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This is a good looking army project. I'll follow along for sure!

Bellerophon,

Beautiful Avatar.

I also ended up making heavier bases for my Eldar tanks...I ended up doing a simple double large plastic rod system to steady the tanks and handle the extra weight on the front of the tanks from the FW resin parts.

Cheers,

CB

whalemusic360 wrote:This is a good looking army project. I'll follow along for sure!

Glad to have you on board

Captain Brown wrote:Bellerophon,

Beautiful Avatar.

I also ended up making heavier bases for my Eldar tanks...I ended up doing a simple double large plastic rod system to steady the tanks and handle the extra weight on the front of the tanks from the FW resin parts.

Cheers,

CB

Thanks Captain. As much as I love Eldar grav tank sculpts, the flying bases leave a lot to be desired.


---


It's been a while again since I last updated but I've been busy in the meantime. I've completed another 5 Wraithguard, a Wraithlord and a War Walker. For the Wraiths I decided to invert the colours from the ones I used on my first wraiths. I've said before that I love the way that you can invert the colours on Biel-Tan and it's still very obviously Biel-Tan, and that applies to the wraiths more than most - I think because they've been painted in both inversions in studio schemes over the years. For the first ones I did the Wraithguard green with white heads and the Wraithlord white with a green head, mainly because that's the way the studio tended to paint them back in 3rd.

So, the Wraithguard - This unit have D-scythes, and since my first unit was green with white heads, these are white with green heads.




And with the first unit:



The Wraithlord - again, fully magnetised. Since I've shown most stuff with Shuriken Cannons I decided to pick some random heavies to put on this guy for the photo. For both this guy and the War Walker I decided that I didn't want to use the scenic bases in their default state, since I've got three Wraithlords and three War Walkers and realised that 6 identical bases would be a bit much. I made rock formations over the broken eldar architecture/missle/whatever-it-is using milliput, and made some rock formations for them to stand on, mainly out of sprue for that nice poly cement bond to the model's foot. For the Wraithlord I've seen a lot of cool chopped and reposed ones, but since my first one was sort of walking, I fancied a classic standing pose - and raised one foot on a rock a little bit to make it a touch more interesting.



And the two of them:



The War Walker - like the Wraithlord I made a sprue-based rock formation to put one foot on. In this case it's almost like it's launching forward off a sloping rock. I'm not a massive fan of the way the War Walker looks when it's posed with one foot in the air, but I wanted a slightly more dynamic pose than the standard, and I think this works. It's got some movement to it, and it keeps the stability of having both feet firmly poly cemented down. As with the Wraithlord I disguised the scenic base with milliput rocks. Once again magnetised, and photographed with bright lances.



Two of them:



---

Finally, I've been on ebay again. Why does this always happen? This time I've been buying Autarchs. I didn't have any up to now, but since I've collected all the seers I felt the urge to start on these guys. Which is irritating because they run pretty pricy. I picked up the current plastic hawk wings one and won an auction for the limited edition 2006 army box fella. I then found somebody selling the old metal warp jump generator and the metal swooping hawk wings model. I was a bit suspicious that they had both of them, and when they showed up I became pretty sure that they're recasts. Oh well, it's not like I could buy these brand new from GW anymore, and the detail is pretty good so I don't feel too bad about it. The only slight irritation is with the hawk wings model where some of the feathers came out short. They're not perfect but I'll rate it as better than not having them.

I need to stay away from ebay.

Here they are, glued and primed:



I was pondering whether I ought to enter one in this month's Art of War challenge, but then I realised that I won't have much chance to get one painted up in the couple of weeks that remain of April given that I'll be quite busy. Maybe, if I get a chance.

Related, I was also wondering about what I would do for a paint scheme. Clearly a combination of whites and greens, with maybe some reds on cloaks and stuff - but particularly I thought of this old studio paintjob on the warp jump generator model:

I always thought that looked really cool, particularly the yellow colour on the faceplate and the way it pops with the white and green. It's what inspired me to pick a similar colour for my first group of Striking Scorpions, and now I'm kinda tempted to adopt it as a linking theme on my Autarchs - to give them all yellow ochre faceplates. I mean, it's got me wondering about Biel-Tan faceplate colours in general. Like the old 16-man guardian box on the box photo had mostly white faceplates, four green and one black - it left me wondering whether it was purely an aesthetic thing or whether it was meant to represent some sort of rank or battle honour. I have no idea, but I liked the mix so I've maintained it on my own guardians. And this yellow Autarch faceplate... I might try it. Maybe a couple of them white with green helmet, a couple green with white helmet, and a yellow ochre faceplate for all. Make it the signifier of 'Autarch' for my force. If it doesn't work I can always paint over a couple!

