Summary

• YouTuber Martin Kovac (Night Shift) creates impressive, unplayable Warhammer models with realistic historical diorama techniques.
• Kovac's Sicaran Battle Tank features intricate weathering and texture work, but is too delicate to handle.
• Perhaps the fun of creation outweighs the inability to play with some models, as Kovac's work showcases.

A slightly unusual 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Warhammer painting video has been do🌳ing the rounds in hobby circles recently. Martin Kovac is a hobby YouTuber who goes by the name Night Shift, but he doesn’t often dabble in Warhammer. Mostly, Kovac paints historical tanks. There’s a lot of World War 2 stuff on his channel, mostly in 1/35 scale.

In his own words, he’s “obsessed with rꦡough steel textures and weathering”. Sounds Warhammery, no? Kovac’s techniques take miniature painting to another level, and applying his experience creating realist♌ic historical dioramas to the tanks of the 41st millennium is impressive. It renders them completely unplayable, but it’s impressive all the same.

A couple of weeks ago, Kovac posted his first Warhammer video, where he painted up a Sicaran Battle Tank from Warhammer 30K (“its design seemed the most reasonable and plausible,” he explains). In the assembly stage, he committed heresy by removing all the rivets (they weren’t in places that made sense) and cut up the armour♛ to make individual plates. He used modelling putty to create welds and a hobby knife to make the thin edges of metal panels look shorn apart.

W🐬hen it comes to painting, Kovac applied liberal amounts of chipping medium, building up layers of different coloured paints (brown, then yellow, then black in places) and used old brushes and needles to bring the former layers to light. The weathering effect is tremendous, and works so well when applied over his texture work in the building stage.

Kovac uses all manner 🍨of processes to create his incredible paintjob. Oil paint washes. Enamel paints. Handmade rivets. Pig꧅ments. Earth from his garden. Graphite.

However, it’s the later stages of his process that makes his Sicaran unplayable. The graphite he uses to give his brown rust a shine and the black pigments applied liberally to the exhausts mean that the vehicle can’t be touched. Therefore it can’t be played w🎐ith. And what’s the point of having Warhammer you can’t use?

I’ve fallen into this trap before. My Dark Mechanicus army is made up of abominable creations that led to friends at my local Warhammer store calling me ‘Sid’, á la the messed up kid from Toy Story. However, they were incredibly difficult to store and carry. If I wanted to play a match with them, I’d have to load them all up in foam-filled boxes and pray that the bus wouldn’t hit any especially egregious potholes en route. Considering I lived in Leeds, th🙈is was a big ask.

The pride and joy of my army was a custom Onager Dunecrawler, which used a Gargant as its body. I extended its belly, sculpted muscles, and made mo๊re Green Stuff wires than I care to admit. But, on🌟e day, his leg fell off. Then another. And one more. My four-legged freak now had to hop around the battlefield.

I think this happened when moving house – a dangerous time for any hobbyist and something that happens all too often when you live in a country that empowers landlords to kick out good tenants on a whim – but I’ve only ever found one of his missing limbs. Now, he lives in a box somewhere in my hobby roo💛m.

So why would you make a Warhammer model you can’t use? I began writing this article intending to poke some lighthearted fun at Kovac’s functionally useless Sicaran, but as I wrote about it, I came to a realisation. I do this, too. I make models that are nigh impossible to store or carry, that will be functionally useless on the battlefield (if they even make it there in one piece). This is ju✨st a part of the fun of modelling, it’s why I buy Warhammer instead of 3D printing complete models or buying action figures.

Where I’ve gone wrong before is by attempting to play with unplayable, untranspo𝓡rtable miniatures, instead of just accepting what they were. Some things are built for the joy of it. Some things are built for the cabinet. My hubris of wanting to show off m🦩y latest subversion of the flesh was my downfall, and sadly my plastic child didn’t survive. The point of Warhammer you can’t use is the fun of building, is striving for historical accuracy, is not necessarily rolling dice or showing off.

I don’t know if I’ll use things like graphite on my models – bits rubbing off when handled makes the finished miniature too impermanent for my tastes and I’d constantly worry about messing up my completed model. However, I’ll take plenty of 💞advice from Kovacs. His mixture of Tamiya Modelling Putty and Extra Thin Cement to texture steel panels is ingenious. His rust is incredibly effective. His build-ups of soil seem completely over the top until he blends them into the model for a natural finish. His Sicaran Battle Tank may not be usable, but it’s one of the best Warhammer tanks I’ve ever seen.