Tau Empire: The Plan, Part 1

My Tau Empire army as mentioned in my opening post is not yet started but I have EVERYTHING planned out. I have planned the army composition and army list, the colour scheme, the basing and, the most ambitious aspect aspect of the force: magnetising it!

THE COLOUR SCHEME

I had several ideas for the colour scheme that I will paint my models in. In the end, my colour scheme boiled down to this:

Tau fire warrior painter courtesy of  Bolter and Chainsword

There are some minor changes I would have made, for example, the purple would be darker as would the red, but in the end, I scrapped the scheme. this was for two reasons:

1. the more I looked at the scheme, the more "wrong" it looked
2. it doesn't make sense in the fluff: the Tau often use colour patterns to match the environment that they are fighting in and even in the 40k universe, I doubt many planets are red and purple. 

For these reasons, I decided to change the colour scheme. After thinking about several options, eventually settling on a night time scheme:

Tau fire warrior painter courtesy of  Bolter and Chainsword

Again, I would darken the red and maybe add another spot colour but you get the idea. The idea of night ops for the Tau really appeals both to my image of them and their tactics. They prefer to "hunt" their enemies so night time ambushes etc. are perfect for them. the green stripes don't change as they are the sept colour, which is the only thing that must be displayed on the armour. It is effectively the equivalent of a Space Marine  chapter icon.

BASING

This was my biggest problem for a while. I simply couldn't think of a suitable basing scheme for these guys. I didn't want to go with the standard sand/static grass but I didn't want something that would be impossible to repeat on an entire army. I had an idea to do marshy bases as the murky nature would tie in with the paint scheme but I couldn't find a tutorial anywhere to do one so I was stumped. It stayed like that for a while until I saw these. The secret weapon miniatures range of resin bases is huge and they look excellent. Every review that I have read is positive and they seem to be excellent quality. I will be sure to review them when i use them. Here is an image of the resin bases when finished and here is a tutorial by "misterjustin" to use a basing kit to create the "marshy" look.

If you have any comments on the colour scheme or basing scheme, please post them below.

Still to come, the army list and my plans for magnetising the models.