Bellerophon wrote:
Thanks! It's good to be back.

A bit more progress to share, I haven't saved things up like I did last time, so there's only two new units to add. First - even more Dire Avengers. I've painted quite a lot of these guys recently. My last big set of army photos feels like it's not that long ago really, and had 50 of these guys. Including this new squad I've painted 30 Avengers since then, bringing the total up to 80. When deciding how to paint these, I realised that it had been quite a long time since I last painted a squad in a classic mid or darker blue. All of my recent squads had been pale blue, or purple, or teal. So this squad got a more classic Avenger blue, and I decided to do yellow helmets. Then I suddenly felt the need to include some strong visual cues that they're Biel-Tan and not Alaitoc or Iyanden, so I did the helmet crests in a telltale green and white stripe pattern, and gave the Exarch a green banner with a so-big-you-can't-miss-it Biel-Tan rune.


Next, my first painted batch of Windriders in quite a long time. I wanted to make these a bit of a tribute to the old Shrieker jetbike kit. Anybody old enough to remember, the old 'easy rider' style jetbike kit only had the shuriken catapuls option, but you could buy a 'Shrieker' jetbike kit which included a metal shuriken cannon and a metal replacement torso for the rider rocking a leather jacket and a plume on top of the helmet. I had a couple of those back in the day, I'm sure I've still got them here somewhere. I didn't want to go quite so far as to raid other kits for torsos that could replicate the jacket, I just stuck with the regular torso from the windrider kit, and I used the helmets with plumes from the storm guardians kit. But I also wanted to lean into a theme of these being wild and aggressive, so I also used some bare heads and gave a few of them swords or shuriken pistols, again taken from the storm guardians. My other windriders have magnetised weapons, which means I have plenty of bikers where I can change the armament to suit the situation, and I was happy to just glue on the shuriken cannons for these. They're shriekers after all! Then I thought - how about a different paint scheme? My regular windriders have classic Biel-Tan green bikes, and the riders wear the standard guardian scheme of white armour and green helmet. So I thought for these, I've taken enough parts from the storm guardians, so why not paint the riders the same way I painted my storm guardians, green armour and white helmet. And if the riders' armour is green, maybe this time around the bikes shouldn't be green. I didn't really want to do white (encroaching on shining spears a bit perhaps, and a bit too bright for what I was trying to do with this squad). I decided that a black jetbike, with some bold green biel-tan thorns could be cool. So that's what I did.


That's all the painted models today, but there will still be plenty more to come in the future. Perhaps most exciting at this stage of the project, are the current batch of commemorative eldar. Releasing an eldar model for the WH+ subscription was just about the only way they could have got be to resubscribe. When I saw Infinity's Lament, it didn't take me long to give in and sign up. Then they revealed the store birthday Autarch model, and I knew I needed to get my hands on at least one of those too. I was originally planning to wait for my local GW's birthday, but then I saw some social media posts from the Warhammer World anniversary event showing off rack upon rack of the things. I'm in the midlands anyway, and it had been a while since I'd been through the exhibition, so... one road trip to WHW later, I have one to build as per the box, one to kitbash. (I feel excited, but also ripped off given they're £27 each!)