats of spray to get the desired effect and you can guarantee I'd either obliterate some details or end up "snowing" them. The other option is to base them in a light grey and slowly build up to a white. This has two problems, firstly, I'm impatient so I'd end up painting to thick a layer of white and ruining it and also I've only got a month so spending ages getting the perfect white really isn't an option!

Therefore, I jacked the whole white Tau idea in and went a browse around the net. I didn't find anything inspiring so I thought I'd paint them all up with Astronomican Grey and then come back at a later date and make them white if I could be arsed. I then bought myself some Adeptus Battlegrey as a secondary colour and painted a few panels. This might sound stupid but I love the dark grey. Sad to love grey I suppose but it really looked good. I therefore re-painted my formerly white piranha like this:

That's a main colur of Adeptus Battlegrey with panels of Regal Blue and Fortress Grey. Now I know I've got to do the drones and crew yet but as a demonstration of my colour scheme I really like it. I then turned my attention to my many crisis suits (10 in the list not including XV88s). I applied the scheme to them and came up with this:

He again needs a bit more work e.g. I'm going to make the missiles red and add more colour to the flamer but again I'm pretty happy with the scheme in general. The problem was that I wasn't sure how I'd apply it to the fire warriors. Part of me was tempted to reverse the scheme and make them light grey armour and dark grey undersuits. The trouble is they'd stand out a bit too much and they'd clash with the rest of the army. Therefore I got hold of Bolter & Chainswords Fire Warrior painter and came up with this:

I think it really works and they tie in well with the rest of the army. Here's my first attempt at translating that onto an actual model:

I'm happy with how it came out. I need to do the "toes" in the dark grey now and add some sept markings (i.e. the orange stripes) but at least I've decided on a scheme!

I'll post some more updates on my progress as I finish more units. The plan is to get everything to three colours as soon as possible and then go back and add detail if there's time before the tournament. Wish me luck!