goblinpaladin's Wood Elves - a February update (241 points)

For all my belly-aching and whinery, I have actually managed to haul my lazy, procrastinating bottom over the February line - and with a few points to spare, at that. I've blown my original plan out the window, but I'm still pretty happy with how things are. Group photo:

the février gang

11 archers. That's 121 points.
2 wardancers. 40 points.
5 glade runners. 80 points.

A total of 241 points. Algebraic!

I painted the wardancers at the start of the month, as I didn't really want to paint the archers. I procrastinated from them all month, really, which was why I started getting anxious and whiney on Facebook. Then, last week, slam, a burst of energy got a second batch of five painted up and the end looked in sight. Pretty nice stuff.

Let's have some close-ups. My partner, who can actually hold a camera without it trembling, is out of town for work. I hope you guys enjoy blurry miniatures, out of focus and sometimes out of frame! Yeah!

the iron plating over his groin is a nice touch

 I can't pass up the chance for some of the wardancers to have outrageous hair, and this fellow begged for a Slayer-orange hairdo.

leather bodysuits are very in among - ah - certain elves

I really enjoyed painting this guy. He came out pretty much exactly as I envisaged.

tight elven buttocks. i know that's what you're all here for, really

#justiceforgary

I absolutely adore Morley's mid-90s Waywatcher range, and they are a perfect fit for the third edition glade runners. Leaf-patterned cloaks, additional equipment, ropes, weird masks. Brilliant. I'm hoping to get the other sculpts as well, but the three on the left here are the only ones I've managed to gather so far.

The chap on the far right is from the Scout range. I'm not sure who sculpted him - it might have been Morley as well, but he strikes me as a little different. It might have been Aly Morrison. At any rate, it's another sculpt I've always liked. I fancy his horn as a hunting horn, used to sonically notify the main elven body of enemy troop movements - the sort of thing that happens before the Warhammer game - and not a musician in the usual sense. So he just counts as a regular guy.

across the Field of Själland, the elven scouts spot the rest of their kin

The chap with the purple hat is a 1980s elf. I did some research on him, all of which I've forgotten. From memory, he's a Goodwin sculpt, originally part of the Tolkien range before being moved to the elven range and then shifted into wood elves, when the elven sub-species became more distinct. He was gone by fourth edition.

His personalised gear and sense of style strike me as very ranger-like, in that D&D sense. The sculpt has a real sense of the individual to him, which is the main reason he's become a glade runner.

His purple hat is a nod to a very different kind of elf, in a different fantasy franchise.

don't tread on the flowers, mortal man (who is doomed to die)

Folks keep commenting on these old plastics, surprised to see them included. They are actually pretty decent sculpts, especially for 1987. There are a few bits of soft detail, notably under their mantles, but not so that you can really see on the board. The biggest issues are the mould lines - along the arms, sure, but especially in the hair. Yeesh. 1987 plastics technology also means that the hair winds up having a bit of a cornrow feel, with washes darkening the shadows more than I want.

But they are very simple models, and in an age of a million tedious details on miniatures, it is refreshing to paint something this simple. Cloak. Scabbarded sword. Quiver of arrows. Coat of mail.* Boots. Manly, muscular arms. Fin. Even I can't screw that up too badly.

i did warn you about the photography

Speaking of hair, I wanted to mention something. As these are wood elves, I wanted the hair to mostly fall into naturalist colours in the middle of the range. Dark elves often have black hair. High elves have flowing locks the colour of spun gold or winter's straw. Wood elves should be auburns and light browns, pale blondes and the like.

However, in keeping with my mixed elven kin ideas, I did want to have the occasional figure with darker hair, to show that not every elf with black hair buggered off to Naggaroth to colonise America wage eternal war for the Phoenix Throne. You can see one in the top right.

I've also been reading a lot of CJ Cherryh lately. Several of her books have some fantastic ideas for Oldhammer gaming, something I want to talk about some other time,** her Morgaine series specifically. Of relevance here is her qual species. An ancient elder race who Tampered With Forces and were Cast Down (sound familiar?), the qual are tall, elegant - and all have white hair. I was already toying with the idea, but now I've settled on it, so a number of elves will have white hair, especially heroes and wizards. I'm going to use different washes to give them some variance, which should be pretty cool.

eleven archers archering

The light wasn't the best this afternoon, but I hope you can also see that I experimented with some different shades of green on the cloaks. It creates more of the effect I was always hoping for in the first place. The systems I was using to get forest and moss greens often wound up with the two looking too similar when grouped together.

Warhammer Rulebook, Rick Priestley, p.59. Artist: David Gallagher. © Games Workshop, 1996.

That's it for this round, folks. Next month, I'm hoping to finish off those archer regiments, do a few more fun wardancers and maybe a character model. If all goes well, I might even be back in alignment with the original plan! A surprise twist!

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* Only one unit of third edition archers can have light armour, so the mail tunic is both ineffective and free. What a bargain!

** The Morgaine books, with their Gates, their fallen, ancient qual, their science-as-magic, and their humans living in weird, new societies are begging for Rogue Trader-style gaming. The Goblin Mirror's aesthetics of sparse wilderness and small-scale skirmishes is very Oldhammer. It also features an unusual take on goblins, being human-sized and witty but with an alien sense of ethics. I could go on.