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Wowwee! Bellerophon your Biel-Tan force has become truly massive in every sense of the word! I really enjoyed reading through your building and painting process for your Phantom and Revenant titans. really nice paint jobs on both. And now a Vampire Hunter! How did you manage to track one down? The freehand is very nicely done and the cockpit looks great. I think you'd feel a great sense of satisfaction going back to and redoing your old cockpits now 😉

Also, how have you been getting on with your Horus Heresy collection you mentioned a while back?

Exalted Bellerophon.

Cheers,

CB

Amazing work Bellerophon! Your Vampire Hunter is fantastic and I love those alternative aspect colours. Your next updates sound exciting and good luck with getting them painted up!

Stunning work on the vampire hunter, it’s amazing all round! Love the thorns and runes, they add lots of interest

Thanks everybody for your comments, as always I really appreciate them. This Vampire Hunter is a model that I'm particularly proud of!

 zahnib wrote:
Wowwee! Bellerophon your Biel-Tan force has become truly massive in every sense of the word! I really enjoyed reading through your building and painting process for your Phantom and Revenant titans. really nice paint jobs on both. And now a Vampire Hunter! How did you manage to track one down? The freehand is very nicely done and the cockpit looks great. I think you'd feel a great sense of satisfaction going back to and redoing your old cockpits now 😉

Thanks very much - I'd been after a Vampire for ages, and after a lot of diligent searching, I eventually I got lucky on ebay. And yes, I'm sure I would feel satisfaction re-doing the old cockpits, I think it could improve the models quite considerably, but it'll still be a fair old project to get them all done. I might make a point of re-doing a few old ones every time I do some new ones or something like that. That way it's not so much a separate project in its own right. Actually I'd like to start with my Crimson Hunter squadron, I thnik those are the ones I'm most dissatisfied with, though I'm not entirely sure why. I'm currently planning to do the updated version in the same pale brown/'sand' sort of tone as they are currently, but updated to the airbrushed gradients and matte finish like I used on the Vampire.

 zahnib wrote:
Also, how have you been getting on with your Horus Heresy collection you mentioned a while back?

Unfortunately not very far. I can be a very hobby-indecisive person. I got as far as assembling a squad or two, and then realised that I couldn't make my mind up on a legion. Most of them have things that I like, but also a number of things that I find offputting, and I just couldn't nail one down. At the point I bought the Age of Darkness box I thought I'd settled on the Imperial Fists, but then I started painting Lamenters for 40k and wondered whether I really wanted to be doing two separate armies of yellow marines. I've been enjoying the Lamenters, but it's been a fairly intense paintjob. I've been using the method of painting and shading them in pink, then glazing with yellow ink. I may still pick the project back up as Fists (perhaps if used a more 'standard' yellow paintjob to differentiate) but I'm still undecided, and really I think I'd like to step away from yellow. And I've got other things to paint that don't require me to make such decisions!

Perhaps for amusement's sake, a fine example would be Emperor's Children. Their crsuade era purple/gold/white are one of my favourite legion paintjobs and I would love to paint them - but since most of the marines I have are beakies, regardless of the amount of retcon I can't really see an army of beakies without viewing it as a late heresy army - at the earliest. And I've never been much of a Chaos fan, or of spiky, mutated, daemon-infused marines, of which EC are one of the poster children. I feel like a mid-late heresy EC collection in glorious purple without a hint of corruption just isn't right. And yet, despite my usual preference for non-corrupted marines, I hate the non-corrupted Fulgrim sculpt while loving the new Fulgrim transfigured sculpt. A state of affairs which I find rather comical. Most of the other legions don't spin quite so confusing a tale, but certainly there's enough ups and downs that there isn't a clear winner for my paintbrush.

---

As to the next updates here - I was gifted more Dire Avengers and Howling Banshees for Christmas, and I've got some of the new Striking Scorpions on the way. Many more aspect warriors are in the near future of this blog, as it should be.

