Byron's Pirate Eldar - Doldair's Skyraiders (381)

 

This month I painted Doldair's Skyraiders. I am very excited by this addition to my army. Let's jump into it!

First a pic of the unit together. Let's go through the team one model at a time.

First, is Doldair, the Lochiarch of the Skyraider unit. She is a champion armed with a power sword on a jetbike.

She is a fairly intricate conversion. Her lower legs come from an RT eta jetbike rider. Her torso is a left over from the Banshee that was cannibalized to make my leader model. The arms are plastic, one from a contemporary corsair sprue, I think. And the other from a plastic early jetbike rider. Her helmet is from a 2nd edition dire avenger. And, her sword is from an RT dire avenger exarch. 

The flames for the jetbike were made from a cotton swab. The white paint at the base of the flame comes from a white ink. It's very white but it always shows up as a mid grey on my camera - maybe it's too bright?

The rune on the bike is hand sculpted to look like the Isha rune to match the design on my wave serpent and the army banner.

Hopefully this video works. I took videos of the jet bikes to help capture their swooping pose.

Next we have the biker with the hand flamer. This was a frustrating conversion. He was initially a standing pose with a power fist. The whole right arm had to go and replaced with an early plastic jetbiker arm with added armor over the right bicep. Then the left leg was chopped off and cut in two around the knee and repositioned.

Some of you might be wondering about the purple cyclops hand icon. This is a hand-sculpted interpretation of one of the banner icons found in the Book of the Astronomican. I didn't get the expression quite right, but it is close enough. I painted it purple because I didn't have any yellow in my pallet yet and thought it might grab too much attention.

Another video.

Another face from the Book of the astronomican. I put a lot of effort into sculpting these designs because I have another jetbike with a harlequin face on it and I didn't want that one bike to feel out of place.

This model is a pretty straightforward conversion. Head swap with a plastic jetbiker. Right arm comes from a plastic dark eldar warrior with an eldar bright lance tip put on the end. 

This jetbiker is my favorite. I think he has the best sense of motion - resulting from his swishy top knot and his jet thruster flame curving. 

Swoosh!

Points

Leaders

Lochiarc - Champion w/ refractor field, mesh armor, power sword, las pistol  = 20 pts

Squads

Skyraider unit

Eldar w/ mesh armor, refractor fields, laspistol and flamer  x 1 = 13 pts

Eldar w/ mesh armor, refractor fields, laspistol and meltagun = 18 pts

Jetbikes x3 = 330 pts

_________________________________________________________

Total                                                            381 pts

The jetbike cost was derive from the Book of the astronomican. In the eldar pirate list, serpent squads can be upgraded to skyraider squads for 547 points. That's five bikes for about 110 points each. That seems pricey to me. 

Next, the baggage train

Here is my baggage train to date. I don't want to celebrate this too much since this month it was mostly just basing the baggage train. 

Here's a pic of the cargo drone to show how the cargo token can fit in the back of the drone to be carried around. 

Finally, a pic of everything I completed this month. 

George's Bad Moonz, Month VI: Leader

 

Big Gobb could feel the power of the WAAARGH pulsating through the air. His big mob was ready.

His father had been a great war boss. Now Big Gobb was one too.

He loved the feeling. Loved it more than anything.

Well, almost anything.

What he loved even more was how flash it all looked. Yellow, red, green with blue and white checks. These really were the flashest gitz in the galaxy and Big Gobb felt huge pride that they were his flash gitz.

He opened his huge mouth and called the mob to attention. Nobz, Weirdboyz, boyz and tanks formed into a mass of yellow, red and green.

The mob hung on his every word.

Big Gobb pointed the way forward and yelled a battle cry at extraordinary volume. The mob joined in, chanting at the tops of their voices and advancing at terrifying speed.

Big Gobb took the opportunity to move steadily towards the rear, well away from the danger as bolter shells and missiles began to fly by.

His father had been a great war boss. But he had also died in battle, and Big Gobb had no intention of doing that.

 

 

Phew! I’ve dragged myself over the finish line.

The Wonderful Ramshackle Games produce a mini perfect for Big Gobb. I actually painted one last year, the only miniature I managed to finish before entering the Field of Bones! It felt like retribution to buy another one, and for him to be the finishing touch for my complete army.

