40k Dark Eldar - Corsair Lord and Haemonculus built

Not as much in the way of hobby progress this past weekend, though it was filled with 40k gaming goodness! Continued on with the Rogue Trader campaign I'm running for some friends on Sunday, and Saturday I participated in the 500pt stage of the escalation league at the Warhammer shop. Unfortunately my opponent's army was unpainted and he had a... liberal interpretation of movement distance and a few of the rules so it was a little disappointing - didn't get any pics worth sharing. That said, a mediocre game is still better than no game, I suppose! I did manage to put together a couple models for the force Sunday night, so it wasn't totally a bust.

Nothing too special here, just an out-of-the-box Haemonculus for the force - he'll accompany the Wyches to provide them with a boost to their Power from Pain turn count, as they desperately need some sort of save for the first turn or two. I have to say I'm very impressed with the way the model was designed, it is really a testament to what GW has been able to do with plastics these days.

I've been intending to do a second squad of counts-as Warriors for the force, the intent of which is to do a unit of Corsair pirates utilizing a mix of bits from the standard DE sprues and the fantasy Black Ark Corsairs. To lead the unit I picked up one of the Dark Elf characters to use as a basis for the Sybarite and put together this model. I'm thinking all of the corsairs will use the full-face helms as they seem appropriate for the space pirate theme!

I'll admit to feeling a bit of army fatigue with these pointy-eared gits (and I've already got the 750pt force painted up for next league day), so I think it may be time to return to the Scions of Magnus for a while...

Eldar - The army so far...

Just a quick post today - Couple folks have asked for a group shot of the Eldar, so I laid them out in roughly the same setup as the painting chart and snapped a pic over my lunchbreak today while I had some relatively decent light:

It's definitely a colorful army! I have gotten the basic blue laid down on the Dire Avengers, I'm trying to ensure they are done up in a different style/shade of blue from the earlier Guardians - a little lighter, and done in a wash-over-white primer style similar to the Fire Dragons and Striking Scorpions. I dabbled with the Warp Spiders but didn't like the 'brown recluse' scheme so they'll likely get a bath in Simple Green and start anew soon!

Eldar - Eldar Corsairs painted

Spent some time over the last week working on the Eldar pirates that I'd built about a million years ago. They have been sitting on my painting shelves patiently ever since, but no longer!

They're built from a mix of Dark Elf corsairs and Eldar bits and incorporate some arms and weapons from waaaay back. My intention was to run them as Storm Guardians alongside an Eldar army that I'd planned but never really came to fruition. Not sure what I'll do with them now, worst case scenario is they come in handy for some 40k:RPG campaign along the way. I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with the banner either. It needs some iconography, but I haven't found anything I like as yet.

I rather enjoyed the duality of the color scheme coupled with the way the poses turned out. From the front the models are very much purple and blue. From the rear, they're predominantly green. I had some trouble capturing the purple color in the lightbox, so I went back to my old 'on the table' shots which I think show off the colors a bit better. To be honest, I'm thinking about abandoning the lightbox and going back to this, as it seems as though the depth of field and focus ends up being a bit sharper.

Coming up, the finished KemVar models for Mercs!

Yo ho, yo ho, a Corsair's life for me...

It's been too cold to primer anything recently, so I broke out the bits and started fiddling around with some Eldar. The fluff for Craftworld Alaitoc suggests they work closely with the various Eldar corsair fleets, and I thought rather than building another squad of Guardians, I'd try my hand at making a squad of Corsairs as a proxy unit instead. I had a number of leftover Shuriken Pistols, so I settled on making them into a squad of proxy Storm Guardians.

I utilized the capes and arms from the Dark Elf Black Ark Corsairs, as I wanted them to look fairly pirate-y without going full blown Dark Eldar. Getting the capes to fit took a bit of cutting and trimming, but they ended up working fairly well.

The unit is armed with Shuriken Pistols and Close Combat weapons, and two of the Corsairs are carrying fusion guns. The banner will have no effect in-game, I just thought it would be a nice-looking addition to the unit. Building them as Storm Guardians also means I'll have two weapons platforms, which I'll build out with a different weapons to provide flexibility for the vanilla Guardian squad when it comes to army list design.