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So a while back I picked up a start collecting Sylvaneth box, specifically to get more dryads, and reluctantly because I saw my choice style of play would require at least one treelord to unlock those delicious battalions. I didn't like the treelord design at first, it looked less like a walking tree to me and more like a power rangers monster with a very loose tree theme, but over time it grew on me; to the point where it ended up being the first model in the box I assembled:





I've been building my sylvaneth to pair up with my wood elves, and to that end I want them to share some common elements to bring the army theme together, I see them as trudging through ancle-deep water, having a very swampy aesthetic, and obsessively pursuing vengeance in a way that becomes more vague and corrupting as they cut through the world. (Which in turn started from another conversation about how Slaanesh's corruption could manifest over excess anything, and how you could depict that in a non-sexual way.)

As with most things, I got distracted by another project and shelved it over the winter (always a builder, never a painter...) nut I happened to start listening to Blind Guardian again and it's got me excited to revisit the project. Next in line will be to build up those dryads, Greenstuff the gaps in my Drycha re-pose, and figure out exactly how I'm going to make the Mistweaver Saih mesh with my elvish swamp-people aesthetic.

 Bottle wrote:

I was really happy with the deep green armour on the model so I made a cheeky "Paint Splatter" to capture the recipe. I want to do another unit in this colour. Any ideas?

That's gorgeous. I'd love to implement this on sylvaneth weapons. Consider it stolen.

Status update on my edgetastic Sylvaneth: progress was smooth and I'm ready to start priming. I have this lingering concern because for the first time in a long time I'm going to be using the terrain paints as intended and not slathering it on before priming. As a consequence they look super bare right now and I constantly have to remind myself that they'll look less busy up top once the bases are painted covered with bushes, mounds of dirt, and water effects. But it's hard.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took while packing them for their exciting field trip to the hobby store, where I can prime them and catch up on our league.

I got to see Drycha fully built on launch day and decided I wanted her to look distinct. Originally it was just going to be a re-pose, then it was a head-swap to differentiate it from the other unpainted drycha that was seeing play in the store (Dry-chan vs Drycha-cha iirc) and I got to thinking I could fill in some of the hornets' nests covering her body to make it look more like a real one that's only partially slouched off. But after implementing it I decided I'd rather have it all look like gnarled bark. Her armour is held on with blue-tac right now, if it looks a little bulkier than it should.


I got the spite revenants at the same time as Drycha, at the time I picked them over tree-revenants due to their rules and there was a real sense that you had to pick one of them and commit. Some odd effect of them being the same kit and similar names despite this very different roles. The idea was they'd accompany Drycha and the dryads and together act as a big nasty tarpit while my wild riders picked off the real nasty stuff. In practice people would just avoid attacking whatever unit I'd casted shield of thorns on in lieu of everything else,they ended up evolving into a dryad tarpit with drycha tackling a big blob by herself and the spites positioning themselves somewhere to maximize their spooky terrain effect. I suppose their theme is 'exile is no excuse not to take care of your hair.'


Inversely, the Kurnoth Hunters come from my 'great ideas stolen from the internet' collection. I spent so much time gradually accepting the way Kurnoth's look that I finally stopped worrying about it and went looking for painting advice for them, only to be immediately blown away by amazing conversion work done by someone for their all-revenant themed army. Though I stole the idea, I ended up paying enough in blood trying to re-engineer it, let me tell you...


The theme for the tree-revenants is 'oh no, you used all your tree revenant parts for other projects!'

... Actually because I had used the hair for Drycha and the spites I had it in my head to try something different with them from the get-go. A restless dead theme gelled well with both my army's backstory and generally what tree-revenants are. I asked around the store for what units would be suited to the way they behave on the field and they all said 'skirmishers'. Then, later, patiently, they explained to the Sigmar baby that I am what skirmishers were in fantasy and what units were skirmishers.


My branchwych and Mistweaver Saih. The former is meant to bridge the sylvaneth look and the centaur theme of my wood elf army. I... may redo her at a later date, but I'll can't seem to find an angle where she looks good in a picture. She's remarkably unphotogenic. The mistweaver is a case study in how to fix a badly executed idea with liberal application of green stuff.


And another shot of my twisted treelord ancient. I realized later that I never took a picture of his face dead-on. Wearing the Durthu face like a mask modifies the treelord's facial profile in a really cool way, I feel.


I also turned the wildwood trees into little stumps that will have smaller magnetic tree branches growing out of them, used the excess tree parts to wood-up my bale wind vortex. But I forgot to take a picture of it.

So I've got a few league games under my belt (We've moved into the tournament stage now.) and I'm comfortable again with AoS in general and the way this army plays in particular. Some things I agonized about picking ended up being shockingly effective, to the point where I don't think I'll take the treelord ancient as anything other than this (so far) unkillable tank build that's served me so well.

Beyond that, I finally got them primed. I decided to try a zenithal progression from black to grey to white using the spray cans. And overall I'm satisfied with the results, though they're a bit inconsistent between the smaller models I did in a larger batch and the larger models that got more individual attention. It's a good starting point though, and I'll be careful to keep my paints thin.











I'm more and more convinced I want to do the branchwych again. That said, propping her up on a balewind vortex with a silverwood circlet has been amazing. This magic rock concert has been neutering dangerous threats while they've been in combat with my dryads line, blocked enemies from getting to objectives, and, memorably, once wiped out an entire trebuchet crew after it almost killed her before she got to put it up. I kind of expect they'll increase its points because holy gak, but don't ever let them change it's effects.

