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Hey,

As my hobby blog is getting longer and longer, I have started creating new showcase threads for each of my armies to display the completed models.
This is the second one and it will focus on my Craftworlds Eldar.

The progress shots from this army and all the others can be seen on my general hobby thread: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/471404.page.

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Some background:

Eldar was the second army I picked up right after building a reasonable sized Ork army.
When I was 12 years old, Eldar was one of the candidates for my first army. I really liked the aesthetics of the grav tanks and the Falcon was one of my favourite models of all time.
For some reason, Orks still stole my interest among many other "I'll start collecting this and this army!" -candidates.

I don't remember the particular moment or reason why I went and bought the Eldar Battleforce box, but somehow a small collection was suddenly on my shelves approximately 12 years ago.
I only remember, that instead of buying my friend's Eldar models, I managed to brainwash him back into the hobby and to keep on working on his models. He played for another five years after that.
In the end, his collection wound up in my cabinet for further use.

From the get go, I was really drawn to the dark color scheme of Ulthwe.
I admired the art and paintjobs on the White Dwarf magazine and the Eldar Codex. The smooth edge highlights and creamy bone color was something I knew I could not produce.
Knowing that did not stop me from trying though. I painted and repainted my grav tanks at least three times over, each time with a slightly different color scheme.
I regret not taking a lot of pictures back then, but here is my Fire Prism with it's second (or third?) paintjob.

In the end, I was never really happy with the look of the army, as it did not look very cohesive.
I wanted to have a distinct look and feel to the army, but something that would not take ages to paint.

I remember sitting at my computer in the night and staring at a space themed wallpaper while listening to Wintersun.
The combination of music and the colors on the wallpaper inspired me so much, that I started searching similar pictures.
After a while, I took one of my grav tanks, sprayed it black (again) and started prototyping with a drybrush.
So, the current color scheme was born.

The secondary colors have been changing over the years, but the main theme has stayed the same for 8 years now.
After 12 years of collecting Eldar, I finally got a fully painted 2000pts force on the table in Autumn 2019.

It took me a while to start this thread, as I have not worked on my Eldar that much since then.
But after playing a few games and completing a few models, I decided to kick it up.


First, I want to share a couple of songs that inspired this army.
Those who follow my general hobby thread, know that I like to post a song before army shots or picture collections to (hopefully) enhance the pictures.


As with the Ork thread, the first posts will consist of models I've completed over the last couple of years.
From there on, I will pick up with the latest creations.

I'll start with the latest army shots I took when I reached the goal of a painted playable force.



















Last spring, I decided to finally proceed and put some snow effects to all the bases in the army.



I will put up some individual pictures of some of the models seen in the group shots soon.

To be conituned...

Oh my goodness, this looks amazing! I'm sure I've seen one of your Wave Serpents before, possibly trawling the gallery, and I was gobsmacked by it - I had no idea you had a whole army in the same scheme!

Thanks Super Ready! Glad you like them.

The pics from the serpents have been up for a while, so it's possible.


Next up the latest additions to the army.
Both of these took part in the monthly Dakka painting contest.

First, the Warlock on a jetbike.
As it's a conversion, it might be hard to tell if she is a farseer or a warlock. Been playing her as a warlock though.



The latest model I finished.
This guy was my first Wraithlord that I ever bought. I built it approximately ~12 years ago.
It was painted over and over again with different colors, as I could not decide the final scheme for it.
Before giving it a new life, I removed almost all of the parts and stripped the paint. I then cleaned the old glue stains and fixed a few broken parts (like the weapon mounts).


Thanks for looking!

I like the purple and the star fields, I just think there is just too much black armor and it really mutes the look of the starfields. Great paint job and a very nice looking army.

That is a stunning army, absolutely amazing, I'd love to see something like that in person. How much work is it to do the star fields/nebulae on something like one of the Wave Serpents?

Liking the concept sir! Well done

Thank you thesilverback, Vaktathi and Argive!

thesilverback wrote:I like the purple and the star fields, I just think there is just too much black armor and it really mutes the look of the starfields. Great paint job and a very nice looking army.

I agree that the theme is quite dark. It's really hard to take a good army picture to say the least

Vaktathi wrote:That is a stunning army, absolutely amazing, I'd love to see something like that in person. How much work is it to do the star fields/nebulae on something like one of the Wave Serpents?

It's actually quite simple in the end. It's something that I came up with almost 10 years ago (the first iteration) when I used to do a lot of dry brushing. Since then, I've almost completely moved away from that tehcnique, except on these star fields.

The steps are somewhat as follows:

- Prime the model black
- Drybrush really dark purple on the areas which you want some nebulae or "cosmic dust"
- Drybrush smaller areas with lighter purple each time. Mix it up with a hint of pink or blue to get more interesting colors
- Really lightly drybrush / stipple almost whitish purple (or even white, but you want to be careful with this). You can also use a fine sponge for this.
- Optional: wash the result with a thinned down purple / red / blue wash to fine tune the drybrush effect and tint the whole thing to the desired color.
- Paint the dots with the tip of a brush. You can also thin down some white paint, dip your brush into it and sort of "flick" on the edge of the brush, so that the paint on the bristles 'rain' all over the surface. This helps with randomness, but is a bit risky. I've done this a couple of times when I'm lazy.

There is no well defined method for this, I usually just let the brush do it's work and don't think about it too much.
This is one of those techniques, that is quite simple to do but looks good enough on the battlefield. Especially when there are a full army of them.

If I paint some other effects, like on the Wraithlord or on the Crimson Hunter, I do a small sketch to preserve the area before adding the the above effects.

Your eldar is fantastic! Especially love the harlequin on jetbike.

Very cool I may have to try something like that myself at some point.

Nicely done

Thank you very much, appreciate the compliments!

Finished repainting my second Wraithlord.
This fellow had a similar treatment compared to the other one: removing parts, stripping, fixing broken parts and repainting.
It was also originally built ~11-12 years ago. The only thing I changed was swapping a single Scatter Laser to two Starcannons.

Nice!

Respect for painting all of the gems

I need to do that on my future wraiths.
Seems worth it.

It is really amazing job! I love it!

Stunning work as usual, loving the double grip on the sword!

Amazing work! I like the combination of black along with the purple star fields as the black makes other colours pop and seem more vibrant. Great stuff!

Beautiful work! I love the swirling pattern running down the head, and it's got a really purposeful-looking stride going on.