It was you! You pinched the WJG Autarch before I could get in on it! I'm surprised they're recasts considering they are metal models, I would have thought recasts were only resin. If I'm looking at the same listing, how are they in terms of quality? I may pick up one should they ever reappear.

Great work on the Wraiths and the War Walker, as usual, loving the crisp paint jobs!

Sweet work on the Wraiths. Seeing the two schemes together they all look really good. I look forward to seeing the Autarch band get painted and how your idea turns out.

Thanks both.

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
It was you! You pinched the WJG Autarch before I could get in on it! I'm surprised they're recasts considering they are metal models, I would have thought recasts were only resin. If I'm looking at the same listing, how are they in terms of quality? I may pick up one should they ever reappear.

Great work on the Wraiths and the War Walker, as usual, loving the crisp paint jobs!

The first thing that aroused my suspicion was that they didn't seem to go out of stock after I bought them so I guessed they were selling more than one of each - so it's not just me to blame for buying them up! I bought both types, the WJG and the hawk wings. When they arrived they'd clearly never been built, from all the excess metal under the shoulder pads which stopped the arms going in properly, so I ended up having to Dremel that out. They were lacking the large number of casting gates that the real ones have, and the slotta tabs were partly formed, which leads me to think that they were entirely cast through the tab. Some of the bits also had holes in them that I guessed were on the original donor model for pinning, then got copied when that model was used to make a mould. They couldn't have been from building these exact models because they wouldn't go together due to the flash/excess metal. Also spotted one or two telltale double mould lines.

Aside from all that the detail is pretty good. My only real complaint is on the hawk wings model where some of the feathers came out short and there's a big mould line in the middle of the crest which was too much of a pain to try to get rid of. The WJG one came out really nice.

It's also weird to think that buying some of this stuff on eBay we could be competing ('we' in this case meaning the general metal model eldar community on here). I know it's the nature of it, but it feels vaguely strange to think about, like if I see somebody post photos of some old metals, they might be from an auction that I missed out on.

So, I finished the first of the Autarchs in time for the painting challenge. I picked the current plastic one as the first one to do and I'm pretty pleased with how it came out - also found that my plan to try painting all of their faceplates in yellow ochre (literally VMC Yellow Ochre) has so far worked from a sample size of one. I'm now interested to see if it will work as well when I do one with a green body and white helmet, since the yellow won't contrast so much against the white. I'm also really pleased with how the dark red on the cloak came out - especially on the middle photo in the collage at the bottom of this post. The base coat for that was VMC Hull Red which I just picked up recently, and I can already tell it's going to be a colour I will use at any opportunity! It was highlighted up through VMC Burnt Cadmium Red, and then the lightest highlights are Burnt Cadmium Red mixed with a bit of VMC Flat Red.







I'm currently halfway through painting up another 10 guardians and building a Fire Prism. I know I've complained before about having too many models to do, but once again I'm at the stage of plotting the next thing to paint and only managing to narrow it down to about half a dozen things!

One of the things that I'm tempted to do is my second unit of metal Swooping Hawks, if only because I actually played a game last weekend, put 10 Hawks on the table and enjoyed hiding behind terrain, flying to land right in front of a squad of presumably terrified guardsmen, then totally shredding the squad with lasblaster fire. Even better, we ran out of time and had to call the game off, so they didn't even have to take any return fire and all survived.

We'd come up with a narrative game where my opponent took a force of guard led by Eisenhorn who had captured a rogue psyker, and was trying to take him away for the Inquisition's purposes. A Biel-Tan force approximately 50% stronger were trying to capture the same psyker for their own reasons - but they had to act quickly to get him because a detachment of custodes would arrive from turn 3 that would tip the balance of power to the Imperium. Well, that was the idea at least. We didn't get that far! Anyway, despite the fact that we barely started before we had to stop, it was cool to see my models on a table. I took my Avatar, just because how could I not? I was also particularly pleased that he got the first kill for my side, striding forward and just getting the nearest guard squad within range of the Wailing Doom, melting one unfortunate guardsman before my army opened up on the same squad with shuriken. That was cool, but damn I loved my Hawks!

