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NICE.

In addition to all the brilliant repositioning, I like the scale change.

I really like the Samurai theme youve built into the army. Especially with the wraithlord.

Your plasti-fu is strong too

looking forward to mo updates

Dude. DUDE! Those Eldar are nice! I love interesting looking armies and I usually dismiss Eldar as being a bit...fruity. I am very impressed.

And I love the Land Raider dozer blade. The front reminds me of Judge Dredd!

Got a few more details added to the model, including =I= stuff. Last bit before painting will be finding places to just add some random doodads, to give the model a little depth here and there. Been trying to work on a swivel-mount spotlight, but it's not really coming together at the moment. :\

Wow really cool^^!

All your work is awesome, though did you get a paintjob from the sliding eldar from on of the first pages?

Keep it up!

Hans_posthumus wrote:Did you get a paintjob from the sliding eldar from on of the first pages?

If you mean the farseer, no I've not painted it yet. I've never quite been happy with the model, and will likely break it down for parts at some point, instead continuing to use my large C'tan conversion . Converting the Autaurch made me realize that it just doesn't look like a proper command-level Eldar, but more like a senior Storm Guardian or something.

I dig the Eldar stuff.. Red Scorpions look hot!

Looking forward to more updates..

Nice Job like the camo

OK, so I found out that the local game shop is holding a tourney in a couple weeks, so I decided I'll finally get around to playing some 5th Edition. That means nailing down an army list and finishing up units that are needed for that army.

That means a unit of Rangers, a unit of Jetbikes, and a Farseer that doesn't suck and that won't be confusing under the TLOS rules.

I was never really happy with the last Farseer that I posted: it didn't really look like one. It was more like a Storm Guardian sergeant or something. So I chopped off his arm (since I really DID like the spear) and dug an old farseer that I'd used for parts out of my bits box. I sort of hamfistedly threw a fresh cloak on the back to cover up some chopping work that I'd done previously to steal part of its sword, and tossed together a card/putty banner.



I still need to do some sanding work on the grey stuff, but I wanted to wait until it had cured before I do that.

Just prior to working on the Farseer, I finished up a unit of Rangers that had literally been sitting in my "to do" box for something like 5 years. I didn't spend a ton of time painting them, mostly just washes and drybrushing, so they're not the best painted models I've ever done. They're going to spend most of their playtime hiding in trees anyways, so...

I'm mainly showing them because I like the conversions, not because I'm particularly happy with the painting.






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Some in-progress painting shots; first few layers are in place. Going to spend more time blending the Phoenix "rune" on his back, probably need to clean up the edges of the orange-yellow on the front ends of the robes.

Wrapped up painting the Farseer tonight. I need to get some better pictures of it with more consistent lighting; I don't think reds and oranges really come off very well with the lights I use for painting.

Assembled this tonight; will be the first of seven models. I wanted to give them a much nicer feeling of speed (similar to the DE bikes and the Jess Goodwin test model you can find somewhere around here) along with modernizing them to match the current guardians.

I also find it strangely appropriate that as I sat down to start working on these, Return of the Jedi was on TV... and the Speeder Bike Chase Scene started up.




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Made a more effective banner for the bike, designed more to fit with the army as a whole, as well as being something I can easily do on all future bikes (I'd run out of the Wraithlord banner bits pretty soon).

I mostly like the bike! It's a good idea. However, it might be slightly more aerodynamic if the fins sticking off of the engines were reversed, enhancing the streamlined look. Just a thought.

Very nice! I really like the guardians with the addition of the high elf parts; it gives each guardian more personailty, and gives them more of a 'citizen army' feel that's appropriate for the non-aspect models.

Great job on the bikes too. they really need that stretching out.

Lots of great ideas in here, keep it up!

tzeentchling wrote:I mostly like the bike! It's a good idea. However, it might be slightly more aerodynamic if the fins sticking off of the engines were reversed, enhancing the streamlined look. Just a thought.

Well, the forward vanes are kind of an Eldar "thing". Even the awesome prototype Jetbike that Jess Goodwin did in his spare time has the fins that way. It's certainly a good option, though, and I'm thinking of adding a lower stabilizer under the engines and if so that one'll be more traditional.

