Sprayaway!

Got a new spray gun from GW in the post this morning and, hold your breath, the parts all fit together! This meant I was able to spend some time spraying up the remainder of my Wolf Guard army and a few normal marines as well. A quick write-up on the spray gun then.

I wish I had known how quickly this thing applies paint before I did three drop-pods, a LRC and a rhino by hand! Honestly - between five and ten minutes to coat 8 terminators in a nice even colour that dries to a smooth finish, ready for shading and highlighting. The finished coat looks like the plastic itself is coloured, its that smooth.

Its not quite as simple as lining up the figures and spraying them in smooth side-to-side motions though. The intricate nature of the sculpts and the model's poses meant I could not get away without picking each one up to angle them so as to let the paint jet get into some of the nooks and crannies. As a result I now have Space Wolves grey fingers and thumb so everyone I meet at the club tonight will instantly know what I've been doing. Caught blue-handed.

The setup of the gun is a little finicky too. The adapter that attaches to the propellant can is a little looser than I would like - I could hear a little hiss of escaping gas when I changed cans halfway through the session, even though the adapter was tightly screwed on. The hiss did stop though so I guess this could just be a consequence of all the pars taking a second to expand or contract into place.

Judging the quantity of paint going into the jar could be more an art than a science too. The marks the jar has on it are designed for foundation paints only so one has to use slightly less water for normal colours. When you're using a homemade mixture like I do for Wolves base coat that already has had a little water added to dilute there's no way of knowing in advance what consistency you want the spray mix to be. I'm a little surprised GW haven't included a guide for non-foundation paint mixtures, but hey-ho. I seemed to have got the right thickness in the end and I guess there's always going to be an element of experimentation involved anyway.

Its hard to say how efficient the spray gun is. As I considered the amount of wastage involved in transfering my paint mix into the gun's canister and then returning the excess back to the original jar I began to wonder if this wasn't just another way for GW to make me buy more of their paints! Naturally a lot of paint in the spray you fire is going to miss the model completely and I can life with that. But I hate the thought of leaving paint in the gun's jar just to be washed away duing the rinse! Surely GW could have come up with an adapter that fitted directly onto the plastic pots the paints come in? Maybe not, maybe I'm asking too much. I guess its really not that much wastage in the grand scheme of things and, after all, the spray gun's greatest economy is in time spent, not paint.

All in all I'm positive about Citadel's little melta-themed effort. I'm looking forward to the next time I need to paint vehicles or buildings and wondering what magic I can perform with stencils and camo patterns. No doubt this pray gun is not the greatest of its kind - I'm sure you can find more high tech tools with more bells and whitles on out there. But for a beginner hobbyist like myself without too much spare time or cash to spend, this one is more than adequate.