Hey everyone, more progress - another batch of models completed!



Here we have:

A winged Autarch. Despite nominally being mix-and-match between the two Autarch bodies, I kept the wings on this one because I feel like the pose on this body just doesn't look right with the warp jump generator or the footslogger backpack flag. I've also used the power sword that comes with the kit, but rotated from the standard assembly so that he's brandishing in more of an "I'm going to use this" way rather than presenting it heroically to the sky, and used the reaper launcher from the other Autarch kit. Expecting that I might end up with quite a few Autarchs and not wanting all of them to end up with the same three helmets repeated several times, I elected to use one of the Shining Spear Exarch helmets. I know Autarchs don't get Exarch gear, but I'm not treating this as an Exarch helmet as such, just a cool helmet that fits the model nicely. And I think the Shining Spear Exarch helmets don't scream "Exarch!" quite so much as some of the other aspects' do. Like my other reaper launcher Autarch I ended up painting the armour black. It wasn't really intended, but my army seems to be developing some sort of canon that Autarchs who were once Dark Reapers just can't escape from black armour. And of course sticking with my army's canon that Autarchs get yellow ochre faceplates.

A warp jump generator Autarch. This one I went with the deatspinner just because I didn't have an Autarch armed with one yet. Though that's quite a lot of Warp Spider flavour already, so I tried to give her some variety in the other equipment - the Exarch's chainsword from the new Scorpions kit (again, I'm not viewing this as 'Exarch gear', it's just a fancy chainsword in a pose that works), and I converted a helmet. It's one of the banshee masks from the banshee kit, and the crest from the Dire Avenger kit that you're supposed to use with the bare Exarch head. I melded the two together with milliput to make it into a helmet, and I think it's worked out pretty nicely - even if my milliput work isn't as smooth as I would have liked.

Also shown in the photographs is my current Autarch council. It's taken a lot longer for this one to get off the ground compared with my Seer Council and it still has a long way to go to match the Seers' numbers, but I think it's starting to look quite impressive. Who needs Primaris Lieutenants, right?

Another ten Dire Avengers. I said previously that I felt for a Swordwind the size of mine, the number of Dire Avengers, which ought to be its core troops, was somewhat lacking. So this is part of the attempt to remedy the situation. Some of my earlier squads were 5-strong MSU with half an eye on the game when my collection was much smaller, but nowadays I'm fully embracing my hobby love for full strength squads. I built these with the Exarch wielding the glaive and pistol, just because that was a combination that I didn't have on any of my existing squads. I've also been thinking quite a bit about aspect colour schemes. I like to make each squad unique, while also preferably not straying too far from the particular Aspect's signature colours. I was looking back at my last set of full army photos and I realised I liked that I could pick out the Dire Avengers by finding the blob of blue in the middle of the army. However, having painted several different shades of blue across my squads, for this one I elected to go a little further afield and do them in a dark bluish purple (or purplish blue?). (I recognise that I used a fair bit of purple on the last big batch of models too - but I think I've got it out of my system now. I feel like I might be about to enter a pink phase on the next batch...) I used a more straight blue in the helmet crests and some of the ribbons. The shuriken weapons get the Biel-Tan green 'rail' down the middle as per the rest of my models, it's a real unifying element to the army. I also realised that I've been painting all of the little Eldar God shrine/statue things that come with the new Aspect kits, but I hadn't been doing them with my old squads of Avengers. So while I was doing this squad I decided to do the two that came on their sprues, and also do two more from my bits box to try to catch up a bit on the little Asuryans.