Made big progress on a replacement branchwych:



Made entirely with leftover parts and kitbash fodder left over from other projects.

Looking at it the next day, I see there's still some work to do on the neck, and will probably work the viney, root motif there too.

So I settled on a scheme for my Sylvaneth and am working out the implementation of it. For my dryads I started with celestra grey, a single layer of abaddon black around the ends of the limbs (to allow some of the grey to shoe through) and castellan green in between. Then went over the whole thing with camoshade.



In the end, the green wash did a much better job blending the three distinct colours than I had anticipated.

Now I'm bringing those three distinct tones back by dry brushing those areas with ulthuan grey, elysian green, and eshin grey, that last one is proving too dark to really notice so I'm going to experiment with stormvermin fur and see how that looks.

The leftmost ones were done black, then green, then white, the rightmost were white, green, then black, and the ones in between were different asymmetrical orders or extra white or black layers as touchups.



The ones on the right were easiest to do but the contrast around the face is really harsh, lefty is clearly much softer than the rest and I ended up retiring that brush.

 Future War Cultist wrote:

Spoiler:

For anyone who’s interested, the metal is a base coat of Warplock Bronze, washed in Agrax Earthshade, layered in Runelord Brass, with Nuln Oil applied to certain parts, drybrushed in Runefang Steel with a second wash of Earthshade to bring out the green.

I really do love seeing people take the time to make a good brass colour. It makes me think 'like gold, but works for a living.'

I wonder if it'd work for armour on my daughters of Khaine?

puree wrote:
Sort of trying for the sunken temple theme, not really feeling it yet.

The white pillars stand out a lot, maybe some staining around the midsection, yellow to green/black the closer you get to the water would make it look like molds are finding purchase on the stone?

So I finally got around to working on my Cauldron of Blood, more or less my last obstacle to having a field able Daughters of Khaine army.

As is my way, to steal shamelessly from the internet, I took big inspiration from Tim Fisher's Cauldron, with its lifted staircase, and double-helping of blood for when you have friends over and want to party.





The staircase is raised and moved back so that the dais sits inside it, the peg for the Cauldron itself hooks into a little spur on the middle axle and kind of hugs the side plate - very difficult to glue together, all-in-all.

Next steps will be to cannibalize a cauldron from my second kit to do the other side, that kit will go on to become a bloodwrack shrine, I'm also debating magnetizeing the dais and stairs, I don't like the look of the avatar very much and would like to replace it with something - problem is it needs to be tall and to have a narrow footprint to fit there.

The wolves are part of the larger theme of the army, I've got all my footbound queens riding wolves and scaling that up to the cauldron is a relatively straightforward matter of removing the front wheels and (eventually) adding some chains to the wolves. Originally I only had two but it looked kind of awkward.

I took a long time to upload this (because I had 69 gallery images and am a child) but I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out:



Next up is a slaughter queen riding a cold one and a magnetized set of queens so I can finally finish that cauldron of blood.

Just a quick and dirty update from this weekend:



Not an original conversion idea by any means but she was a lot of fun to build.

She was, sadly, too big for a 25mm base.

More importantly she'll be serving as a test bed for my colour scheme idea (blue skin following the T'au progression with a white snake body) and if it doesn't work for a whole army it'll at least let her stand out as a regular sorceress.

I love that skin. How'd you do it?

Built Ylthari's Guardians, not really reportable except my camera decided to make them look all freaky:



Thoughts on colour schemes for the flesh? Thinking maybe very pale, with red in the gashes or perhaps black and green fades on the extremities of the limbs? The wood will be along the same lines as the dryad's bark.

Progress on Ylthari and friends - it occurred to me just now I don't know their names:



Found between the bark and the hair and the fidly bits there really wasn't enough surface area available to paint muscle fiber and stuff. I dunno... The skin looks really blotchy to me and I'm not sure how to fix it, or maybe it just needs a highlight.

The colours themselves are more or less where I want them and I've done some experiments with clump foliage and I'm going to aim to use matte varnish to harden it up. Hair is just celestra gray right now (need to finish everything under and around it before I shade with oxide and highlight with ulthuan), heading out after work today to pick up some remaining paints I need to do the metalics, power weapon fades for the sword and axe and a few touch up's here and there.

Aaaand with that, Ylthari Inc. is complete:



I'm actually really happy with how they turned out after all is said and done, topped them off with clump foliage from Woodland Scenics (olive on the revenants, light green on the bases) which I hardened with Vallejo paint-on varnish and drybrushed with nurgling green, and some realistic water effects, also by Woodland Scenics, which I just managed to apply without having it spill over the rim and make a horrible mess.

Together, they're the first properly finshed set of models I've done for my sylvaneth and prove out the swamp/wandering river theme I'd been talking about doing for years and I'm excited to do more.

Not much of a progress report so much as it is a notice that I've finally gotten off my butt and got back to work on my sylvaneth.



Thats 16 dryads block colored, washed, then drybrushed and I Think I'll build up the rest of them to that standard before proceeding with the next steps: painting the leaves, touching up the eyes and mouth with a little camoshade, laying down striland mud, adding water effects and foliage, before moving on to more singular models.

 Tiberius501 wrote:
Some really awesome and inspiring stuff on here! I’ve just started working on my new Sylvaneth army and am kicking it off with a Spirit of Durthu.

I really like that colour combination!