Well its no great surprise, but I finished off putting together the rear autocannons last night and glued them in place, which means that the Stormlord is fully assembled and with the exception of those two guns and the main gun, was undercoated on Monday evening so ready for paint. I’m currently suffering from a cold so may well spend some of tonight airbrushing in the warmth of my office.
I speak as I find and the model was an absolute joy to put together with a couple of odd exceptions. The tracks are a proverbial nightmare to tidy up as the ‘join’ line seems to slope on one half of the track. The fuel barrels on the back of the tank have awful join lines which I filled in using thin plasticard that I cut with a circular cutter. What I am exceptionally unimpressed with, is how the two autocannons mount onto the rear of the tank – one of the poorest connections that I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across. The area that you glue is no larger than 1mm x 2mm and even with a decent amount of poly cement it feels quite fragile some hours later. Fingers crossed it doesn’t ever get knocked else either gun will likely just snap off :s
I have managed to borrow a couple bottles of metallic Vallejo Air (grey colours) to supplement the bronzy colours I’ve already got. This means that I can easily do the regular grey metallics such as the tracks and gun barrels in addition to the copious amount of brass that Vostroyan’s tend to have as part of their background style. I also purchased some sticks of earth coloured chalk which I’ll grind up small portions to use as weathering pigments. Although this might sound strange, they actually work in exactly the same way and I purchased the twelve colours for around the same price that a single pot of weathering pigment would cost.
Painting is going to be quite a big job, but thankfully a large portion of it is airbrushed or weathering using oils and powders. I’m going to be using the Forgeworld Masterclass book on painting tanks for some of the techniques so to a certain extent there isn’t a massive amount of “skill” involved. I don’t mean that horribly, but with the correct paints, brushes and equipment most people should be able to achieve a good result – OK I’m probably going to rue the day I said that 😉