Further Progress

Had a rough couple weeks, not had a lot of time to work on my models. A week ago I lost my job, and had to dedicate a good amount of my time to finding work. Good news is I start my new job tomorrow, and I feel good about it.

The few times that I've had to work on my Eldar I've been able to make some headway. In my last week of my last job, I spent a night airbrushing in the shop since I wouldn't get to use the shop's compressed air again.

Really all I got to do was finish the bone basecoating. I had a lot of trouble with the paint beading on me, I'm going to have to do further research into this. Even still, I am very impressed with how smooth the air brush is.

Still going with the dire avengers. Been highlighting with the main color blue, got to these three (the other two in the back are old ones). Although I may have to touch up the older ones now to match the new ones. I was planning on mixing blue and white helmets in the unit to add variety. If I don't like it, I could always add the white ones to a separate unit.

That's all for now. Thanks for checking in!

Airbrush!

And some more progress on the Dire Avengers.

Although I brought two Wave Serpents with me, I only got to start on the basecoat for my Crimson Hunter. I actually started with them, but I was using the airbrush paint that i got when I bought the kit originally. After I had finished basecoating one of the serpents and got half-way through the next, I noticed that the gloss from the paint being wet never went away, and then came to realize that the paint that I had was, fact, gloss paint. I got the majority of it off the tanks when I got home.

I did bring some of my normal paints with me too, and I diluted it and painted the Crimson Hunter because it didn't get painted with gloss paint. I'm pretty grateful at this point I chose to paint the flyer in accordance with its shrine colors rather than my Craftworld colors. Next week I'll continue playing with it a little.

The Dire Avengers saw a little progress this week too. I spent a lot of time on the white, but I also painted all the gems black and did some lining on a couple of the models. Hoping to do most of the rest of the work over the next week, but we'll see how overly-optimistic that goal is.

Alright, that's all for this week. Tune in next time for more progress. Thanks for reading!

Basecoating the First Batch

Alright, I'm finally getting somewhere with these guys. Had some time to really put in for basecoating the unit I've been working on.

The blues are basically ready for highlighting, which means I can do the final assembly soon. I also got the chance to detail some of the parts on the model, as well as do the bone colors of the weapons.

 

Also tried out freehanding some texturing on the first avenger, attempting to get a little better at adding grain to the bone. I still think my strokes are a little too big, but I have a lot more practicing to do. Sorry, cell camera doesn't really get the detail well.

The Crimson Hunter is still sitting on my desk, I've been meaning to break out the airbrush to start working on him. I think this week I'll give it a go.

That's all for this week!

Blue!

Been a slow week. Still working way too many hours. I got a few models primed so that i could base coat them this weekend. Only halfway through so far, but here's the progress:









Mostly just the undercoats of blue on the Dire Avengers. I'm not worried too much about the Exarch yet, I want to be able to focus more exclusively on painting him later. I'm still working through the customizations on each of the Dire Avengers, I'll figure them out while painting them.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

Getting back Into it

Maybe a little premature, since work is still so busy, but I'd like to put up an update showing my more recent work. So let's just get right into this. My desk looks like this currently:

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First off, what I am currenly working on. The painted Dire Avengers in the back I painted years ago, and I have them here as a reference for this unit. The unpainted Dire Avengers have been my focus, since my new army is full of them. I also recently bought a Crimson hunter to modernize my army.

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So this is the bulk of the work I've done. I had a bunch of dire avenger legs glued to bases, so I dug up the rest of the sprues, built the remainder of the model, and detailed the bases. Also made some objective markers with spirit stones on the bases. The idea is that the spirit stones are the objective, and the little statue is there more so the marker doesn't blend in with the table and I forget it. All of them also have minor amounts of sculpting, mostly to blend seams where the parts didn't glue together cleanly. The middle one I sculpted a new faceplate onto her helmet, and added a few trophies to her base from battles the unit has fought in.

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This is the unit Exarch. I had never been able to decide on a base for him up until I discovered I have a billion little pieces of slate in a bin (yay!). I re-sculpted the face plate on his helmet after I finished the base. The knee was done when the model was built (I forget how long ago now, maybe at the beginning of 4th ed?), and I'm not too happy looking at it now. I have yet to decide whether or not I'm going to attempt to fix it.

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Also Crimson Hunter Exarch. I recently just got back into the hobby, and much to my joy there are now Flyers. I have a Phoenix and a Nightwing, but many of my local tournaments don't like forgeworld models, and to stay competitive, I bought a Crimson Hunter for a Christmas Gift to myself. I've spent the last month meticulously assembling and detailing the model.