My first ten of the new Striking Scorpions. Again, it's full strength squads all the way! For these I selected a pretty classic scorpion scheme of a fairly rich, darker green and bright yellow helmets. I deliberately did the green with different paints than I use for my regular Biel-Tan greens, although it's probably not at all obvious. For this first squad I decided to do the Biting Blade Exarch. I was tempted by the Chainsabres because I already have the Biting Blade and Scorpion's Claw represented in my metals, and no Chainsabres because they weren't an option in the previous kit - but my fondness for the Biting Blade and the fact that it's a considerably different pose to the previous metal one won out for this first squad. Chainsabres on the next squad, probably. I definitely enjoy these new models on the whole, although I found that mixing and matching the shuriken pistol and chainsword arms between the five bodies had a relatively limited number of results that really work as poses, which is a shame - I've got a lot more of them to build! I was so convinced that these would end up in 5-model boxes at the same price point as the Banshees and Reapers that I bought a copy of the Kill Team Salvation box to net my first squad, and then bought 30 more on sprue on ebay under the mistaken apprehension that it was the cheapest I would ever get them. My mistake, once I saw that GW released them separately in boxes of 10. Although I don't feel too bad. I didn't go over the GW RRP for the box-of-10 on any of them.

Two more Wave Serpents. Another unit where I thought the numbers were lacking for a Swordwind the size of mine. I only had three. Only three Wave Serpents to transport all of those Aspect Warriors! So here's two more to take the total to five. They get my standard tank scheme, and they're also the first grav tanks to receive the new cockpit window technique that I premiered with the Vampire. I'm really pleased with how it's looking, and I think it's a firm upgrade on my old style. Alongside these new ones, I decided to take a tentative step towards updating my old models by redoing the cockpits on the old Wave Serpents. My three previous Serpents all got their cockpit windows updated, a good clean, and then a new blast of Ultra Matte varnish. They were old enough that I'd originally painted them when I was using the Army Painter rattlecan varnish, and it was never as matte as I wanted it to be. I'm really pleased with the upgrade, although I'm still daunted at the scale of updating everything else - between the other Grav Tanks, Vypers and Flyers I think I've got over twenty cockpits to revisit, and I'm also planning on painting some new tanks soon, so that adds even more to the cockpit production line. The photo with all five Serpents is interesting, you can really see the difference in the colour scheme from when I started (all done with brush, and the thorns were nowhere near as neat), compared to now with the airbrush gradients and much smoother freehand. I also just picked and glued in turret gun options for these. The way I magnetised the old ones is a bit frustrating keeping the guns on the tanks and pointing at the same level. I figured I've got three magnetised, I'll just pick some guns and glue them on for these new ones. Another example where the size of the collection means that I have fewer game-related worries these days and can just concentrate on making new models look cool.

What next?
You didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway. I'm still operating on this principle of "there's not enough of Unit X for a Swordwind this size". Namely, Shining Spears, of which I only have one squad at the moment. Which I feel is a poor situation given I'm Biel-Tan and they're aspect warriors. So I'm building another full-size squad of Shining Spears to bring it up to a slightly more respectable two squads. I also only have one Night Spinner in the army at the moment, and only two Fire Prisms. I've got two kits on sprue (which I bought before 10th ed when they became as rare as hen's teeth). I would definitely like to add more Prisms, but at the moment I'm thinking I'll build these two as Night Spinners, just for the painting convenience of painting two sets of Doomweavers at the same time. I've also recently got my hands on an unbuilt Firestorm turret, which I'm over the moon about, those have been scarce for a long time. I'm sure they were discontinued long before I started on this project. I have a Falcon on sprue, which I think will donate its chassis so that I can add a Firestorm to the collection.

I'd like to expand the Autarch council and Seer council with some bikers as well - I only have two Skyrunner seers and none for Autarchs. For the Autarchs it's because I don't want to buy the old kit - so I have another box of Shining Spears and I'm planning on doing some kitbashing. My only real hesitation at this point is that they might be a bit restricted to "a Shining Spear, but with a different helmet and a Biel-Tan Autarch paintjob", which to be fair would probably be suitably cool. I just feel as though I should kitbash it a bit more heavily than that! I've also got excess Shroud Runners, and I'd like to kitbash a farseer onto the back seat - and maybe do the same for a ranged firepower Autarch. I like the idea of having some characters riding shotgun. But all of these are at the general pondering and brainstorming stage rather than actually doing it.

