Eldar Army - WIP Part 1

I picked up the GW spraygun and decided to give it a run in painting up my Dire Avengers. I primed these, along with the other models I have, black, which is a little unusual for me (I usually prime white), but I wanted to try some different painting techniques with this army.

Here's a primed wave serpent packing EML and TL-Shuricannon:

I started taking these photos late, so you missed the starter photos of the Dire Avengers. But here they are after a round under the spraygun (too bad I didn't get a shot of my hands!), along with one round of going over with a slightly lightened blue glaze on the raised bits:


Blue city. Just so you can see what I'm going for, here is a pic of my "test" model that I painted on Sunday:


So what I got from the Spraygun was a whole lot of blue, but overtop of the black primer it was still pretty dark, so there's not a whole lot of shading to do, which is nice. Instead, I took a blend of regal blue and dab of skull white and edged all of the raised areas. I wasn't trying to be too clean here, mostly just trying to avoid the recessed areas and highlight corners and recessed areas. Then I thinned this out and light drybrushed over most of the model to try to even out the color. Here's what I've got so far:


After that, I slapped some light gray on the helmets and tabards and called it a night.

Next steps will be adding a touch more highlighting on the edges and the raised nobby bits, hitting it with a blue glaze to even out the color shifts, and then working over the helmet and tabard with grays, whites, and a blue wash.

Eldar - The Beginning

So I decided to construct an Eldar army. Not sure why - I've enjoyed Space Marines for two years, but I suddenly got the itch to do something different. A friend had been talking about abandoning his Necron army and was considering which army to collect next. That got me thinking a lot about what the different armies are like. I didn't know much about Eldar - no one in my regular group plays them - but I really like the models. I picked up the Codex and began to read. And I thought, wow, these guys are freaking sweet!


So here's the deal I made with myself - I won't buy anything new until what I have is painted, and I won't play with anything until it is painted. This is to keep myself focused on the project, and so far it is paying off.


I'm not sure what sort of army I'll be building yet, so I started out with a few units I'm pretty confident I'll use, and we'll go from there. In future posts I'll suggest some army lists I'm thinking about for different sized games and get your input. To start with, I've got a farseer, a squad of dire avengers (x10), a wave serpent with shuri-cannon and T-L EML, and 5x warp spiders.


I'll be assembling the army is a custom craftworld. Look for upcoming fluff as I develop the craftworld background. For now, I've got colors - Hormagaunt Purple and Hawk Turquoise. The aspect warriors will be painted using their official colors. This is one of the things I really like about Eldar. I really got tired of painting my space marine army because I was just using the same color scheme over and over again! But the Eldar have the opportunity to have varied color schemes. This keeps it interesting. Already I can't wait to try something different.


I started painting the Dire Avengers last night. I recently acquired a GW spray gun, and I decided to use it to basecoat them. I made something of a mess (I wound up with blue hands), but the spray gun was really effective at basecoating. Within 10-15 minutes, I had basecoated nine DA's. (The tenth one was already painted up as a test job to see how the different colors worked together.) I'll post some WIP photos later on.

So, coming soon in Eldar posts:

• WIP photos, discussion of painting & modeling techniques
• Army list ideas and next purchases
• Craftworld development