The Tempest Hawks and why I couldn’t complete an army of them
I have an all too familiar problem. I can’t finish an army.

It started off as a single model for a competition. “Quartered liveries are fun and really pop.” I thought. “People will like this”.

They did. Not enough to win the competition, but there were a lot of positive comments towards my freshly painted Tempest Hawk.
After finishing the rest of the squad and a unit of Hellblasters the cracks started to appear, and like any good painter, I plastered over the top of them.

In my haste to start painting I had forgotten the

This small detail meant that I had to add freehand black markings onto each model. The tactical markings were easy, then came the assault squad logos…

“But at least I’m getting practice with freehand”. I thought.
This, at least, was true.
I continued plodding through them, getting a squad of Inceptors, a Redemptor Dreadnought and a Sicaran Venator finished before a few sturdy thrashings at 40k convinced me that I should have built the army on paper first.

“But the fun is in the playing not the winning” I thought.
As the
It’s hard to pick my least favourite experience. It could have been watching models I had spent weeks painting getting wiped off of the board or the dawning realisation that I needed multiple units of Hellblasters and Inceptors (and their complicated markings) in the squad to make them useful.

So I remade the army on paper. Adding in powerful units and characters with area buffs to augment its firepower.
Then I realised that only 10 of my painted models found a place in the new army…

The final straw was the airbrush.

After assembling all the new models ready for a giant batch painting session I discovered that the same paint came out several tones lighter due to being thinned down so much. Pallid Wych Flesh was a pain to airbrush, separating and splattering all over the place. It would need to be
The quartered scheme also meant that each model would have to have a mask of silly putty painstakingly applied to it before.

I haven’t touched them in months now.
It’s back to the drawing board for me. I need to hack my painting skills so I can paint faster and better. Without
How’s your painting motivation? Have you ever bitten off more than you can chew? How did you fix it?
I really like the look of your red’s, whats the recipe? Whats the Pallid wcyh Flesh colour like, some kind of offwhite/beige?
As for the red helmets, I know what you mean. Maybe a dark blue would be better The Fang/Dark Reaper?
The best way to describe Pallid Wych Flesh is that it’s a white grey brown mix. I love it but I had a travel a long way to find an airbrush version to replace it with. The red is a white basecoat (Corax White) with a couple of coats of Khorne Red and a thick highlight of Evil Suns Scarlet. It’s just high contrast enough to stand out on a battlefield. I think you’re right about the blue