The squad is fully converted at this point, except for bases... and I need to figure out how I'm going to do up a Warlock since I apparently don't have any warlocks lying about in a box somewhere like I thought. :\ May have to actually buy one. Paint starts tomorrow night on these six.

Sorry about the width of the photos, but I didn't see enough detail on smaller sizes. Edit: whoa, I didn't know dakka automatically resized photos to prevent H-scroll. Sweet.

Nice Jetbikes too..

And great motivation in the Star Wars scenes..

I've done the pass of bone-wash-bone, and have done the purples on all of the models. The freehand on the front end of the bikes is based on the Noh-mask style mon of the Moto family (one of the families in the L5R Unicorn clan, the foremost masters of cavalry in that game world). I tried to make each bike have a different, stylized version of the mask, and intentionally elongated the faces to make them a bit more Eldar-like.

Next step is to do a bit of cleanup, then to add some detail to the riders, and then to do the banners.

I'm sorry about the variance in the photos, I didn't want to dig out the light box for this and the jetbike carapaces are VERY reflective apparently, preventing me from getting any good consistent photography of the bikes. :\








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Added some yellow to the carapaces to provide some much-needed depth/variety to the bikes. Tomorrow, the banners!

Again, I tried various camera settings and Photoshop fudging to make the colors look a bit more like reality.









And a closeup of a single bike so the rider's general color scheme can be viewed:

Those look really nice! Good paint job, and good freehand. Makes them stand out!

OK, time for a big photo dump. I completed the Jetbike squad, mostly (still need to add grass to the base and I forgot to paint the warlock's spear, dammit), but I took the opportunity to get some better photos of some previously completed stuff and will be showing those here as well.

First off, as mentioned, the jetbikes are complete:











Next, I took some better photos of the Farseer, Autarch and Wraithlord...






And finally, a quality composite of the Land Raider:

I went ahead and pulled out the whole bloody army as it stands and took some full army shots. Hopefully this shows that the army manages to look fairly unified through the use of the banners and common basing rather than looking like the typical Eldar "Who Crapped a Rainbow on the Table" mishmash of color. Not sure if that's accomplished, though, feedback is certainly welcome.

This is basically the army I'll be taking to a tourney on Sunday, plus/minus a few models here and there. The only things I really have left to do are:
-Paint the spear on the Bike Warlock
-Paint up a new Scatter Laser turret for one of the Wave Serpents
-Repaint the gems/holofields on the fronts of the Wave Serpents
-Make a few objective counters
-Decide if I want to hack together a banner for the Autarch or not.

The pics are all 1280 pixels wide, so if your desktop can handle it you may want to spread your browser window wide to see them at full detail.

Two full, wide-angle shots (one naturally taken one fake-panorama edited):




A side angle:


And closeups on the two halves:

No new pics or anything, but my goal was successful: I won the best army award at the local tournament I was rushing to finish the army for. With the store credit I picked up a War Walker, which will be the first member of a future squad. At the moment I'm trying to visualize what I'll do to them to make them distinct (other than the usual banner work).

I'm probably going to be taking a few more days' break from any minis work, then I'm going to start a new thread focusing on stuff I'm doing for my D&D campaign and other similar minis, keeping my 40k/Sci-fi stuff separated from the more individualized fantasy-level minis. I am also in the planning stages for something extremely epic, but I need to track down the parts for it before I can start really doing anything with it.

Last night I decided to start work on the War Walker. My intention before I cut into any plastic was to create a somewhat faster-looking walker, something that's worthy of the scout move and the general grace of the Eldar. I'd thought about extending the weapon "arms" as well, to give it the look of more weapon flexibility. Browsing around various galleries of mecha and battlemechs, I remembered the Battletech Clan Omnimechs were usually fairly graceful (compared to the clunky Inner Sphere mechs), so I looked them up. Turns out that the Vulture was a fairly perfect representation of what I had mentally visualized, so I used it as the general outline for the walker.

On the whole, it's not really "based" on the Vulture, but the arm and leg layout were at least influences towards the final look. After building the arms, it turned out that the legs had become way too short (both in looks and in actual physical capability, as the arms would drag on the ground). I thus had to extend the legs by a couple of inches, which turned out to really give the walker even more of a long-legged grace that looks like something the Eldar would grow.