Those are the next things on the agenda, although of course I've still got plenty of aspects (especially Striking Scorpions!) to do. I've got half an eye on doing another set of full army photos soon. I feel that the recent additions (especially the Vampire) mean I could take some full army photos and have them be noticeably larger than the last set. Perhaps after the next batch of models - and once I've finished upgrading all the cockpit window paintjobs!.

Excellent work on those models. The green really pops.

That's a heck of an Eldar infusion. Great looking stuff. The Autarchs are very cool.

Lovely work on everyone. Epic collections of Eldar you have, painted beautifully.

Beautiful work Bellerophon. That is some serious hobby output! And to a really high standard. The new blue cockpits look fantastic as well, well worth the time. Look forward to seeing your next update

Stunning as ever Bellerophon! Love the yellow helmets on the scorpions in particularly, such a nice gradient you’ve achieved. Future plans sound impressive too!

Wonderful force additions there Bellerophon.

Cheers,

CB

Always a joy to see new additions for the beautiful army!
Great work as always

Thanks everybody, as ever I really appreciate your comments. I was just reflecting on the fact that some of you have been commenting here since I started the army, and it's been quite a journey since then!

The latest thing that I've been up to is converting some Wraithblades to carry glaives. I'd seen a couple of people on the Eldar subreddit posting their versions of this conversion and I thought they looked fantastic, and decided that I had to give it a go myself.I still had a couple of sets of wraiths on sprue...

So here's my take on them. It's pretty much the same method pioneered by those guys I linked - chop up a couple of ghostaxes to form the shaft, and one of the swords for the blade. I've included a photo of of a completed glaive alongside all of the parts that I had to chop up to make it, as an illustration. I think it's a clearer explanation than any clunky words that I could come up with. Just a case of chopping the extraneous bits off, cleaning them up, and then very carefully drilling and pinning because I didn't trust the size of the contact area for poly cement. For three of them, I went with one handed poses (which are certainly easier to arrange), but for two of them I left the sword hand in place so I could do a two handed pose.

I've also updated some more cockpit canopies - my Scorpion, all 3 Falcons, the Warp Hunter, the 3 Crimson Hunters and the Hemlock.For old vehicles to update, that just leaves me with the Fire Prisms, Night Spinner and Vypers. Maybe the War Walkers, but I'm not so sure if I'll do those.

Found your blog recently, and I’ve had loads of fun reading through the pages and pages of your creations. I‘ll always stick by Iyanden, but you do the Biel-Tan scheme justice, especially because GW‘s official schemes look dull to me. You have a great collection! Can’t wait to see what comes next.

That's a neat idea with the glaives. Can't wait to see them painted!

Great execution on the wraith blades, really cool!

The updated canopies look great too, was it as much effort as you thought it might be?

Those Wraithblade glaive conversions look great! Thanks for showing the breakdown of the parts you use, very handy (pardon the pun). Look forward to seeing them painted up!
Nice work on redoing the majority of your canopies as well! They look great ☺️

Thanks again for all your replies! I'm glad you guys are enjoying the continuing progress of this collection. I'm certainly eager to keep painting.


I've been working on a bigger batch, but I got a few bits finished off so I thought it would be good to get them photographed and in the cabinet. Hopefully it's not too much longer before the remainder of the batch is done too and there will be another post.

Here we have the 'Wraithglaive' conversions that I posted last time, now painted up. I decided I fancied mixing up the colour scheme a bit more compared with my previous units of wraiths. All the ones I'd done up until now had been fairly classic Biel-Tan green body/white head, or white body/green head. For these I went with a 'shades of green' approach - dark green on the body and a much brighter green on the head and the cloth. I'm really pleased with how they've come out.