It’s fair to say that May and June have not been good months for my hobbytime. A lethal combo of work and real life have drained any painting opportunities. Fortunately, I had foreseen this before the challenge started and painted enough from January-April to get me through.

I would have loved to have done more, and to have added some flourishes, but life has had other ideas!

However, I’m still proud as punch of this army.

In my first OWAC (OWAC VI), my goal was to finish. No fuss, no fine detail painting. Just finish. And I managed it. I then crashed out after Month I of OWAC VII.

This time, I wanted to stretch myself a bit more, finishing whilst using a few more techniques. With such a wonderful selection of models available for space orks, this has been a great opportunity to go wild! Finally gaining confidence with colour blending has been a real joy, and I’ve loved adding texture to all of those bold yellows and greens. It’s been great fun!

Anyway, I’ll save the Oscar speech for my wrap up post!

Month VI Points:

1 x Warboss: 90 Points

Big Gobb!

Big Gobb and his nobz!

Big Gobb's Big Mob!

Shadespyre's June Post - Wild Card Month - OWAC VIII - High Elves of Lothern

OWAC VIII - Wild Card Month - High Elves of Lothern

June

The last month of OWAC VIII and it's WILDCARD MONTH

Probably one of my least wild ones, if I'm honest. But this is what I've got for you:

More Heroes

Let's start off with slotta-based imposters - this is Brommedir from the Blood bath at Orks Rift scenario. Such a fancy fellow that I just had to include him here.

And this is the C33 Elf Hero, in his mounted and dismounted forms. So obviously a match to the C08 ranges and the Regiments of Renown that I'm using that I don't really understand how they ended up separate from them.

And then, I've also painted a few more of the C08 sculpts. I picked through my collection and used the *worst* examples of everything that I had doubles of - in other words, I still have a full set of

 36 in decent condition stashed away - to add to this project.

So here we have another four:

In this set, the two handed sword blade is a replacement, the second guy is pretty much solid, the third guy barely has a face, and the spear has been repaired at least three times!

And here are three more:

These are actually in okay condition. I don't like the first guy much, even in this range he is very busy with clashing details. And then the fighter-mage on the right has a rather deformed face.

And here is the last four:

These are among my favourites. I hope it's pretty obvious that the second guy was missing his hand, and this is how he ended up wielding the enormous Coffee of Doom. Hmm, that cup seems familar from somewhere?

This takes us to 16 out of 36 sculpts included in this project in some form or another. Some of these minis, like the Cleric with the mace, I really like and if I could have found enough to make a unit I'd have been very happy. Some would only work as characters or unit leaders. Maybe the opportunity will come to add more to the army, but I think I'm done with these colours for now.

None of these have a set roll in the army as such, so I'm not going to bother working out points for them.

However, here are some "proper" additions.

Dragons

Would you believe that I had no plans to include a dragon in this army? No Dragons? Me? 

But honestly I did not.

It was only when I paused the project briefly to paint a dragon as a gift / favour for a friend that I realised that I really wanted to paint more of them. So I had a dig around and came up with this:

So this is the Marauder Miniatures MBF17 High Elf Dragonlord *Dragon*, for which I don't have the proper rider, with a modified Elwing's rider on his back. I built the saddle to make the two meet up as best as I could.

The Dragon, Kargos, is traditionally a big red firebreathing type, but to fit better with this army I borrowed the colours from the later Prince Imrik box art. I think he looks quite smart.

I also wanted to include some sort of "sea dragon". I considered a number of serpentine types, but they tend to be sculpted as in the sea, and I wanted something that might have travelled inland with the army - far enough to have joined up with their Wood Elf cousins. And I eventually turned up this little guy from one of my boxes:

This is the Ral Partha Sea Dragon, code 01-151 (I think you can still get it from Ironwind Minis if you want one). I like his fishy look, but those wings suggest he's not restricted to the seaside. The paint scheme is inspired by the Blue Marlin and uses all of the blues which appear in the army, which is a nice way to tie things together, I thought.

So that is that. OWAC VIII done! Apart from a final July post where I might mull on what I've done and try to get a full army picture for you. Thanks for reading!

Scores for June:                620 points   16 models

1 x Elven Dragonkin            (Lance, Shield, Bow)                                                              320 points

1 x Dragon                           (Level 1, Wings)                                                                     300 points            

Running Total:                   3304 points  96  models