Hello my fellow Hobby Zoners.

This evening I have some progress to show you all. As some of you are aware I am heading to Salute 2018 this coming Saturday. I had thought to pick up some items from Anvil Industry on the day. However I could not wait till the weekend so I made an order directly on their website using some of my funds ear marked for Salute. 

The order arrived promptly today. There was in fact a slight hiccup. Anvil notified me that the moulds for the Ops Core helmets which were part of my order were damaged, they told me there will be a slight delay with delivery while they sorted things out . I did not mind at all as my order qualified for free shipping anyway so another day would not affect me at all.

The quality of the resin is just unreal. There are basically zero issues with mould slippage or miscasts. They really are gorgeous sculpts and the parts always are incredibly detailed and the layout on the frames is always logical. 

In fact I have to say so far with working with Anvil Industry resin I am finding very little in the way of mould lines as well. I also need to mention the resin does not require washing before assembly and painting but you can if you want to. And the material itself is of a hard nature almost like plastic but has a little bounce to it. The detail on the casts is incredibly sharp and well defined.

The parts are also a joy to assemble. (I used ZAP superglue) The fit is excellent and there are usually never any gaps. I have never needed to use green stuff or anything to fix these whatsoever.

so here are my Anvil Industry Kalarchi 17th Airbourne (which I will be using in a few different Systems including Warhammer 40K as Scions or Astra Militarum Veterans)

I do have a recipe to paint these Spec Ops Troopers, involving Army Painter acrylic paints and some Games Workshop Washes.

Here are the basic colours I will use for the majority of the Troopers. And yes you may see a trend, I do like the colour green very much! :]

My formula is to spray undercoat the base colour which in this case is a dark green. So I will use Army Painter (AP) Angel Green spray. Then I will wash using Games Workshop (GW) Biel Tan Green wash, then I mix Angel Green with a little Green Skin and dry brush very lightly all over the model. 

(It is easier painting models in batches of 5-10 as once you have worked your way through and drybrushed the last model in the batch, the first model should be dry enough to work on again). 

So then mixing some more Angel Green and Green Skin but this time with a higher ratio of Green Skin I work through and drybrush the models again. Lastly I will mix the same ratio of the same paints but now adding a touch of Daemonic Yellow to the mix. This is my last dry brush stage, depending on how this looks I may then use very thinned Biel Tan Green just to add more depth and shade to the recesses. 

This 4 colour method works with anything. Say you want to paint something blue, you look for the darkest shade, then find a mid tone, then a lighter tone, then you need to find a bright tone or a brighter tone of another colour that you can mix to get the extreme light shade for the final dry brushing.

I prefer to mix my paints, but you can simply select the approariate colours and use them directly. Call me old fashioned if you must... haha!

I will always paint the largest areas of a model first, be it cloth, metallics, skin tones, or another material. It is easier to work like this for me but you may prefer another approach.

I will go into more detail with painting guides and methods in another article but I just wanted to at least talk about colour choice and such briefly.

So till next time my fellow Hobby Zoners!