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They are beautiful! Mega jealous!

Gorgeous job on the Scorpion and a truly inspiring army.

It’s a nice crowning jewel to your collection, which in itself is great.

Thanks so much everyone, I'm glad the army can elicit such reactions! I'm very proud of them, and plenty still to do.

I didn't do much over Christmas, but I've just in the last couple of days finished my second squad of Fire Dragons. Gallery link as usual.



It's another squad of 10, with the Dragon's Breath Flamer on the Exarch. I picked the scheme just because I'd seen somebody else paint a similar scheme at some point and thought it was cool, tied in with the same dull bronze for the fusion guns that I used for my first squad. I'm really pleased with how the colours for this squad came out. I wasn't convinced for a while when I was painting due to the shine I was getting on the helmets, but as soon as I hit it with a few coats of Ultra Matte it really pulled together. The only problem since I started using this varnish a couple of months ago is that it makes me want to go put a couple of coats over all the old models, which would mean either masking or re-glossing the spiritstones...

I've still got a Falcon most of the way towards being painted, and I've built a squad of Wraithblades and a Wraithlord that will probably get some paint on them shortly.

Lovely to see your work as always.

Interesting take on the dragons.

Army shot is awesome, great looking force and the fire dragons are a nice addition.

They are a very impressive force all captured together! Crazy how much you've powered through. I love the darker red on the dragons - looks really sinister. Excited to see what comes next!

Great looking squad. I, too, like the dark red.

Bellerophon,

The Scorpion is exquisite. Voted for it on the challenge and exalted here.

Cheers,

CB

Thanks very much all.

I'm fond of how that red came out. I'm not totally sure I'm getting this right since I did the red before Christmas, but I think it was one of my favourite paints - VMC Burnt Cadmium Red, an all-over wash of AP Dark Tone, then a subtle highlight back up with Burnt Cadmium Red.

You've got a great looking army! I really like the scorpion.

The Scorpion is just... Beautiful! Absolutely beautiful.

And your army is truly a collection to be jealous of! Great shots and a lovely bunch.

Good work on the dragons as well.

I seem to always start these updates by apologising for how long they take, but at least this is a big one. I'd managed to finish a few things without ever quite getting around to posting them.

Let's start with the main event - angry ghost robots with big swords! I built a squad of wraithblades with swords, I'd had a wraithknight with sword built for some time, and also wanted to re-pose a wraithlord into more of a running pose. For that wraithlord, I fancied just building it with the sword and magnetising the shuricats/flamers - no heavy weapons. I figured I've got two fully magnetised lords, so I was happy to make this one more fixed. With that in mind, I liked the idea of painting all three sizes of wraiths-with-swords at the same time.

To the photos - there's a few more than this in my gallery.
















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Phew. What comes after such a team of wraiths? How about another Falcon?




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Okay, one more. Another squad of Striking Scorpions. After my first squad were in a more traditional apple-green with flashes of yellow sort of scheme, I decided for these that I wanted to do a really dull, drab scheme that's quite fitting for sneaky ninja-elves. So, I kept it dark, kept the highlights subtle, etc. It was a fairly quick squad to do, but I'm pleased with how they came out.

Nice work man! Those blends on the WK are beautiful!!

Did you find the WL knees bit of a pain to convert? I've done all 3 of mine and they are a pain lol.

I love wraiths. You have done a superb job! Not sure Im sold on the darker scorpions. I do like the OG paint scheme better but they still look great of course! Putting my Eldar to shame as always

So, so pretty. Super clean, great color choices. Love 'em all.

Thanks both! Regarding the blends, it's been much easier to pull those off since I picked up my airbrush. It's only a cheap one but it's already had a rather large impact on my painting process.

 Argive wrote:
Did you find the WL knees bit of a pain to convert? I've done all 3 of mine and they are a pain lol.