He's a solid bit of work. I personally love Hull Red, and agree wholeheartedly that it makes a great base to work from. Congrats on the game performances and I am looking forward to the next Autarch!

Yeah, the yellow on that face works really well.

Narrative games are a lot more fun than standard games, even if the narrative element is pretty minor.

I have missed a few updates. Great work all around!
I like how the Autarch turned out. The yellow on the face pops out really well and the cloak is superb.
Definitely receives one of my votes for the challenge

Love the Autarch, really like the classic dark yellow faceplate I seem to remember the GW team painted at some point in the past. Best of luck in the challenge!

Cheers guys, glad I made it in time on one of them. I'm not in a rush to do the other Autarchs, but I imagine it won't be too long before they come to the top of the queue.

Over this weekend I've been building my Wraithknights. You may recall from a few pages ago mentioning that I was thinking of going against my usual magnetise everything philosophy and just gluing them together, and that's what I've done. I made a point of doing them all together so that I could arrange the poses to suit the weapon loadout for each knight.

So,
Heavy Wraithcannon Knight - the standard out of the box pose, putting the legs together with the fixing tabs. Nothing special here. There's nothing wrong with the out of the box pose, I just didn't want the same on all 3.
Suncannon Knight - rearranged the legs to be striding over a wrecked sentinel that I 3d printed (from Thingiverse - very cool model)
Sword Knight - I wanted to make this much more dynamic. I had the image in my head of running with the sword swept out to the side/behind, but when I got to putting the sword on it didn't look quite right. I experimented a bit and realised that the pose didn't look quite right for running, but worked better as a leap. I tried it with the sword up in the air and thought it looked pretty cool, as if the wraithknight is leaping into a vicious downwards blow. So that's how I went in the end. I also added a dead space marine to the base for a bit of extra something, with no legs since he's been torn apart at the waist. I put a little bit of wound guitar string sticking out the bottom of his torso to be part of his severed spine. A meltabomb on the floor just below his outstretched hand...

I still need to put the starcannons/scatter lasers/shuricannons onto them, but those are the last thing left. Just need to make my mind up whether to make those swappable or just build them fixed like I did for the main weapons.

I'm really pleased with how these came out, and also that I decided against magnetising. Even so it took me ages - so much dry fitting, masking tape and blu-tac to try out various poses before I committed to glue. Now to see if I end up trying to get one painted up for *this* month's painting challenge!

Well, this is looking all sorts of awesome. I can not wait to see the one bringing the proverbial hammer down get painted. That pose is superb.

Agree with the above, great posing and basing. I'm especially a fan of the Suncannon Knight!

Autarch is great, got a vote from me. Look forward to seeing the whole group together. Wraithknights looming awesome too

Nice poses on the WKs, all three.

Bellerophon,

I missed the updates. Very nice work on the Wraithguard, Wraithlords, War Walkers, and Autarch.

Cheers,

CB

Thanks again folks!

I've finished the first Wraithknight. They weren't necessarily going to be top of my queue, but they seemed very fitting for the month's painting challenge theme so I decided to bump one up the list a bit. I picked the suncannon knight. Even though it's a terrible choice in 8th, I just think it's a cool model and I wanted to get the paintbrush on it. I was also keen to see how the 3d printed sentinel on the base painted up, because I'm fairly new to 3d printing and hadn't actually painted any 3d prints yet.

To repeat some words I put in the painting challenge thread; on the whole I'm really pleased with how the paintjob came out, aside from a sputtering spray can of varnish that has left the surface a little bit grainy in places. I really need to get that airbrush and switch to airbrushing varnish - it's tough when you've spent ages painting a model and a spray varnish detracts from the model. It's not too bad though, and I think anything I try to do to 'fix' it would probably make things worse and I think I've managed to leave it in a way that it's not too noticeable.