Also, another squad of Dire Avengers. Recently I've been doing full-sized squads for all of my Aspects. I've always preferred to paint full-size squads regardless of whether they're the best choice in the meta, but I did make some concessions to listbuilding when I first started on the army. The first Dire Avenger squads I made were when the meta was for MSU squads with dual shuriken Exarchs, so I made 3 5-elf squads. All my other squads have been 10 strong. My squad sizes are somewhat fixed by the fact that I do different paint schemes for each squad, to represent different Aspect Shrines, and also because it's fun working around the Aspect's typical colours to come up with interesting variations. So there's no mixing and matching, each model definitively belongs to a squad. And I've been mildly irritated that no matter how many full size squads I've been painting, the army's total of Dire Avengers always ended in a '5' due to those initial MSU squads. 25... to 35... to 45. I considered expanding one of the MSU squads to 10 strong, but figured I wouldn't match the paint scheme to my satisfaction. So I resolved to do another minimum strength squad to round the numbers out to 50. I have most of the Exarch weapon combinations represented, but until now I hadn't done an Exarch with the straight one shuriken catapult. I tend not to do Exarchs armed with the standard squad weapon, it's just more fun to give them one of their special options. But in this case with most of the special options already represented, I figured I'd give this 5-elf squad's Exarch the standard gun. As it happens I'm happy enough with the paint job on these that I'm mildly miffed that I didn't make it a full size squad! I've also continued with catching up on the little Asuryan statues by painting two of them.

Also we have another batch of cockpit updates. This completes the pass of updates - the only ones that I haven't done are the War Walkers, and I don't think I'll do those because I don't think it'll work great with the back of the canopy exposed, I guess I'd have to paint both sides if I did them. Maybe in the future, but not now. On the whole the amount of work wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. It was a bit of a slog edge highlighting the frames, but I got them done.

The wraithglaives have turned out stellar. Keep it up!

Those glaives came out gorgeous. Love the pop against the double-green armour.

Great background for the little DA squad that could, too. Not sure I've ever seen a DA exarch with just a catapult before, but they look neat together!

Congrats on getting the cockpits done, too. There are so many little bits on my armies that I'd told myself I'll fix later and never gotten around to - it must feel good to tick it off the list!

Love the wraiths, that bright green helmet is a great colour great job getting all of those cockpits done too, they all look nice and unified now. That green on the avengers’ catapult is a great touch too, well done on rounding out the numbers

The army has come along leaps and bounds since I last looked, Bellerophon - any thoughts on adding a Wraithseer to your force yet?

Oh hell yeah! Bellerophon has more cool minis to show the class! I absolutely love those wraithguard, and I have been following along with this blog for a few months now, reading every single post to pass the time. I really must thank you for all the enjoyment your blog has given me. Good luck painting some more space elves.

I absolutely LOVE the Wraithblade conversion, will be stealing that. Your painting is super crisp and I love how your Dire Avengers are inverse of each other with White being the central color. My army is Iyanden, and just having the Dire Avengers blue is sort of a 'meh' paintjob for me, and this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the inspiration.

Thanks once again for your replies everybody. And some of your replies had come in since I last checked the thread, so that was a really pleasant surprise when I came back this evening to add the next update.

But first, to respond to a few specific things -

 Dysartes wrote:
The army has come along leaps and bounds since I last looked, Bellerophon - any thoughts on adding a Wraithseer to your force yet?

Definitely one for the future, just something that I haven't gotten around to yet. I'm gradually adding more Forgeworld bits and pieces, with another one in this post. I'm a little worried about the future of the Forgeworld models, and so there are a number that I'd like to get my hands on sooner rather than later - but equally I don't want to be so wasteful as to go on a Forgeworld shopping spree just to add them to my pile of shame. In a way I feel lucky that most of the ones I'm most tempted by, like the Lynx, have been persistently out of stock the last few months to help me avoid temptation!

 bullisariuscowl wrote:
Oh hell yeah! Bellerophon has more cool minis to show the class! I absolutely love those wraithguard, and I have been following along with this blog for a few months now, reading every single post to pass the time. I really must thank you for all the enjoyment your blog has given me. Good luck painting some more space elves.

