Fable's Ulthwe Army

[Sildani]

Liking the stripes and chevron. Adds personality without making them stand out too much. BTW, if you're not going to use the snapped prow, I'll happily give it a good home!

By the way, you got off lightly. Last cat-related accident I had cost me an entire Scorpion I!

[Fable]

I have been in a painting lull as of late and tried to get myself out of it. I did a little bit more work on the Void Dreamer and while the model isn't yet finished I think it gives off a good idea of how it looks with the conversion work.




I'll post more when it's done along with his fluff blurb. The pirate force I'm going with are Ulthwe's Steel-Eye Reavers. There's an old bit of fluff about how Yriel's Eldritch Raiders absorbed Xian's Black Raiders (which IA: 11 indicates work closely with Ulthwe) so it seemed appropriate to go a different route and the rune that is on the back of the Void Dreamer will be repeated throughout the Pirate Models.

[Fable]

At the end of 2009 I purchased a bunch of resin bases and I've slowly been replacing the bases of the warlocks and some characters with them so they'll be interspersed throughout the army. I am still working on some, but I finally got around to the one I purchased specifically for the Avatar:



The yin/yang used to be very prominent in the Eldar army, often seemingly associated with Exarchs, so this seemed like the most appropriate place for it. As I try get through my painting slump I'm just trying to get little things done that I've wanted done for a while. I even got around to finishing the touch up work on the two standard Wave Serpents that I had started a couple weeks ago. I got some more work done on the new one (the one with the Chevron) but it's not close to done quite yet. Maybe next weekend if I can find the motivation.

While I know it's not exciting to work on things I've already had "done" I find as a hobbyist that it improves the sense of the army as a whole and in this way improves how much I enjoy the gameplay. Even something as often under-appreciated as basing can really impact the whole experience, and if it has that much of an impact on me it might improve the game for my opponent as well, and how is that not worthy to reinvest my effort in?

[Fable]

Today I got something major done and finally completed that fourth Wave Serpent, my third standard one. I also used the opportunity to model on the Vectored Engines and Star Engines to all three.




The Engines have a curious visual effect that they flatten out the model to make it look squatted and elongated.

[Fable]

I had suggested to my friend Clay that I would be willing to convert a Razorwing into a Nightwing for him if he could gather the requisite parts. As it turns out his birthday is coming up and his wife picked him up the requisite parts. Thankfully I won't be painting this (I really do suck at yellow), but I'm amazed how fast the conversion seems to go now that I've had the chance to practice on a couple others. I took a picture of all the prts before I started working on them, and then another when it's about 75% done, as I need to wait for a lot of the grey stuff to dry for sanding and then I can move towards completion.

Before:


After:

[Inquisitor Engel]

Nice to see the Razorwing/Nightwing conversion. I'd love to see a step-by-step on it. Looking VERY promising indeed.

[Fable]

Nice to see the Razorwing/Nightwing conversion. I'd love to see a step-by-step on it. Looking VERY promising indeed.

A bit earlier in this log I've got essentially a step by step on it. To be honest just clipping off the flair does a lot of the work. If you have any questions I'll be more than happy to answer them.

It starts about here: http://www.warseer.com/forums/showth...=1#post6045295 and between the Nightwing and Phoenix conversions I think I've got most of the step by step up there.

In the meantime Clay's Nightwing is pretty much all done except the painting (which, thankfully he'll be doing, not me).

For comparison I included my original Nightwing Conversion next to Clay's.





I didn't build in the pilot for his, but he paints over his canopies so it would be kind of silly to spend the time doing it.

[Son of Russ]

It is such a nice conversion. I'll be building a second myself before I eventually tackle a phoenix for an upcoming Corsairs force.

[Fable]

It is such a nice conversion. I'll be building a second myself before I eventually tackle a phoenix for an upcoming Corsairs force.

Man, the phoenix, if left unmolested, can put out a sick amount of firepower over the course of a game. If 6th edition really moves them to require 6's to hit... I'll include mine constantly.

[Fable]

With 6th edition out and a few games in I felt confident in starting to look at what conversions I can redo for my army. I started off with the simplest one, updating an Autarch. With a quick weapon swap from my Storm Squad leader and my second Autarch I finally have something in my Eldar army that is essentially unique... a Power Axe.




