Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

That's super rad. A beautiful display of Aspect goodness.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Bellerophon wrote:
Thanks guys

As promised, here's the "Aspect lineup". One representative of each shrine/squad in the army. Much quicker to do than the proposed updated army shots!

Rollover!

Even the subset line up is pretty impressive and inspring work. Here's to more!

Love how all the shrines are distinct, but still obvious who they are. Amazing work.

Thanks guys!

It's that time again... new army photos time. Each time I do this it takes longer and longer to set up, but it's very worthwhile. I wanted to wait until the army was noticeably bigger than last time before I took another set of army photos, and I thought the time had come when I'd achieved that.

The first photo is reduced in size, with some full size ones in the spoiler. See the imgur album link for the full set.

Massive army pics are always worth it. But I totally get what a PITA it is to drag everything out and set it all up for a pic. I think the last time I did was like 4 years ago, so I really should. But it’s such a daunting task.

Very impressive!

Take a bow. That's beautiful. Just...beautiful.

Exalted Bellerophon.

Enough said...

Well it is also a beautiful army, massive in size, and comprehensive in the entire range.

CB

That's a very impressive army shot, Bellerophon - I take it you'll be getting a larger table before the next one?

The Aspect rainbow was stunning (yellow scorpion is probably my favourite), but the whole army shot what a labour of love. It comes to something when you need a dining table and massive sheet for a backdrop! Amazing

That's pretty awesome but I do have a question...what is that lego set ?

Thanks again everyone. These army shots are really satisfying to set up, but yeah, it takes an absolute age to carry them all from the display cases to the table and to arrange them in a reasonably sensible way. They're still on the table now - I'm summoning up the motivation to take them back to their display cases, and I do quite enjoy just looking at them arrayed on the table anyway. It's such a rare thing, so I like to enjoy it for at least a few days, so long as I don't have anything else I need to do with the table in the meantime.

Re: needing a larger table - it seems that way! They definitely take up over half the table now, even packed quite tightly. But there's still room for a fair bit of expansion before I need another option.

Oh, and the Lego set is the Technic McLaren F1 car. Not mine, it's actually my brother's. He's halfway through building it. (I moved it off the table because I deemed Eldar photos to be more important. )

I’d worry about leaving an army on the table. But then, I share space with a Void of the feline persuasion. And while the Fuzzy Mistress is generally well behaved, and my Ultras veterans of the Tyranic Wars and no stranger to bio-titans, I’d rather not risk it.

Defiantly easier if you don’t need to rush set up and break down. And it is a wonder to glory at the whole collection together.

Wow, that's a stunning Eldar collection you have there.

What an awesome army shot! It must be very gratifying to see them all together I imagine it was a full days work to get them all set out. Now you’ve just got to find someone to have a. Apocalypse game with before they all go back in the cabinet

I'm way late to the party, but that is truly an impressive army! So much love concentrated into a set of pictures, that it's almost overwhelming.
It's always cool to see whole collection in one picture. Not just for us, but for the painter as wel!

Thanks for taking the time to take the pictures!

PS. I hope you have gathered the mental power to get them back to their cases

Hi everybody, I'm back!

Thanks again all of you for your comments on my army photos, I really appreciate it. It's a real labour of love. But, I've been MIA for about 18 months at this point. You could be forgiven for thinking that the army was finished and I'd moved on, but far from it. I set the army photos up when I did because I knew that I had some enforced time away from painting towards the end of 2024 and early 2025, but I was back in time for the 2025 Eldar release wave. For whatever reason, I was just out of the habit of posting at that point, so nothing I completed last year got uploaded here. Today is where I rectify that, and show you what I've worked on since I last posted.

What other way to start than with the new Phoenix Lords? Absolutely lovely models. It made for an expensive release day buying a bunch of characters and aspect squads, but it was worth it. I mostly stuck to the box art schemes for these, I figure that represents the canonical version of each of these characters. The only real deviations were on Fuegan, where I painted Searsong in the same dull bronze that I use for all of my fusion guns - which was itself inspired by the old 2nd ed dark red Fuegan and Fire Dragon paintjobs. I also painted the Fire Axe to look molten, which I think is just cooler than the metallic look on the studio job. I've got a photo of the four new Phoenix Lords together, and another showing them along with the rest of the squad, Jain Zar, Maugan Ra and Iryllith, who I painted some time ago. Looking at them all together like this really makes me think I should rebase Irillyth on a 40mm to match. There's a conspicuous scorpion shaped gap in this group at the moment, really hoping we get a new Karandras before too long.




Now, the first squads I've painted of the new 2025 Aspect sculpts. For the Warp Spiders, I wanted to do a scheme that was at least a bit distinct from my venerable 2nd ed metals, and the main way I did that was by taking the red in a more burgundy direction, which I was really pleased with. In fact I like it so much, I'm tempted to use it as the basis for my corsair scheme when I finally get around to painting those. I picked the blade array for the exarch on the basis of it being cool more than anything else.

The Swooping Hawks I did in a pretty close to the modern box art scheme of a dark turquoise, which again I was really pleased with, with a splash of purple and pale yellow for accents. I picked the Scatter Laser for the exarch, mainly because I already have Hawk's Talons on my metals, and I'm not quite so keen on the pose with the sword. Not to say I won't do one at some point, but this first plastic hawk exarch got the Scatter Laser.