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Remember that slate I mentioned? I decided to detail out the base of the flyer and make it look like a rocky wasteland. So far those are about the only details I've decided on for basing the army. Added a few WE twigs to add some diversity.

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I've already gone ahead and painted the cockpit, since it'll be harder to reach once the model is fully assembled. I decided to go with an Exarch for my first crimson hunter, and painted the pilot to match. I used a Dire Avenger head and cleaned him up a little, and then painted him to look like his skin was crystalline. I remember reading fluff somewhere that Exarchs begin turning crystal as they meld into their armor, and thought it was a cool detail. I have yet to really touch the screens, I am working out exactly what to paint there right now.

 And that's about it for now. I have a lot of models to paint (My collection is around 10,000k, and that's just my Eldar). The majority of them are unpainted, in some state of assembled, and otherwise probably only barely field-able by most people's standards. My focus right now is building the core of my new army, which consists of wave serpents and aspect warriors. I have at least two more units of Dire Avengers to roll out after this one, and some fire dragons too.

Thanks for reading!

Striking Scorpions

My headline project for now, I'm hoping to get this unit off my painting table and onto the battlefield!

Aside from Warp spiders, these guys are my favorite aspect. I've had this particular unit almost since the beginning of the army, and they've only been fully painted once (almost as long ago as I've owned them). having this unit sitting, unpainted, on my shelf was driving me crazy, especially since they've been doing so well in battle.

I've got a little bit of a WIP for this unit. As you can see, two of the models in the opening picture are unpainted (not including the exarch on the far right). they got left out of the initial que and I had to bring them up to the level that the rest of the unit is at so that I can consistently paint them. Below are a few images of them as they get painted.

After undercoat:

After Basecoat:

And finally, after primary color:

These guys both came out pretty well. I have yet to begin working with the bone colors on these two. I've currently got two more of them to highlight. Once that's done, it's on to bone for the rest of the unit.

A small detail you might notice is that, while these are the 3rd ed scorpions, they lack the traditional "bucked-teeth" look. I decided to sculpt over it since I personally thought it was the one weak point of the models. I have a second unit of the same generation that will be receiving similar treatment.

The biggest part of this unit is doing justice to my Exarch Veredras. He has been a vital warrior in my lists since practically the beginning of the warhost, and has accounted for hundreds of kills at this point. The only other character that has been in my army for that long has been the craftworld's high farseer (who now plays as a "counts as" Eldrad).

Anyways, I have an Exarch model that I have been toying with for awhile now, who is converted from a base scorpion model.

I ground out the arm holding the shuriken pistol and swapped it for his Scorpion's Claw. Some minimal sculpting has been done to finish up the left arm, although I believe that I have a little more work to do here before I'm satisfied. I also want to resculpt the chest area, and possibly even make a new helmet for him, since I still am on the fence about the 4th ed Exarch helmet he got somewhere along the lines...
I'm also not sure what to do with his right arm. I think I may end up scratch-building him his own chainsword, but I'm not sure on this one (I would like him to be done sometime this year xD)

That's pretty much all I've got for now. I'm sorry that this turned into a mega-post, but, then again, this is a massive project.

If you're looking for more pictures, head over to my

-Valkyrie

Guardians

Short post this time. This is a project of mine that's now 2 years in the works, and you have no idea how much I would love to be done with it. Right now, the models are almost ready for casting. This is really how I hope to have an army of hand-sculpted miniatures, since I'm not going to sit down and hand-sculpt the entirety of my guardian force. I'm hoping to have the molds for the initial sprues done by August, and maybe be working on the weapons sprues before September.

The idea here is to revisit the most basic troop of the army. While Games Workshop has gone ahead and published their own versions of the models, I took a slightly different tack. The thought that really ignited this project was this: Imperial guardsmen, who are about the human equivalent to the guardian, wear much less armor than our warriors do, and they have the same save? As a result, I designed a guardian which would have much lighter armor and also have a lot more character than the standard Games Workshop guardians. This, I figured, would set me apart from the rest of the Eldar armies you see.

The first picture is my test model, which I built over 5 years ago. Ever since, I've been attempting to convert at least a whole unit of them, and after picking mold-making and casting skills in college, I decided on my method. I've got 8 basic bodies that I have been sculpting almost from scratch (some more-so than others). The results are posted below.

As you can see in the first image, the old guardian is still kicking around. He's gonna be in the first completed squad, so that he (finally) has buddies. The sculpts I'm still touching up a bit, but they're almost all set for casting.

That's all for now! Thanks for reading!

-Valkyrie