Finished Pheonix Guard and a Product review

Okay so the title may be a little misleading but I did get this guy finished today so that bits true, only thing is I want to repaint my entire army like him. I'm really pleased with how he came out, the pictures let him down a bit as my skill not quite up to scratch, especially painting red. I tried painting true metallic metal for the first time (essentially metallics but takes the principle of high contrast from nmm) and I think that came out pretty well. I reckon by the end of the unit it should be looking pretty sharp. Also this is the first time I got nmm looking reasonable in my opinion, I think the uses of washes and the high level of embossed detail on the banner helped a lot. But still a wins a win, whenever I tried it in the past it never worked. So what do you think, is it worthwhile doing an entire army like this?

And now onto the product review of the post. I guess the most note worthy thing of the whole process was that I used my new air brush, though admittedly that was just to paint the base a bit and to undercoat the model. But that doesn't stop it from being great, it was a tonne of fun to use, it didn't break, wasn't to much of a pain to clean and I seemed to pick it up pretty quickly. Leading on from this was the under coat, I tried Vallejo's polyurethane black primer through the airbrush and it worked really well. Here's a more in depth review from Tale of Painters, but in short it was brilliant, cheaper even with shipping and the product being really easy to use with great results. Finally I tried army painters steppe grass on the base, its their version of Games Workshops static grass so here's my experience of it:

• It seems cheaper, I don't know if it is not having worked out the maths but I don't feel ripped off when buying it like I do with the GW version.
• It comes in a neat container that opens easily enough that it doesn't fly everywhere when you try to open it but again I have no fear it will spill in storage.
• The actual grass has a whole lot of different colours so it looks quite interesting and realistic.
• Finally and perhaps most importantly in my opinion it sticks down well with PVA glue. This was the main problem with the flock I used to use as I would open my case with green fluff covering the foam (the stuff I used under the rocks in the base above is what I'm talking about, in this case after the glue had dried I gave it a wash of 1:1 catachan green and watered down PVA to tone it down a little and make it look more like moss.)

Thanks for reading and I hope it helps even a little.