The Fire Dragons I went with quite a bright orange with red helmets, again picking a scheme that's a bit distinct from the 3 different paintjobs I already have on my metals. I picked the pistol and axe here for the Exarch because it's the only option that I didn't have in the metals, even though really I think a Firepike is the one true weapon for a Fire Dragon Exarch. It's just I already have 3 in metal! The other advantage of picking the Axe was that I could paint it at the same time as Fuegan's, in the same scheme.







So those were the new aspect warriors, but that's not all. I've painted two more squads of Dire Avengers, because I've said before and I'll say again, they should be the backbone of any Swordwind. I know the models are old and quite janky to build compared with the newer aspects, but I still think they look really good once finished and painted. So I've done these two squads, and I still have plenty more to come. For the first squad I continued with my pink phase that was kicked off by the last group of Shining Spears, by giving them a classic blue body with a pink helmet. Then the second group I decided to deviate from blue into teal. I haven't named their shrine, but it almost certainly has the word 'Jade' in it. Very happy with how both squads came out.

More Dark Reapers followed. This is my first squad of 10 Reapers. For whatever reason I'd always done Reapers in 5s before, and now was starting to regret my prior choices given I prefer to build max Aspect Squads. For this first group of 10 I went with a classic black armour and turquoise reaper launchers, and gave the Exarch the missile launcher. I already had missile launchers (and tempest launchers) represented on my Dark Reaper Exarchs, and no Shuriken Cannon yet, but I felt my first full size squad ought to have an Exarch wielding something that shoots missiles. I don't have any more of these on my to-do pile at the moment, but I absolutely want to add more. Dark Reapers are somewhat under-represented in my collection at the moment, and I need some more 10-elf squads.

Sticking to the order I painted things, next up the only squad in this update that isn't an aspect warrior. We have 6 more Shroud Runners, taking my total to 9. Not much particularly to add about these, they're in my standard Biel-Tan scheme, and I think I've used most of the combos of options available in the kit now, and also borrowed some heads from the Rangers and Guardian sprues.

And finally, for now, my most recently finished minis - another squad of Striking Scorpions, these ones in a lime green with black helmets. I didn't have any scorpions quite this bright before. The Exarch here is the first instance of Chainsabres in the army, which means that all of the Exarch weapons are now represented. Although I haven't done a Scorpion's Claw with the modern plastic kit yet.









There is absolutely more to come. I have plenty more to build and paint, and I have the new Corsair box on the way. Looking forward to getting my hands on the new Vyper, although I might be tempted to wait until I can get my hands on more of them and paint several at once!

One postscript - apologies to my fellow UK dakka users for the blocked images my previous posts, I had been uploading using Imgur for quite some time, and that's now blocked in the UK. I've switched host for these new ones just so you don't need to fire up a VPN just to view the new pics.

Love the color schemes.
Eyecandy, so good.

Those teal/jade Dire Avengers are fantastic, Bellerophon.

Amazing as always. I particularly like the swopping hawks. But everything is great.

You going with a cannon corsair scheme? Or doing up your own fleet?

Those aspect warriors are amazing, love the colour schemes that you have done on them all. And you have quite the impressive collection of exarchs!
I like the classic swooping hawks colour schemes that you have done, the fire dragons look great, but my favourites are definitely the dire avengers in teal!

Ps and thanks for changing your photo host site!

As a Death Guard player, I'm very envious of your greens.
Those look very infectious.

Thanks guys!

 Nevelon wrote:
You going with a cannon corsair scheme? Or doing up your own fleet?

I had been toying with creating my own fleet, and was probably going to base the scheme on the burgundy red that I used for that new group of warp spiders, although I'm also very tempted to do Void Dragons. I do tend towards canon factions, I'm quite fond of the Void Dragons colours and I love their symbols, especially the way they're shown on the vehicles in the art from the Doom of Mymeara book. I didn't particularly want to do another black army, so maybe if I do end up with Void Dragons I'll dial up the red a bit - or try to go for a different, interesting way of painting the black compared to what I usually do.

In any case the choice is up in the air until I commit paintbrush to model, and that depends on how high the corsairs reach in my painting queue. I've had a bunch of Voidscarred since the Eldar Boarding Patrol box and I haven't touched them yet...

Tommygun1918 wrote:As a Death Guard player, I'm very envious of your greens.
Those look very infectious.

And this is high praise! I'm very pleased with my greens. Can't have a Biel-Tan collection without good greens.

Amazing update and good to see you back on dakka Bellerophon. That new warp spider phonemic lord is such a cool mini and you painted them up fantastically! I’ll also throw out some love for the jade Dire Avengers, great colour scheme and execution!

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!)

Outstanding work- such a great color scheme and the contrast between well-executed black and the greens is amazing! Rock on!

Love the black wind rider bikes. The thorns on their hulls are fantastically executed

Nice to see your army continue to grow, Bellerophon, and that you're maintaining your high standards.

Man those Jetbikes are amazing, the green thorns on the black looks fantastic.

I really like your aspect warriors. The finish on them is very striking.

Amazing as always. I like the bikers not just riding with both hands on the handlebars. Gives them a ton more flavor. Would be nice to actually get storm windrider guardians bike rules, but the models work fine for basic bikers. But cooler.