Alaitoc Eldar

Alaitoc Wave Serpent. First finished Eldar model. More to come!

For those interested, I went with GW Bone, Alaitoc Blue (with various blue shades), Yriel yellow, and some other colors:) Think I will go with a different wash for the bone though, go for Sepia instead of the flesh colored one.

Next on the painting table, two flyers.

Eldar seer council on bikes

No "hobbying" this weekend. Yup. I am more disappointed than any of you. My plan is to make a step by step guide on how I paint Imperial Fists using a sergeant. First tutorial type posting. I am also planning on trying to make a little "white box" to use when taking photos. Just a cardboard thing I plan on making white somehow.

What I have done is thinking. I do a lot of that stuff:) I have been thinking about making a jetbike seer council. I am far behind on my Eldar and don't expect to have anything playable for quite some time, so I am will just paint models up now and then and not care about lists or anything like that. Maybe I can have a little cache of Eldar for when any future codex hits :)

I have looked around the internet as much as I can to find any good ways to convert farseers and warlocks for jetbikes. I've found some cool looking examples out there, but I haven't found anything that really spoke to me, that really said "that is what you want, that is what is going to be *your* council!" Here's a few really nice examples I've found:

Meandering the dune sea

40k maunderings

moc065

Don't get me wrong, they are awesome, but they don't get me what I want. So what do I want?

* Jetbikes. Don't really plan much here. Maybe a flag or so. Maybe minor GW to make them stand out a bit.

* Farseer. I want a traditionally looking farseer, but I want her to fit on the bike. So robes and runes etc. Should look like it could be an official model. Either a nifty helmet or get an elf head from somewhere.

* Warlocks. Same theme here, but not as elaborate as the farseer.

So what could I do? Weapons seems like I can find in WHFB, but the huge problem is the robes. I can't find any good robed characters I could use that would fit. I don't want leather clothes and a cape/mantel. My thinking is trying to make them with green stuff, and then add some cool details either from other kits or green stuff. Problem is that I am a total noob with the stuff :( Anything I could kit bash would definitely be preferred. I would start with one of the standard riders or a shining spear.

I will put a magnet on the seat of the jetbikes so I can switch out drivers. Just have to solve the handle problem. Either that or remove the handles totally :) And now it strikes me that I could start with any model with good weapons, add the legs from a jetbiker, and have the robes cover the ugly seams. Hmm.

Going with an Alaitoc theme I want to base the bikes in a foundation blue (which I haven't decided) and then try to "stipple" it using an airbrush. Using a few different blue colors and one grey (black might make it look too camo). Paint up the underside in yellow/white, the seat in some other color, use the blue wash in a few places and a thinned out light blue on the edges. Tape off the front for some nice yellow patterns. Freehand/decals might be in it as well.

This is going to be more of a long term project, as the rest of my Eldar, but sometimes it is important to get out of painting the same stuff, and sometimes one has to try new stuff.

Any ideas is *more* than welcome at this point. But before that I have 12 marines and 3 vehicles to finish :)

Eldar Falcon Grav-Tank Pilot

I've painted more of my Falcon now. This time I went for another of the "inside" pieces, i.e. the pilot. I want to go with the open clear canopy look as it looks more "natural" to me, and thus I had to paint the pilot.

I don't know how most people do it, but I glued the little piece behind the head of the pilot to the chair-like piece and then I painted the three separate pieces before I glued all of it together. I did notice exactly how little paint do like glue. Not much room for error there! Had to do a little touch up even.

I went with a pretty basic paint job. First I used a dark blue for the cabin, a medium one for the suit, light blue for some of the nifty details, and a blue was over all of that. The hands and forehead got a good mix of red leather, tan skin, and white which ended up being maybe the best skin color I've produced thus far. Maybe I'll use that on epic Haley and epic Stryker :)

And here are the pictorial evidence of my madness:

And again:

The pictures turned out way better than the poor Gobber (to my defense I did try using my parents camera instead of my piece of junk and that might have made the different, still really hard to photograph minis!) and I really do have to take a new pic of him. Maybe I'll try to make that really nifty base I am thinking of and then I got a great reason to shoot the guy!

