Project: Building a Battlefleet Gothic Tau Fleet: Intro

In a series of posts, I am going to detail how I built a Tau fleet for Battlefleet Gothic (BFG). BFG is a fun starship miniatures game from Games Workshop. At GW's Battlefleet website one can find all rules that are needed to play. Along with Tau, there are a number of other miniatures for the game and one can build a fleet for all the major 40k armies.

Starting out, I had to choose which Tau fleet I wanted to go with. Should I go with the standard Tau fleet from GW's Specialist range or should I get some of the Tau ships from Forge World? It was a tough decision as I already had some of Specialist Games ships but I really liked the ships Forge World put out. I ended up going with a mixed fleet. Now the styles between the two ship ranges are quite different but the Specialist cruisers and escorts do look good next to the Forge World capital ships. Below is a picture of part of my planned fleet.

Here I have a Tau Messenger, 3 Defenders, and 4 Orca ships mixed with a Forgeworld Custodian, 8 Mantas, and 5 stands of Barracudas. Also include is Nicassar Dhow caravan.

The article will be orginized in the following manner with a post on each major point:

1. Basing
1. Building fighter stands from wooden bases and finish nails.
2. Building removable ship stands with GW flight stands and necklace clasps.
2. Fast but effective Painting
1. Painting gradient color schemes using dry brushing.
2. Painting Gradient color schemes using metallics and inks.
3. Quick and dirty ship labels
1. Creating curved labels for stand base.
2. Creating banner labels for stand pole.

Here is a teaser image of a finished Custodian.