Struggling with basecoating.

My plans to ally with the great devourer took a bashing this weekend.... first when the £90 of minis I bought from GW failed to arrive in time for me to have a weekend sniffing plastic glue and putting together hordes of fiddly annoying Gaunts (but huge props to my parents in law who gave me the £90 for my B'day), and secondly when I tried to use the GW spraygun I bought midweek to basecoat my ‘nids.

Although the large part of my nid force did not arrive I still had the rest of the box of Termagants I used to practice my paint scheme on and I also had a box of Gargoyles which have been waiting to be built since before the codex came out - they just looked so cool in the shop and are probably entirely responsible for the fact that the first 1000 point army I have will now be ‘nids not wolves. I figured in preparation for the big boxes of sprues, which I hope will arrive tomorrow, I'd build the rest of the Termagants and the Gargoyles and practice basing with the spraygun.

The Gargoyles were fiddlier to build than I expected and it took me all of Saturday afternoon to build 4 Termagants and 10 Gargoyles (I almost missed picking the wife up from work as 4 hours slipped by too easily!). I also put together two bases of rippers from the Gaunts box - I had some spare bases and thought 7 looked too crowded on a base (I know that's how they're supposed to look and I intend to used the FW rippers for my army in the end as those just look awesome but for now I just wanted some bases I could paint easily and playtest with).

Suffice it to say the spraygun experiment didn’t work (I’ll explain why in my next post) so I had to basecoat my Termagants by hand but they are now all done and I’ll soon have my first ‘nids unit complete. The reason for the rainbow colours in the pic is that I wanted to use my ‘test models’ but didn’t want to strip them or lose any detail by painting over the existing layer. Once I have 30 termagants the few fruity ones will blend into the background and I need all the biomass I can recover.

Expect another update soon....