I need to do a few more things: file down the leg putty work to get them a little more smooth, decide what I'm going to do with the shoulders, and of course build the banner to tie it into the army as a whole. After that, I need to afford two more walkers.

Feedback and suggestions for future versions are welcome!

Love your work here, especially the Striking Scorpions and the Tetsubo Wraithlord, but i'm loving the re-do of the War Walker!

Fantastic!

I like the less static pose of the wraithlord.The jet bikes are nice to and that war walker has peeked my interest.Keep up the good work,I can't wait to see what you do next.

Haven't done much minis work (other than experimentally painting a few D&D-related minis) over the last several weeks as it's gotten close to the start of the school year. I made it a point, though, last weekend, to pick up a couple kits to start up a project so that I had something specific to work on during weekends when I have time.

I've always liked the idea of a live-pilot Space Marine Dreadnaught, especially for the more dakka-pattern ones. When I finally noticed that the newer Sentinel kit had a metric ton of weapons included and better legs than the original plastic one, I decided that I had to do this conversion. I like that it's a bit more graceful looking than the standard Marine Dread (I've never liked the super-waddle look of the legs), and once I get the gun arms put together I expect it to still look like a nice big hulking machine.

If you want fluff for why they're doing something so heretical as not honoring a fallen battle brother (I just think it looks cool, sink the fluff), the company is on a sort of last-stand campaign across a planet (dropped in to examine Eldar ruins, killed the Eldar, but then an Ork fleet came in and took out their Strike Cruiser) so they had to cobble together a gun-walker after their last actual dreadnaught was lost. The planet has several heavily forested regions, so a walker is better able to pick its way through trees than heavy tanks.

Still to be done:
*gun arms, obviously (the plan is for the primary build to be a dual-Autocannon setup, with most of the other weapon options represented at some point using a combination of the dread and sentinel parts and scratch builds).
*Leg armor: I need to bulk it up a little bit below the waist to make it look more dread-like
*a cage for the pilot. I'd just use the one that came with the Sentinel, but I had to widen the cockpit quite a bit to fit a marine.
*Cleanup: there's lots of visible rough edges and plain plasticard; that stuff will get greebled up and covered with other bits here and there.

Comments, feedback, etc. welcome as always.




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Did the arms tonight; this'll probably be all I do until the weekend, and even that depends on how much reading/homework I get given in my first two days of school.

Found time this weekend to wrap up the first set of weapons for the Dreadnaught. Two fully scratch-built twin-linked autocannons are probably the hardest ones I'll have to convert; the other weapons I can at least base on a weapon from the dread or sentinel kits. Also still to do is the cage for the cockpit (haven't decided if I'll do it before painting or add it after I can get into the marine, paint-wise, and to add more junk to the base.

This is the full-composite of the angles; I've got bigger views of the individual angles in the gallery.



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Upon further review, I'm wondering if the TL-Autocannon isn't a little too wide for the layout of the model. They look a little bit oversized for the arms that are holding them and I'm not sure that those pistons could handle the torque as it stands.

It would be non-trivial, but possible, to cut the magazines and barrels off of the central bit of plastic that's holding the embedded magnet. In doing so, I could then rotate the gun assemblies 90 degrees, with the magazines hanging directly underneath the barrels instead of sitting off to the side. It would probably balance out the model nicely, but I'm not sure how effective it would look overall. Comments and suggestions?

Oo--oO

to

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ALSO: I'm trying to decide if I should:

A: split the Jade Fists off into their own blog,
B: just retitle the damn blog thread since I've finished the Eldar army and will now just be adding individual models to it occasionally,
or C: just leave it, since the name is recognized and I don't post frequently enough right now for it to matter.

Feedback welcome in that regard (as well as the usual feedback on models).

Trimmed down the Autocannons to fit the body somewhat better. Still need to add the occasional doodad to them to get them looking less like random Plasticard.



Also assembled a TL LC + ML for it; the LC is heavily modified, the missile launcher just had a magnet embedded.

So, it's been awhile, but I've gotten some paint on this model finally:

Finished the dread; I'll probably get lightbox pix next weekend. Pics are auto-resized; click for gallery shots.

Woo that dread is AWESOME