Absolutely. My first 2 were done without re-posing - so one of them is sort of gently walking forward and the other one standing still, so it was about time I hacked one apart at the knee. It was enough of a pain to chop the joint open without damaging the bits I didn't want to damage, then when I went to drill holes to pin the knee back together, my Archimedes drill jumped out of the plastic and jammed the 0.8mm drill bit right into my finger...

 Argive wrote:
Not sure Im sold on the darker scorpions. I do like the OG paint scheme better but they still look great of course! Putting my Eldar to shame as always

Oh yeah I love the brighter scheme too - so my first 9 scorpions and 2 exarchs are in a brighter green with a lot of mustard yellow. What I really enjoy doing with aspects is coming up with colour scheme variations for different shrines of the same Aspect. And I've got a lot of metal aspect warriors.

On the Aspect Warriors topic, I've also picked up the new Jain Zar and one box of the banshees. I still love the design of my twenty 3rd edition metal banshees, but I wanted to support the first new Aspect Warrior release in years. Unfortunately, the pricing somewhat put off even a diehard Aspect collector like myself, to the point where I went from considering 2 or 3 boxes to only getting one. I'd been thinking of either building a 10-banshee squad, or getting 15, doing one exarch of each loadout and then being able to field MSU or a full squad with choice of exarch purely from the new models. But even with FLGS discount, £32.50 RRP put me right off that. Shame. Who knows, maybe I'll pick some more up if they put them in a battleforce down the line or something.

Very nice work Bellerophon.

Cheers,

CB

Love the faceplate on the big guy, even though I don't normally like airbrushing.

Nice little group of dead folk you've got there.

I feel like the scorpions need a bright spot colour. Maybe bright yellow or red eyes? Or even bright green.

A beautiful host of wraiths!
Loving the face plate of the knight.

Thanks again guys. I'm also rather fond of how the faceplate came out on the wraithknight. I was trying to get some reasonably different schemes across my 3 wraithknights, so the first is almost entirely green, white head, black faceplate. This one has the different faceplate and more white on the under-armour panels, and I think the third one I might do mostly white.

 Fifty wrote:

I feel like the scorpions need a bright spot colour. Maybe bright yellow or red eyes? Or even bright green.

Ordinarily I'd agree, but I deliberately wanted these guys to be really dull all over - I even went to the extent of doing the gems darker than I normally would, and using darker metallics with a heavier wash on the hoses and such. Nothing bright to give them away while they're hiding in ambush!

One (small) new squad - this time it's another MSU squad of Dire Avengers with dual shuriken catapults on the exarch. That leaves me with three such squads, and one squad of 10 with a Diresword Exarch. I've got 10 more avengers, I expect I'll build them with a glaive/shield exarch when I get around to it. For this squad I decided I'd like to do a lighter tone of blue, since my previous DA's were all on the darker side. So these are VMC Andrea Blue, an all-over wash of Army Painter Blue Tone mixed with Vallejo Matt Medium, then highlighted with VMC Deep Sky Blue.



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Vypers. I hadn't done any until now, and one of the reasons that I'd put it off is that I knew I wanted to convert them to be swappable between the underslung shuriken catapults and the shuriken cannon - and anybody familiar with Vypers will know that they only come with the 90's style catapults, and that they're fairly well built into the vyper's body. I decided that what I wanted to do was convert a mount that could take the new underslung weapons from the windriders, and it seemed to be a suitable first thing for me to 3d model myself for my FDM printer. I've already got my windriders magnetised, so all I needed to do was replicate the mount, make it fit to the Vyper, and stick a magnet in it to line up with the ones on the weapons. So this is what I came up with -







It required a slight chopping of one of the peg that goes through it (normally the peg that goes into the standard shuriken catapult - there's a hole in my new piece, but I needed to chop the peg to not stick out at all because that's where my magnet needed to go. And then fitting the other piece, I needed to chop a few bits off so that it would fit and so that the windrider weapons would fit on -




I also wanted to mod the heavy weapon mount on top to be swappable. I did that by enlarging one side by gluing some sprue on it, so that it would better take a 2mm hole. Then I used one of the weapon cowling pieces from the weapon sprue and glued a piece of 2mm rod into it. So just put the weapon in position, then slide the rod through the hole in the side of the mount, and in through the hole in the weapon. A slightly crude solution but it works well enough.





