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Hey Dakkanauts, welcome to my Dark Eldar thread!

I've been collecting Dark Eldar for around a year now so thought I'd start this up to help keep myself motivated. I've got ~3000 points, all at various stages of completion, and as I'm almost done with my most customised model so far, I thought I'd share it with you guys

Annoyingly my SLR camera makes my painting look a lot worse than the models actually do irl (that's my excuse anyway ), but hopefully you'll still get a decent impression! Anyway, enough with the excuses, on with the pictures!



I started with a basic Hellion model and used one of the bald heads from the Raider kit as the basis for the Baron. The picture in the codex shows him with a really big and fancy hellglaive so I pinched the non-descript weapon from the Succubbus model, and added another blade to the top end to make his weapon. Notice the little finecast bubble at the very tip of the blade . Then after looking through his entry I had to rummage through the bitz box for a right handed pistol, it took a while but thankfully I had one left. Then I just strapped on a skull to represent the bones of the seer and some Phantasm Grenade Launchers, that was the easy part done!

I'd been practising with green stuff by making a couple of beast masters, which I will post later (one pic already linked in my sig), so after 3 models practice I set to work. Firstly I drilled a hole in the back of the Baron's head and glued in a length of straightened out paperclip to give me something to work off with the hair. I put one thin-ish strip of GS on the metal frame to give the basic shape for his hair and left that to dry whilst I set to work on his cape/coat thing. It's basically one big piece of triangular GS that I've bent and twisted to give some sort of sense of motion, I like it though. Then all I needed was to add the arm holes/straps, a simple little strip of green stuff over the shoulder and under the arms, to finish the coat off.

The next day, when the hair had set properly, I added another thin layer of green stuff to the top and bottom sides of his hair, and set at it with a knife to score some hair-like texture into it, then sculpted a hairline onto the bald head. With all of that done I was happy, but not 100% with the model. I eventually realised that it was his board that struck me as being a bit weedy, so I hacked a second board to bits,and combined them with the existing one to make it look a little more meaty.

That's all I've got time for right now, but I'll update this evening (if I have time) to show you what he's like now he's painted. Here's the rest of the WIP shots though







Thank's for checking it out, I hope you've enjoyed reading

Very nice!

Just a quick tip with the SLR though; set the aperture to a higher number and thus increase your depth of field. Currently, much of the forefront of the models are blurred - it is quite distracting when trying to attain the overall model. You may need a tripod and//or to hold it -very- steady as the shutter speed timings will have to be increased also.

Eiríkr wrote:Very nice!

Just a quick tip with the SLR though; set the aperture to a higher number and thus increase your depth of field. Currently, much of the forefront of the models are blurred - it is quite distracting when trying to attain the overall model. You may need a tripod and//or to hold it -very- steady as the shutter speed timings will have to be increased also.

Thanks for the comment, I don't have a tripod atm but I'll have a play around with the aperture next time I'm using the camera. I took the painted photos for Sathy before reading your post, so these will most likely look the same. I'll try and get some really decent ones of him soon though


Anyway, on to the painting! All of my Dark Eldar Cult are painted in a purple scheme, inspired by the Reaver Jetbike on page 76 of the codex. Vehicles, jetbikes and sky boards I start with a mix of chaos black and liche purple, that I slowly work up using less and less black, to pure liche purple. The clothes (and armour on Kabalites) are warlock purple with 4 washes of leviathan purple on top. I then do the details in several shades of grey or tin bitz/dwarf bronze. I've had quite some trouble with the really fair skin, I've tried several mixtures of elf flesh and different greys and/or white. Any suggestions on methods that have worked for you would be much appreciated




Apologies for the poor photo's, as Eiríkr suggested, I'll be working on improving this as much as I hope to improve with the painting and modelling!
The codex makes one or two references to the Baron having a bloodstained coat, so I decided to bloody up his cape when I got round to painting it. It's ended up a bit like this:




Here's a couple of pictures where the flash didn't fire, I don't think they're as good, but I think I'll just chuck, hopefully somebody will find them useful if looking for inspiration!




