A Tale of 5 Painters

For those that don't already know. A lot of my hobby updates and even tutorials have moved to Instagram over the last few years for the simplicity, immediacy and wonderful community that exists there. (You can find me at http://www.ragados.com/raggypaints ). At the tail end of last year Ben aka @playtime_paints suggested doing a replica of 'Tale of 4 Warlords' with a bunch of buddies on IG. Well I was in!!! To this day, Tale of 4 Warlords is the single biggest reason I read White Dwarf and I'd long dreamt of participating myself. As many of you will have seen from my army painting speed and style - I've been heavily influenced by the concept of painting things up regularly, driven by hard deadlines - something I first really got from Tale of 4 Warlords (and later by the wonderful Armies, Legions, and Hordes by my friend Dave Taylor - go buy this book, it will really help you get your models painted faster).

Tale of 5 Painters aka #to5p was born.

Sooo what I am going to do? Well... for the last few months, Kharadron Overlords have been growing on me. Particularly those glorious ships sailing through the air, filling me with nostalgia for the hours spent as a kid at my friend's house playing Skies of Arcadia. I'd already picked up a box of Arkanauts a while ago for an aborted plan to create a Squat army, so I took one of those models to put together a test scheme.

I love the look of the 'traditional' Kharadron sculpts and really challenged myself with Thundrik's Profiteers with a cartoon NMM Copper aesthetic but I knew I didn't want that look for a whole army. Predominantely metal colours should be left to robots and historical knights in my opinion. My thoughts kept circling back to Skies of Arcadia with the 'sky pirate' feel that was slightly steampunk but not full on watch cogs all over the shop!

I'd also been painting a commissioned box set of Blackstone Fortress to match the set I'd painted a while back and it reminded me of how I'd painted Janus Draik to have a pirate-y look:

Those stripped red pantaloons seemed like the perfect way to say PIRATE!!! Argh... etc. Of course when you actually search for 'pirate' striped pantaloons are a strictly 'cartoon only' style... well that's ok, my Gloomspite Gitz army was pretty cartoony and had given me a great, quick way to paint NMM Steel that looks decent:

But what about all the shiny armour? Well that was a tougher challenge. In the end I opted to look at it as 'leather'. The rivets are certainly over the top even for studded leather but working through it, I had a quick and enjoyable way to paint it to give me:

Next: I give this budding army a backstory!

- Raggy, signing out