So I've applied those mods to 3 Vypers. They're currently being painted, along with a Hemlock.

Nice work re-engineering the weapon mount. Avengers look good, too. Super clean, as always.

That gun mount looks handy!
Great way to make use of one's 3d modelling skills!

Cheers guys. The Vypers and the Hemlock are now finished! The project rolls ever onward. The Vypers are all fitted with the mods I showed in my last post, though these photos don't really show them off. I really enjoy painting this green scheme, and the Hemlock in particular was a nice canvas for it. Enough that I decided to limit the vines to the nose/centre of the model so that I had nice large areas on the wings where the green wasn't being covered up.

I'd say they look a bit richer than this in real life, but the auto-adjust on the gallery upload overcompensates, so like with everything else in this thread I've uploaded them unadjusted.










I've said before, but I think updates may be a bit slower from here on - I'm starting to spend some more time on my other projects (none of which have been blogged here - yet). I still want to keep working at the Eldar, I just might do a few other things in between Eldar units. I'm currently batch painting a big group of Sororitas, I'd like to do my Imperial Knights, I'm gradually building a full-size Forgeworld Warlord Titan, and I've also recently bought into Adeptus Titanicus. Plenty of non-green decidedly un-thorny things to get on with.

So if the Eldar are getting a bit less painting bench time, what am I going to concentrate on?
- My 3rd Wraithknight is now the only thing in its display case that isn't painted, so that's got to be high on the list. I'm thinking of doing it in a mostly white scheme with a green head and maybe a bunch of green thorns, to distinguish it from the other two.
- The 4th Ed Army Box Autarch has been sat on the desk for some time. As a cool, fairly rare model I'd like to paint it up as my 'senior' autarch to stride into battle alongside the Avatar
- There's another 10 Warp Spiders and 10 Fire Dragons in one of my other cabinets, just waiting to see a paintbrush
- Phase 4 of the Ridiculous Seer Council.
- Perhaps another Wave Serpent or Falcon

So yeah, though I'm spending more time on other projects, there's still not a lack of things to do for the Swordwind. I think perhaps once I've done the 3rd Wraithknight it might be time for another set of full army photos.

Excellent work, as always. Nice that you let the green have the...limelight...on the Hemlock. It is quite pretty. Plans for WK3 sound solid. Looking forward to more Eldar as well as any of the other things you have cooking.

Exalted Bellerophon...enough said.

Cheers,

CB

Really beautiful work mate. The bases on the flyers are top notch. Hope to see more of whatever you're working on in the future!

Great job on the Hemlock and Vipers. The green you use is fantastic. i hope you’ll start blogging your other projects, especially the Warlord!

Nailed it!
Always a fan of Vypers and hemlocks.

It's sometimes hard to get all the colors right in the pics.

It would be cool to see your other projects too, if you decide to start writing about them as well!

It is a great as always. Keep plugging away at the Seer Council, that is my request!

Thanks everyone.

For those asking about my other projects (and if you haven't already seen it yet) I've started blogging my Titans. Within you'll find a full size Forgeworld Warlord, eventually some supporting Knights/Admech, and my Adeptus Titanicus models.

Back to the Eldar, I've completed a model that I was very keen to get done - the Autarch from the 4th Edition Army Box. It's not exactly an easy model to get hold of, but my constant ebay vigilance paid off. Because of the relative rarity and having to pay a premium for it, I definietely wanted to get it painted, and to do the paintjob justice - hence the more detailed freehand runes on the banners. I also couldn't resist a photo with the rest of the Autarchs.

What's next will depend on how soon I can tear myself away from painting God-machines, but the most likely options are the same ones I listed before. The third wraithknight, more grav tanks, more Warp Spiders or more seers. I've also got some Harlequins that I'll probably cover here as and when I do them - they're close enough allies to merit a place in this blog.