40k Dark Eldar - Kabalite Warriors painting begins

There's an escalation league starting at the newly-opened GW store in Boulder and despite my general reservations about whether my schedule will allow me to participate in the long run, I figured it would be a fun way to motivate to work on the Dark Eldar. The league isn't "painted only" which is a discouraging factor for me, but I understand the shop's desire not to exclude anyone while they establish a player base. That said, I'm going to try and do a personal challenge of not fielding anything that isn't painted - the first round is 250 points, which when following a CAD doesn't mean many models. In my case, it'll be the Archon (already painted) and two 5-man Warrior squads. The downside is the 10-man squad I've built doesn't quite break down into two legal 5-man squads (no Dark Lance unless there's 10 warriors in the squad), but I figure most folks shouldn't have a problem with me saying "Okay, so this Dark Lance is just a splinter rifle for this first set of games, cool?"

Of course, since I'm a bit of a masochist I figured I'd paint up the unit's planned Raider transport at the same time, this one is rather boring and unadorned (as I feel befits the low-caste Warriors) but I have several others in increasing levels of bling planned!

We had a brief respite from the punishing heat yesterday and I managed to lay in the purples and the very initial color for the yellow cloth on the warriors in the relative cool of the evening. I realized when editing the photo however that I apparently neglected to add the hairpiece on one of the helmets. Argh! Nevertheless, so far so good - supposed to be another relatively cool day tomorrow so hopefully I can knock out a few more colors after work...

In other news, my good friend Adeptus Michael (aka Captain Maxissimo Erasmus Domocletian Heronomius Carscallen in our ongoing Rogue Trader campaign) has started up a new blog called The Glory Days of the Underhive in order to share and document his Necromunda and other 40k goodness. As an old tabletop adversary of his before he moved to Italy, I can say I am really looking forward to seeing his fever-maddened creations come together again (albeit from the other side of the planet)! Definitely worth checking out!