Sa'cea Tau - Tau Empire Battlesuits

One of the great things about running a Tau Empire Blog for Warhammer 40k is receiving all the communications from far-flung outposts of the Tau Empire. The Sa'Cea Sept steeped in knowledge of urban warfare, bloodied from long months of battling the Gue'la Insurgency on the colony of Ta'Essar. Dennis Duszynski has submitted these excellent photos to Tau of War. His painting skills are top-notch and he was even able to spend some time to tell us about the urban bases he's made and the sept markings that are near-flawless.

What I did for the base was really simple.  The concrete slab is just a piece of Styrofoam cut to a regular thickness to represent a fallen piece of building debris.  I cut it's sides irregularly to make it look like debris, and then coated the sides with watered down elmer's glue followed by dusting the glue with play sand to create the rougher concrete edge.  I also coated the top with thinned elmer's glue to smooth it out and help create a more "finished" look.  Incidentally,  don't bother buying that Games-Workshop sand tub.  You can buy a 45 pound bag of play sand at Lowes for less than 5$.  I have enough sand now to make my own beach.   So back to the concrete.  I then painted the entire piece codex grey, and gave it a darker wash of codex grey mixed with chaos black, then I drybrushed it with fortress grey.  easy.  The rebar are just paper clips cut and pushed into the sides of the styrofoam after coating the inserted end with elmer's glue to help them stay in the Styrofoam.  Make sure that the rebar sticking out of both sides of the concrete is lined up.  I used a multi tool's needle nose pliers to bend up the edges of the rebar to make them look like they've been torn away from a structure.  I painted the rebar bolt gun metal, the made a wash of scab red and vermin brown to make the rust, then I washed it over the rebar and onto where the rebar touches the concrete and dribbled it down the sides of the slab.  I wanted it to look like rain water had washed some of the rust from the rebar down the sides of the slab.  The rest of the debris are just small cut pieces of styrofoam and model railyard ballast stone and sand, which all got painted similarly to the slab, and placed to look like they broke away from the slab, when it hit the ground.
    The entire process is actually very fast to produce. 

How do you paint your sept markings?  Yours always look good too.  Do you just eye-ball them?  

I have eye-balled mine, but  I try to either start with a circle and mark off the 4 poles on it's edge, so I have reference points to make the details inside the circle look balanced.  I have also tried buying a circle template from office max for like 4$ and making a circle on a piece of painter's tape or masking tape, cutting out the circle, then making the 4 pole marks (compass directions)  on the tape.  The template helps by showing where the poles are.  Then I can paint a perfect circle onto the model.  For the linear markings, I eyeball half of them, but I try to mask one side of a line with tape, so I have a way, like a straight edge of making the initial line straight. 

Whatever you've done, it works. I thought those were transfers at first glance. 

I am really curious why people pick the septs that they model.  Why did you pick Sa'Cea? 

I really like your paint scheme.  I am utterly sick of desert scheme tau.  Your scheme seems somewhat WW2-esque.  It reminds me of our soldiers' uniforms.  Green and Khaki.  My Choice of Sa'Cea was about not painting desert tau, and also I figure that most of the warfare in M41 would have to be urban, and since Sa'Cea were the tau's urban specialists,  that made my mind up for me.

Great models and great poses as well. I cannot wait to see more of your work, Dennis. How about sending a group shot once you've completed your army? 

Happy Hunting, Shas'la!

-Old Shatter Hands