A couple of eldar

Hi there! It´s been a December of not-much-painting but at least I´ve gotten these two space elves done. Even though they are colored red and white like Christmas they are certainly no Santa´s elves. Hope you like them!

 

 

The left one is called SGT. Mael Nightwing and seems to armed with

a laspistol and a power glowe. The one on the right is musician By the name

of Taal Spellsinger. He wields a flamer and a sword.

 

 

From this angle you can see the bag pipe/organ thing the musician is

carrying on his back. One of the best RT eldar sculpts in my opinion.

A small but important addition

Have to admit, I´ve been pretty lazy both painting and blogging. I do have  multiple projects on my panting table but this little fellow is the only one I´ve finished since last blog entry. In that last entry I mentioned getting a musician for my unit of gobbos and here he is.

He is a Marauder miniatures MM30/6 goblin musician. The sculpt is By Aly Morrison if I´m not completely mistaken. This line of models is from 1989 but in my opinion the face and clothing are pretty close to stuff that came out during red era and afterwards.  The totally oversized weapon is also something that we got used to seeing starting from 4th edition WFB.

This was propably not a very popular model back in the days as I couldn´t find a single painted example of him online.

The instrument is a drum of some sort. It clearly has a piece of animal skin stretched over a wooden frame. Studs or spikes that hold the skin in place can be seen in the picture. One can only wonder how well that instrument would last if pounded with that huge mace of his as he appears to be doing.

This little gobbo is an important addition to my army because in 3rd edition WFB a musician ads a +1 to leadership rolls when testing to make a second or subsequent manoeuvre. With the goblin´s Basic LD of 5 you need all the help you can get.

Let´s hope february will be a bit more productive month for both painting and Vanhaa Vasarointia.

Elf parade

In my previous posting I mentioned the Finnish independence day and the military parade that is an essential part of celebrations. Going through my even older text I noticed that almost exactly one year ago I painted the first model in the blue and white theme that was then chosen for my high elf army. That me made think - let´s see how my army looks today. Elves! Get ready for a parade!

Here´s everyone. Not exactly in a parade formation rather than just arranged on a bookshelf to fit in one picture.

Backrow: Baggare train, Guards, Shore riders with Scouts behind them, a Wizard, a Spectre

Middle row: Merchant company, Archers

Front row: Two Marine bolt batteries, Ship company, Wardancers

That roughly 120 models painted during last 12 months if you count in the war machines and carts too. I´m pleasantly suprised with myself.

Here´s a closer shot of the left wing. The merchant company was the first unit I completed. I had quite a lot of those 4th edition archers and spearmen left and it was nice to practise painting after many years not touching your brushes.

The right wing. Pretty much everything here is old school citadel. A lot of Jes Goodwin sculpts here.

In my opinion the army has a naval expeditionary force feel in it. It´s an infantry strong army with just a small unit of light cavalry in support. Just like something you could expect to land from elven warships and merchant galleys.

I´m hoping to expand my army so that it would eventually have at least one unit of every unit type presented in the WFB: Armies book. That means that I will have to paint a dragon rider, a unit of silver helms, a unit of warrior, kith unit and a chariot. I have a dragon and it´s rider in WIP state and it would be finished quite fast if I took the bull by horns and just painted it. One day...

For kiths I would like to get some rural looking archers. Armed with longbows the kiths could add some firepower to my army with lower points value than the normal +1 missile elite archers. I did buy a chariot a few months ago and I think I will take it on the painting table some day during next spring. As I love Jes Goodwin sculps I will try to get my hands on some more hand weapon armed elf warriors and create a warrior out of them.

Independence day archers

Today we are celebrating the 99th independence day of Finland. It is a tradion to have a big military parade on 6th december and this year it will be in Kajaani. And it is also quite common that if the Defence Forces has aquired some new equipment lately it will be presented to the public on this parade. This year the new system to make it´s first public appearance is the Orbiter II UAV system that will fly over the city of Kajaani during the parade and the image it transmits will be shown on a big screen.

With all this on the background I felt it would be appropriate to have something new ready for my high elves today. As my army has been lacking a dedicated archer unit I decided a while ago that I should get one. I was lucky to score about 30 plastic fantasy regiment archers from two seperate ebay auction for a very low price. Now the unit is completed and ready to mow down my enemies.

The unit leader is a Citadel Eternal Champion EC05 Dyvin Tvar model. Both the musician and standard bearer are excellent Jes Goodwin models from Elf command groups range. And the rank & file are of course fantasy regiment unipose elven archers. The archers were in pretty nasty shape when I got them but I decided not to strip them but to just give them a facelift. I think it worked and will do just fine as rank & file. The command group was given a bit more care.

A close up on the command group.

The whole unit.

This is how the archers looked like when I got them.

Seventeen archers, standard, musician and a LVL5 champion is roughly 350 points. That is a lot but elf archers can be used in hand to hand combat too if needed. It would be nice if they had access to shields and magic standard. Those would add a lot to their usability.

I still have eleven of those unipose archers left so I might do another unit later. Or use them as scouts. We´ll see. Happy indenpendence day everyone!

A harpist and some archers

It´s been a month since my last update and to be honest I haven´t been painting that much lately. Mostly it´s been because of work and other duties taking my time but I´ve noticed myself being a bit tired with the current projects. A unit of dark elf crossbow armed warriors is still waiting to be finished among other things. But as I´ve promised my friends those darkies will be completed by Christmas.

I hadn´t painted any high elves lately as I sort of got fed up with them until this week when I suddenly got a boost of motivation and decided to start a new unit. It will be archers this time. Same blue and white theme as the rest of my guys. I have close to 30 plastic elves from the fantasy regiment box and ultimately I´m aiming to have a 20 elf strong archer unit including 80´s metal command group. Rest of the plastic archers will propably boost my small unit of scouts some day.

The first one to get completed of the unit was this harpist photographed 

standing on a training for warriors book :D

The musician, a pair of very quickly painted archers and a WIP standard bearer.