But back to the Falcon. I might just do the gunner as well now as long as I remember how I did this dude. I guess I am trying to focus on everything but the stippling of the outer hull. My tests did go, well, bad, awful, painfully bad. Totally sub par! Not at all the look I wanted. I really wish I could get a very detailed intro to stippling. I get it that you are suppose to use a brush and push it down and twist, but it honestly don't get that good when I do it.

I wanted to try to use some kind of sponge instead, and I tried it, but without any good results. I will give it some more goes soon though. I want to get a really smooth several shades of blue look. What I don't want is to make it look like a bunch of color blobs with too much color difference between. The Eldar doesn't strike me as a bunch of guys that would botch the paint job:)

Good thing I have some Orks now to try painting some insane stuff:)

Until next time, signing off...

Embarking on an adventure

I started out painting minis sometime during February 2009. I have painted 806 out of 1385 points worth of Mark 1 WARMACHINE Cygnar. It takes a little time but I can whip them up to table top standard and play with them. I do enjoy painting them a lot though, even more than playing most of the time. I tend to loose more often than win when I play, but when I paint I always win :)

That being said I have embarked on a new journey. I have bought my first plastic model, my first model purely intended to be assembled and painted for fun and not for gaming (even if it might end up in games in the future). This lot fell on the Eldar Falcon Anti-grav Tank. I chose it because my local game store had it, it's a plastic model, and I enjoy the Eldar models. I wanted something very different from the very detailed Cygnar models.

Next I got the parts off the sprues and dry assembled the whole thing to get a feel for the model. I also got terribly confused about the possible additional weapons. I do have the Eldar Codex, but it doesn't really feature good pictures of what different weapons looks like for the Falcon. I do feel a general confusion that lies over Games Workshops products. I look forward to Privateer Press new "Forces of..." books to see what they might come up to. I also feel a frustration to the point of wanting to write me own ultimate "Codex: Eldar" that is clearer and more logical. Go figure :)

So I decided that I wanted to paint my Eldars in some kind of official colors, or rather base it on official colors since not all of the models are represented in official colors. I settled for Alaitoc. It's a deep blue with yellow details. I haven't fully decided on everything yet, but that is the basic theme. It is pretty close to what I have for Cygnar, plus it reminds me of my home country a bit. I did decide to go with a few metal parts though, so they will get done in gold instead of yellow.

I will keep the canopies clear and paint the pilot and gunner. I just find that niftier and while they do have details they are far from the most detailed I've painted so I want to do a good job and make them look as cool as I can. I will also keep the back door operational and paint some of the interior. Not yet sure if I should keep most of it black, or go with painting it yellow inside. Not many will ever look at the inside of my Falcon, but that's not the point. I will know which makes all the difference.

Having cleaned off all the plastic pieces with a knife, which took me several hours, I put the pieces into three different plastic bags to keep them separated a bit better. I realize that I have to be very thoughtful when I do start to actually glue things together, as otherwise I might do things in the wrong order and really screw up. So slow moving is the key here. I am starting with the main fuselage and the three big pieces which looks like this:

So pretty much just plastic there. I decided to quickly paint at least something today, so I chose the inside part that I wanted gold colors on. I realized that I probably need to paint a few more areas before I am done with it, since it will be hard to reach parts, but either way it turned out quite neat. I was happy with the result, which is something like this:

The metallic golden should go well together with the dark blue patchy pattern. I do have to think about how I want to paint the details as well. Some seem to just paint it as if it was a big area, while others pick the details out and paint them in a different color. Saim Hann goes all red for instance. But I kind of want to make some of the details pop a bit more. We will just have to see where I take this :)

I am also thinking long and hard about the blue pattern. I've read two ways of doing it, one where I mutilate a brush and kind of drab the color onto the surface, and the other I take a drybrush brush and push it down on the surface and then rotate the brush. Both seems to work, neither seems to quite make the pattern I want. I don't want the color patterns be that distinct so I think that I will use colors closer to each other, no really bright blues for the pattern, and I might just try some kind of sponge for it. I realize that I need parts to try this out on before I pain the actual plastic :)

The future will have to tell what happens!