A work in progress

Having completed a 1500 point Beastmen army and realising that they really are not that good (over priced monsters, over priced mass infantry, lack of special choice and far to easy to kill) I decided to start a new army. The big turning point was getting trounced by the new rules Ogre army they tore through my best combat units with their worst combat units. Seeing as the user was someone I was going to play regularly I figured I should get a better army.

High elves seemed like a good choice lots of shooting and cool special choices and they were one of the few armies not used regularly. I dipped into eBay to see what sort of stuff I could get cheap and got rather lucky. For £10 I got a sold as seen army. In it was 16 spear man 16 archers 10 sword masters 5 dragon princes Tyrion and 3 shadow warriors. They were however the older models but for £10 I wasn't too bothered as it was a pretty firm start for the army.

The day it arrived I play tested them with a couple of stand ins against the same Ogres as before. The elves did us proud with a devastating victory. Content with my army I started to expand and buy new models. One of my first purchases was 5 new Dragon Princes of Caledor and a White Lion Chariot. They are pretty cool models and on top of that they are very good units.

Due to the mass purchase of men and the large amount of games played painting was put on the back burner. The first unit I painted was a White Lion Chariot. I'm not usually a fan of dry brushing due to it take extended effort but I figured I'd use it just this once. The result was very pleasing.

 

For the lions I spray painted the whole model chaos black and after that I dry brushed over with bleached bone the first layer was pretty thinly spread with more black than anything so I dry brushed it again with a much more pleasing affect. After that I added in the brown speckles you can see. Once they had dried I mixed a wash using dwarf flesh and a tiny bit of skull white. I then dry brushed the manes with bleached bone and added the details to the harness etc.

In my rush to use the lion chariot in a battle I put the whole thing together without thinking about the men on top and the actual chariot. Painting them whilst glued together was horrible so it ended up being a pretty basic paint job.

  As you may know from previous blogs hormagaunt purple is my favourite colour and therefore had to be included on the chariot. The rest is pretty basic.

After painting the Lion Chariot my next models to be painted were the Dragon Princes. The way I figured it the Dragon Princes are 30 points a model so with them painted that's a large portion (points wise) of my army.

So boldly I painted away. Using the standard black undercoat.

I used the Dragon Princes of the Games Workshop website as a guide to painting them, which unfortunately meant for the first time ever in my fantasy armies I would have a unit with no purple! Instead I used Altdorf Guard Blue (the old ultramarine blue, a lot cooler name) and skull white. The gems and detail on the shield I painted with Troll Slayer Orange. The armour I used bolt gun metal and chain mail metal accordingly and finished of with burnished gold.

For the horse I used bleached bone, another of my favourite colour also with the success of the lions I even used some dry brushing. Although it looks pretty basic the model took the best part of two hours to paint partly due to Hollyoaks and Dead Poets Society distracting me and also due to in decision on what colour to paint parts. The last 4 models I should be able to batch paint.

All in all I was very impressed with my own painting and look forward to finishing off the army. Watch this space...