Amidst some intense Black Friday shopping to get gifts for family and friends I managed to scrounge enough time to finish the tanks for Nova Albions. And with all four tanks finished the Nova Albions can now roll out and a project almost 11 months in the making is now complete. But I am getting ahead of myself here, so let’s take a brief look at how I dealt with those last four tank models.
Following the same color palette of the infantry models I based the entire tank in Zamesi Desert using the airbrush and then boosted the saturation by brushing on a thin layer of the same. The owner of the army wanted desert camo stripes which is fine by me because it made it easy to incorporate the Dark Umber color. These stripes were done the old fashioned way, meaning I used a large brush to simply paint on all the stripes. With the core colors placed I then used a large makeup brush to drybrush Vallejo Pale Sand all over the tank.
Next up were the metallics and here I decided to bust out the Vallejo Metals colors Magnesium, Dark Alumnium and Gunmetal Grey. The tracks were done using Magnesium while the sponson weapons and part of the main barrel were done with Dark Aluminum. The rear crate and grill were done with a mix of Gunmetal grey and a bit of Dark Aluminum in order to lighten it up and make it a little more distinct from the tracks. At this point the tank is is completely based so I seal it with gloss varnish and then hit all the recesses with a black/brown oil wash which I cleaned up with some makeup sponge sticks. Then once all of the oil wash was dry I sealed everything in with a matt varnish and the tanks were good to go.
The tanks were fairly simple and overall a pretty fun way to cap off this project of nearly 11 months. This project started last year when the minipainting discord announced their year long Army Along challenge for 2021. I canvassed my warhammer group and one friend agreed to let me paint up 50 imperial guard models for them all for the sole purpose of fake internet points and the bragging rights to say that I painted an army in less than a year. Was it worth it? I have absolutely no idea but what I do know is that if I ever take on a commission for painting an army again I am going to charge a lot of money and assemble all the models myself because I have a real control problem. With that being said I have some big plans for 2022 that I will go into more detail in an upcoming blog post. All that’s left is the big family picture of the Nova Albions before they are shipped back to their rightful owner to wage ware against poor fools who go against them. Here is to another year in this wacky hobby and all the poor souls unfortunate enough to come along for the ride.
Dr. Schemes Miniatures 