Thanks, it means a lot that you're getting such enjoyment from it!

 blockade23 wrote:
I absolutely LOVE the Wraithblade conversion, will be stealing that. Your painting is super crisp and I love how your Dire Avengers are inverse of each other with White being the central color. My army is Iyanden, and just having the Dire Avengers blue is sort of a 'meh' paintjob for me, and this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the inspiration.

Cool, glad you like both the conversion and the Avengers scheme. For the conversion, please do steal, I stole it myself from a couple of guys on reddit, so I'm not actually sure who had the original idea. Whoever it is, it must be really nice to see their conversion idea spreading and inspiring other Eldar players. As to the colour scheme, I've put quite a lot of thought into aspect colours, mainly because I like to make each squad from a different shrine, but I do like to stick at least somewhat close to the classic theme for that type of aspect. I sometimes feel like I spend more time trying to decide on colour schemes than I do actually painting them.

----

New update time.

Until now I only had one squad of Shining Spears in the army, and for what has grown into a fairly large Swordwind, that just didn't feel enough. So here's the second squad. The first squad had the star lance on the exarch, so this one has the paragon sabre. And, given what I said above about all the thought that goes into colour schemes... of course the classic for shining spears is blue and white. I mentioned in the last post that I felt I was on the verge of entering a pink phase, and I think it's begun! I've also seen a number of people painting miniatures in the trans pride flag scheme of blue, white and pink over the last year or so, I've thought they all looked brilliant, and that the colours are particularly suited to eldar. Combine that with an aspect that traditionally uses blue and white, and a painter who had recognised that there's not really any pink in the army yet... so I've gone with blue armour on the riders, and a pink-to-white fade on the bikes. I think they've turned out really well. A lot more colour than on my first squad, which were more straight white with flashes of blue.

Next, we've got more tanks. I was toying with calling this something along the lines of the Fire Support Tank Update - we've got two Night Spinners to join the one I already had and take the total up to three. And the next Forgeworld addition, and a lucky ebay find - a Firestorm. I'd been after one for quite a while, and I'd been vaguely contemplating converting my own turret, but then I luckily got a chance to buy a turret at an acceptable price. I had a falcon on sprue, which has now donated its hull, and the Swordwind has gained a Firestorm.

So as usual, what's next? Well, given what I was saying above about choosing aspect colour schemes, I think it might be cool if I do an 'aspect warrior colour lineup' photo or set of photos, with one member from each squad. I've got enough squads now that there could be quite a lot of miniatures in such a photo. Also, I think it's now time for another set of full army photos. After the last set of army photos at the start of last year I've added quite a lot of models, and my primary criterion for taking another set has been "it must be noticeably different/bigger than last time". I think I've achieved that with the number of new models, and also the size of some of them, for example 5 new falcon hulls, and of course the Vampire Hunter will make one big point of difference. So I think I'll do that soon. As for next models, I'm not sure. I've built more Dire Avengers and Striking Scorpions, so they're likely. But also I probably won't have as much hobby time over the next few months, and away from Eldar I've picked up the Cerastus Knights bundle and started building the Acheron (revive my Legio Metalica and Allies thread perhaps!). So it's quite possible that aside from army photos this blog might go a bit dormant for a while. We shall see.

Anyway, the photos:

Nice work on the new elements, chief, and I'm looking forward to the updated army shots.

Do you have a flat surface large enough (aside from the floor, I guess)?

Ultra clean paint job on those, you are creating a great army.

Your tanks almost make me want to get some Eldar they’re stunning. The bikes look cool in pink as well

Thanks guys

As promised, here's the "Aspect lineup". One representative of each shrine/squad in the army. Much quicker to do than the proposed updated army shots!