For a long time I sort of lamented that the Autarch didn't have access to any unique wargear. They're just kind of a boring statline bump. Now I have something that isn't replicated anywhere else in my force and gives one of my HQ's a little bit of flavor without having to use a special character. Plus he stands a real chance against a Space Marine commander in Articifer Armor, or perhaps a Librarian in terminator armor... though he'll still get schooled by standard terminators I suspect that's not really a big deal for me. I like the return of Terminators being an unholy terror on the tabletop.

I also finally broke down and swapped the arms on my Scorpion Exarch's to get the flag on the one I'll use more commonly. I think with the availability of both Terminator armor and articifer armor AP2 weapons will be more important to sprinkle throughout a list.

[Inquisitor Engel]

Nice work with the Nightwing conversion. Shows great promise on GW actually putting out a Nightwing with relatively little work from the DE kit, at least from a CAD perspective...

[Fable]

Thanks, I was really happy with it and it's an easy enough process to replicate.

On an incredibly hot and humid day I've been struggling to find motivation to do much of anything, so I painted Bel Annath.




Not my best work, but in my defense I was salvaging an older model and I would have rather had an original model from FW to work on. No matter what I did the large volume of white seemed to distort every pic no matter how I adjusted the exposure compensation. I'm actually quite pleased with the white of the inner robe.

I wanted him to look more prone to combat so his upper left arm came from an old Dark Eldar warrior arm and the lower arm came from an old Harlequin (A shadowseer I think).

[Fable]

As my work for 6th continues (and FW rewarded my work by releasing some neat rules for Bel-Annath!) I put together an Eldar Quad Gun... now I just need to make some Aegis Walls to go with it.





With two flyers at my disposal this feels like something my opponents may take more often than I.

[Fable]

Some news from this last weekend. I participated in the 40k tournament at ConnectiCon and took Best Painted!

In other news I have done some playing around with the idea of Eldar Aegis shields and I was wondering what people thought of these:




It's got the see-through clarity that I really want. It just needs a small shield-projector added, but I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas about it before I churn out a few more and base it.

The blue shield is from a small see-through plastic envelope bought at an office supply store.

[Radium]

Just add some of the wave serpent energy projectors at the ends, and it's a very fitting defence line!

[Son of Russ]

Some news from this last weekend. I participated in the 40k tournament at ConnectiCon and took Best Painted!

In other news I have done some playing around with the idea of Eldar Aegis shields and I was wondering what people thought of these:




It's got the see-through clarity that I really want. It just needs a small shield-projector added, but I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas about it before I churn out a few more and base it.

The blue shield is from a small see-through plastic envelope bought at an office supply store.

Hah! Perfect! I was wondering what to use for the energy field myself. Trust you to have the answer mate!

Just add some of the wave serpent energy projectors at the ends, and it's a very fitting defence line!

That sounds like a plan!

These ideas are duely stolen!

[Inquisitor Engel]

Fortifications are looking excellent! Perhaps with them being part of the main rules, we'll see a market develop for more alien terrain. Then you can laugh as you make awesome stuff from scratch.

[Fable]

Thanks guys! At this point I'm really interested to see the types of things the community cooks up for terrain. I've been using my webway gate as the landing pad which is ridiculously good. I'm interested to see how this runs out. I have a plan in mind for them and we'll see how it goes.

Ok, I got the whole set done in their base format and I was pretty happy with how they came out:



While I strongly considered the Serpent Stones as generators the more I considered it the more I wanted the generators to feel like something a unit could carry without too much encumbrance and activate as quickly as possible. The Serpent stones are very large compared to say... a Guardian.

The ones I crafted are actually based from unused bits in the Razorwing kit for both a large generator:


and a small generator:

[Fable]

I've made some serious progress. I finished the Aegis walls and now just need to paint the quad gun. Here is the Aegis:





I was really happy with how it came out. While my paint gave me some issues during the basing process and I wasn't entirely happy with them at first the static grass saved the day and really pulled the bases together. Overall I think they look great on the table and they don't pull away from the models themselves (which is part of the reason I kept the generators so simple... they're just terrain and to some degree I kind of want to forget they're there and just have their inclusion feel natural. Also I just used there, they're and their in a single sentence.

[Radium]

Also I just used there, they're and their in a single sentence.

And all of them used correctly!

I like the Aegis line, so I might just have to nick to basic idea behind it. That is, if I ever feel the need to take fortifications in my army.