It's generally painted in my standard Biel-Tan style for vehicles, which is a dark green base highlighted up through several different layers up to the panel edges. You can tell from the photos that I'm firmly on the side of not overdoing the gems on eldar - I prefer the idea that most of the bumps are things like sensor pods and it's only the ones in the settings that are actually gems. The Biel-Tan rune is actually one of the standard decals with freehand on top of it. Even though I knew I wanted to do the more colourful version of the rune I figured I could use the decal like a guide to make sure that I got the rune nicely proportioned. I threw in some Biel-Tan thorn designs on the white plates around the waist, this time in green. Those are totally freehand.








Hope you guys like it.

Like it? I should say so. I would go so far as to say I LOVE it. Really nice work on the rune and the glow on the shield.

Amazing work. Love seeing these big guys. Barring the FW ones, I thought the suncannon was the best option. Coolest looking at the very least.

Lovely Wraithknight Bellerophon.

3D printing detail is not so critical on terrain pieces of destroyed vehicles...any holes or gaps become more battle damage.

Cheers,

CB

Thanks guys. I think it's starting to get towards the point where another army shot is in order, especially now it can have the wraithknight towering at the back. I'll see when I get round to it, or if I paint another couple of things first.

Captain Brown wrote:

3D printing detail is not so critical on terrain pieces of destroyed vehicles...any holes or gaps become more battle damage.

Yeah exactly. I'm still experimenting and getting the hang of it. It's a standard FDM printer. My first few prints turned out great. The main issue I had with the sentinel was that the supports were fairly solid and in awkward places, so I made a bit of a mess of it in places removing them. But that's fine, because as you said, more battle damage! I wanted to spend longer on the wraithknight than on the base, so I did a pretty simple job on the sentinel. Even so I think it came out pretty well; khaki and a sepia wash on the body, gunmetal and a black wash on the metallics. Then liberal application of typhus corrosion and some AK interactive 'Accumulated Dust', to make it look like it had been crashed there for a while and wasn't just a fresh victim of the knight.

Since then I've tweaked some of my support settings to hopefully make them easier to remove. But I'm not totally sure how well that's worked because my latest prints have been having bed adhesion problems! Solve one problem, another one crops up.

Those vines set off an already brilliant model! Very well done on the freehand, I bet it'd be nerve wracking painting over white like that.

The base looks great too!

Wonderful work!
I'm always a fan of that green of yours. The wrecked sentinel gives a lot of character to the whole model.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks both.

Been rather a long break since my last update, but as usual I've been plodding along. I've finished my 3rd group of guardians, and second set of Swooping Hawks - and I've just tonight finished my Warp Hunter that I've painted for this month's challenge.

The guardians are fairly standard, painted as per my usual. The Hawks, I decided to craft a different shrine scheme. So these have ended up in a dark blue-grey, with a dark yellow for the wings and heads, sort of an early dawn/late dusk darkened sky and a bit of sunlight sort of theme. The Warp Hunter follows my usual vehicle style - that makes 4 grav tanks finished.






A few angles of the Warp Hunter:







I'm off to post it in the painting challenge thread shortly.

Now I'm working on my second squad of Howling Banshees. I'm keen to get my metal Aspect Warriors done, if only because it was enough of a pain to track them all down on ebay that I'd hate to get distracted by some other project before getting them all done - or if the incredibly unlikely happens and they actually get updated sculpts before I've finished painting the ones I already have. My Hawks are all done now, and this lot of Banshees will finish those too.

Next in the queue after the Banshees... I'm not sure. I've got a few more Seers and Autarchs that I'm gradually putting another coat on here and there, I might concentrate on getting those done. I'm also keen to keep at the Aspect Warriors, paint my Fire Prism and Crimson Hunter, and also to keep up doing my Forgeworld with the Scorpion and the Shadow Spectres. I mean, this stuff is far to expensive to wallow unpainted.

Worth waiting for. I really like that look for the Hawks, but the Warp Hunter steals the show. Very well done.

Yes indeed- all of the work is well executed, but the Hunter is truly admirable- very striking!

Gorgeous work Bellerophon, that Warp Hunter is stunning and it's already got my vote when the voting goes live.

Those hawks are very nice, I have a similar scheme in progress - blue/grey armour and pale blue/grey helms. Weapons will be the usual wraithbone for me.

Guardians look incredible too!

Bellerophon,

The Warp Hunter is particularly beautiful.

Cheers,

CB

That Warp Hunter is amazing. Very deep colouring, and the vines are so well done.