Restarting my Grey Knights

A long time ago I purchased a squad of Grey Knights in power armor on their release day and was able to paint them up for a contest at Games Workshop. To make their weapons appear different I polished the pewter blades up to a mirror finish (which takes about 2-3 hours a model) and did my best paint jobs on them. This won me first place in the contest and I was able to enter the next leg of the contest in Austin. I drove down to Austin with a newly repainted squad and re-polished blades and was beaten by the managers girl friend and best friend. My "prize" was free admission into all tournaments held in the store for the next year. Nothing like winning something that you have to drive 5 hours to use.

After this I expanded the list to be 2000 points of various models and Inquisitorial forces. When the Grey Knight rumors started to surface I dug the models back out and started taking a good hard look at them. The models were originally painted with Testor's Metalizer and the blades were polished up to a mirror finish.
(pics after the break)



Since painting 2000 points in that scheme I picked up over 8000 points in trades in the past year. I've been thinking of repainting the whole bunch of them and I finally decided too. However, since each of those original models takes roughly 2 hours of prep time per model I figured it was time to do something quicker. I give you the awesome-sauce that is Alclad Steel:


Prep time: 30 minutes per model
The only down side is that the finish is comprised of 2 primer coats (with an hour wait between each) and then waiting overnight to apply the base coat.
You may notice the little chip on his head and shoulder, that is from me dropping the model from about 5 feet in the air while carrying it to my car. Those scratches (and the backpack popping off) are the ONLY damage! The Alclad is a very strong Laquer based paint and it's about as strong as most protective coats.
Even with the 3 layers of paint you can see that very little detail is obscured on the model, in fact you can see that I missed a few mold lines on the original!

After showing the model off a bit I decided to take the test base coated mini and turn it into a test paint mini.

My camera needs a little more work when it comes to white backgrounds but you get an idea.

Each "piece" has something different that allowed me to test the looks of certain techniques. The 3 inlay pieces have different techniques applied (sepia on the leg, sepia + mud on the left chest, and Rhulic gold on the right chest), there are 2 different ribbing colors, different pieces of armor have different washes applied, and if you look close you'll see that there is some touch up tests in a few spots (REALLY easy to spot in person).

And from what I learned here I painted my first Grey Knight!
May I present Rabacyal Grand Master of the Grey Knights






So where do I go from here? Well I've nearly finished stripping all 10k of metal knights. I've been cleaning the models as I strip them by filing mold lines down, sharpening weapons, smoothing armor plates and the usual. I plan on starting to prime these models in April, which will give me all of that month and a bit of May to prepare for the Alamo GT in San Antonio, Texas! And from there on to Warcon!