And that's my Baron Sathonyx! I tried to keep him fairly simple and as close to the codex art as I could, but I thought it would be better to do it simple and well, rather than try and be overly fancy and fudge up all the needless detail. I hope you like him

I'll try and get some better pic's up soon. Up next: Beasts and Beast masters, You'll be able to see 1 or 2 pictures of them in my gallery already (please vote if you do check it out ), but once the last two masters are all painted up I'll let you have a look!

Thanks again for reading!

You're right, your camera is pretty brutal. It looks better with the flash and I can tell it looks better in person. Can't wait to see more!

Thanks for the comment
Yeah, he looks pretty decent irl, but when the picture makes it look 3 times the size, every tiny imperfection starts to look like a big mistake

I just started painting up my second beastmaster(of three) yesterday morning and all the beasts have been pretty much complete for quite a while now. Hopefully I'll be able to get them finished and post them up this week.

I've also started on making some pain token markers for my army. I grabbed a couple of the GW packs of metal skulls online at the end of last week, when they arrived yesterday I plunged into the bits box to help finish them off. For 1 pain token I've just stuck 3 or 4 skulls to a base, when the unit gains a second token I'll repace that with a larger marker. these have a small pile of skulls and another small bit of debris, maybe a bolter, some leftover decorative bits, or maybe even (inkeeping with the GW asthetic) more skulls . When (read if) they get a 3rd token, that will be replaced with a huge pille of skulls, with a spare head/helmet on.

The question is, how many of each do you think I'll need? I normaly run 2 or 3 units of wyches, accompanied by a haemonculus each, 2 warrior dakka venoms, ravagers (sometimes replacing one with a talos), beasts, the baron and some scourges if I have points to spare.

I can always move the tokens around, but basically I'm asking what is the most I'll need at any one time?

I'm going with 3 of the big (3 token) ones, 5 or 6 of the small (2 token) piles and probably the same number of 1 token markers. D'you reckon that would be about right?

Thanks again for checking this out Any ideas about the pain tokens would be awesome too!

I'll leave you with a taster of what's to come. A picture of my first, pretty much finished, beastmaster

I'd say as far as pain tokens go, think about how many units you're going to wipe out realistically, and how many units you have that can collect tokens. If you make 6 level 1 tokens, the same level 2, and 3 level 3, then to run out you'd have to wipe out 15 units in one game with just the models that can collect them. This seems more than ample to me, as I don't think I've seen many armies at typical points levels with 15 units of the pain token delivering variety. I'd say a good basis would be to make one per unit of yours that might get one at level 1, then a few less at level 2 and a few further less at level 3. Just my input. Of course if they're fun to make you could just make a stack for each unit...

Hope that helps.

Doomface81 wrote:I'd say as far as pain tokens go, think about how many units you're going to wipe out realistically, and how many units you have that can collect tokens. If you make 6 level 1 tokens, the same level 2, and 3 level 3, then to run out you'd have to wipe out 15 units in one game with just the models that can collect them. This seems more than ample to me, as I don't think I've seen many armies at typical points levels with 15 units of the pain token delivering variety. I'd say a good basis would be to make one per unit of yours that might get one at level 1, then a few less at level 2 and a few further less at level 3. Just my input. Of course if they're fun to make you could just make a stack for each unit...

Hope that helps.

The only problem is when I start to consider wracks, haemonculi and cronus engines. Sure I won't be using all of them in a single game very often, but seeing as I've got plenty of the bits I think I'll make a couple extra just incase. Thanks for the feedback though

I've done the basis of the other two beastmasters now, all that's left to do is the washes, shading and highlighting I spent yesterday evening playing around with the camera too, so I should be able to get some improved pic's for Sathy as well!