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After getting back into 40k after a few years of downtime, I've been rebuilding a number of armies - Orks, Blood Angels, Eldar, Dark Eldar. And after an even longer hiatus from painting, I've picked up the brushes again. Over Christmas, I started painting the Orks as an exercise to get back into the painting habit again. With the new Blood Angel Codex, I decided that Blood Angels would be a good next step in dusting off my rusty painting skills. But then two things happened:

1) I ran across 3rdechelon's Dark Eldar on instagram (http://instagram.com/3rdechelon/). When I bought my Dark Eldar (~$1,000 worth of models for $200), the majority of them had already received a spray basecoat of silver. Frankly, I was a little stumped on what to do with them until I saw 3rdechelon's DE army. His use of metallics for his Warriors contrasting with solid colors on his vehicles really appealed to me - particularly as it means not having to re-basecoat my infantry.

2) I came across Mechanicum Jon's Kabal of the Drowned Gardens here on Dakka (http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/378881.page). It was 2 a.m. when I found it, but I scrolled through all 48 pages, saving images left and right. I fell in love with his Razorwings and Raiders. His use of Tamiya Coral Blue made a colorful DE army that evoked what I had loved years before when I first saw GMM Studios 'Memento Mori' Eldar (http://www.gmmstudios.net/eldar). I knew I had to use that Coral Blue as my contrasting color with 3rdechelon's metallic infantry scheme.

So, I picked up a can of Tamiya Coral Blue and sprayed the first Razorwing. It looked so damn good, I burned through the rest of the spray on my other vehicles.



Being extremely happy with how that basecoat looked on my vehicles, I decided a few nights later to paint up a test Warrior to go with the vehicles. I was a little worried about how the Sotek Green would go against the Coral Blue, but it had the best tone to match.



I was pretty happy with how it turned out, but I was right about the Sotek Green - the color was good, but was way too dark.



As much as I love 3rdechelon's metallic infantry color scheme, I'm thinking that Mechanicum Jon's infantry color scheme will be simpler to execute. I'll need to re-basecoat the infantry with Coral Blue, but I think it'll be easier to work with all around. Time to go get another can of Coral Blue...

(Sorry about the quality of the pics - I can't find my background sheet and I'm still figuring out how to best photograph my models in my new place.)

All right - better pic this time, though still not amazing. I decided to run a test model using Mechanicum Jon's color scheme. Mechanicum Jon has done a fantastic job in his blog of laying out step-by-step how he's painted his DE army. While his tutorials are spread out over the course of the 48-page thread, they're all there and in good detail. I've been compiling them into a single document for my own use.

So, I re-sprayed the test warrior from before with Tamiya Coral Blue, then sponged on weathering in a dark gray. I basecoated the warrior's undersuit with what Mechanicum Jon calls "Bodysuit Brown" - a dark red-brown. I didn't get quite his shade, his is redder than mine. And then I blocked out the areas that will be gold in Khemri Brown. Went back over these in Gehenna Gold and then gave most of the model a Devlan Mud wash. The gold areas, I washed with thinned down Sotek Green.

It still looks pretty rough at this point, but I think highlights will sharpen it up quite a bit. I like the scheme, though, and it's pretty easy to execute.

My gaming club is running an escalation league, so I decided it was time to put in the work to get my Dark Eldar going again. I've now got everything assembled and basecoated for my 500 pt and 750 pt escalation league armies, along with some extra that I'll be adding in down the line.

First on deck were assembling 4 Blasterborn and a Trueborn with Splinter Rifle. Only two of the blasters are plastic, the rest some that I came up with using some grey-stuff resin putty. They're not quite as detailed, but on the table-top, the differences aren't that noticeable. And while I love the Lhamaean model, $28 for a 10 point model is just ridiculous (not to mention the fact that when I went into my FLGS last week, they didn't have one). Consequently, I built one out of Kabalite Warrior, Succubus, and Wyche parts. Considering they're supposed to wear Kabalite armor, I felt it wasn't too out of line. I also basecoated the crew and weapon pods for my first Ravager and Raider along with a Splinter Cannon carrying Warrior.





The only model in the army that I haven't sprayed Coral Blue is the Succubus as she'll only have a couple pieces of blue armor on her. She'll primarily be the bodysuit brown that's under the armor of the warriors. The Succubus that came with the army I bought was resin. Her glaive was horribly bent and I didn't want to run her with the agoniser. So, I cut away the glaive, took off the agoniser arm and replaced it with a splinter pistol arm. I built a new glaive out of brass rod, some leftover Raider spikes and blades and a thin plastic strip. Since I had given the Succubus head to the Lhamaean, I gave her a new, different Wyche head. The glaive looks exaggeratedly large in the picture, but it's fairly reasonable on the model itself. I think it should hold up better than the resin one. I'm pretty happy with the conversion.



Now, I've run out of things to basecoat which means that I'll actually have to start using my paintbrushes for the next steps.