Dark Elf Warriors - Swordsmen II

My Swordsmen regiment got into the next round of extension.   In order to close the first rank I painted the command crew for this regiment. In case you missed the first part creating this regiment, read here. Here, the Champion was already done and the Musician and Standard Bearer followed their leader on their heels. Or let us say they tried. There is a lot of competition on my workbench to get into my focus and to get some colour. Therefore, painting them was interrupted several times to work on different projects. Despite some serious time half finished on the pile of shame... these two guys were able to motivate me finishing them. Here the story of their odysee on my Workbench.

The Miniatures

Full regiment of Warriors - Swordsmen

Two sets of Command Crew miniatures exist. For the Swordsmen unit I choose a selection which reflected best the look and equipment of the troopers. The Champion with raised sword was the best choice. Additionally,  I took the Musician with sword and the Standard Bearer holding his sword still in sheath. I placed the Command Crew around the centered Champion. What I did not recognize at this moment was, that the banner was placed far left due to the fact that the Bearer hold it in his right hand. It would have been better to place this guy in the middle or on the right side so that the banner has a more centered position. Unfortunately, the musician does not work on his position because of its diagonal orientation. Put him on the left would mean to present his backside to the frontline. Switching with the Champion is still an option I have to think about. But, I always loved the idea that a regiment is arranged around its leader in the center. I will play with different options in some upcoming units. Perhaps I get this problem solved later.

Painting the Command Crew

Commmand Crew with basic colours

First detail work on these guys

How mentioned in the beginning, those two guys were not alwaysPart I of this regiment. I started on these miniatures with less time on an evening in early January. Just for relaxing I added some basic colours, the red, black, grey and gold (see WIP pic). I had a lot of further short session focusing rather on finishing specific elements than finishing a colour completly. What I also did was painting the faces very early. This normaly helps me a lot to keep my motivation high to finish these dudes. Not this time. I made a break here to paint the Sorceress riding Dark Pegasus and continued my work on them in March. Then, I painted both in parallel for a long time as you can see in the second WIP picture. I focused later on finishing the musician first as this was the easier miniature. In contrast, the banner of the Standard Bearer promised already very early to become a difficult task. And it would get a lot more difficult than I thought at the beginning. When testing the banner I noticed that most of the upper half of the miniature and the miniature to his right was covered by the banner. One option to solve this was with a lot of drapery in the banner, but this would complicate the freehand work a lot. I looked for other options and I get inspiration in the 8th Edition miniatures which shared a lot of similarities with this old range. Here the Standard poles were higher putting the banner over the heads of the regiment. Therefore, the second option was to extend the standard pole. I decided for the latter even if this meant to change the original miniature in this case.... and to change it on a already painted miniature! I did it and in the end I extend the banner pole by 1.5 cm which was already enough.
in my favor. Consequently, my time was very limited for them. When ever I paint miniatures only in very small sessions I miss to take pictures. This has happend here as well.... shame on me! Therefore, I can only tell the rough story of the process. If you are interested in a detailed painting description take a look on

The Banner

My technical experience in creating paper banners was nearly that old like this miniature range. In consequence I made a lot of mistakes here but learned a lot how to do better. Therefore, do not take this article here as a tutorial. I will write a detailed tutorial as soon as I will have optimized the technique. However, I took some pictures and can guide you through my learning curve.

I started with a pencil sketch of the banner. For the central symbol I wanted the winged skull. This symbol is carried by the unreleased master sorcerer on top of his staff. I had used this motif already by the shild from the General on Cold One. In terms of heraldry I wanted to link the regiment to these characters. The Swordsmen already carried the winged gem designed by Wayne England on their shields. I decided to replace the gem by the skull and fit the tail to the Banner shape. I added a rune looking similiar to the symbol in a smaller version on the front and on a bigger version on the back. The final design looked this way:

Banner design based on Wayne Englands artworks

Then I started with the painting process by putting the banner with Patafix on a wooden stick. Then I painted the basic colours. I noticed here that it would have been useful to seal the paper somehow. Due to the missing sealing the paper became rough and partly fibrous. Definiatly something to do better the next time.  

Banner with some first basic colours

After all basic colours were painted to front and back I added some drapery by bending the banner carefully. Two times my banner get some slight fractures. Not much but definiatly a warning to be more careful next time! Then I started the detail work aligning to the drapery. I played a lot with the contrast to make sure the symbol stand out from the background and the single elements had a good visibility. From time to time I checked the banner on the Standard Bearer to get a feeling for the final composition:

Testing the look of the banner on its Bearer

Here you can see the final Banner from the front and back. I am happy with the result and I like the simplicity creating that old school feeling a lot. However a bit more texturing and details could have been an advantage as well. I will have to think about what can be improved for further designs. Finally I fixed than banner with PVA glue to the horizontal bar.  

The finished command Crew

Here you can see final pictures of the Command Crew. These two chaps were nice additions to this regiment and I am happy to have the first rank done. The red colour scheme works great on these miniatures. However, I am looking forward to paint these guys in purple too as part of my Spearmen unit. I am curious what looks finally better when beeing able to have both in a direct comparison.

The first rank

Here you see the finished first rank of my Dark Elf Warriors - Swordsmen. Five miniatures done, 15 further troopers to do. For the moment I need a break from these guys. I am a slow painter needing a lot of variety. Therefore, I am only able to paint 2-3 miniatures of the same type. But, I would be happy have a playable regiment of ten men. Therefore I am looking forward to break down this large unit in smaller pieces. My next goal is to paint first two and then three further troopers to have ten troopers ready for battle. 

I hope you like the final result. As always I am happy to read your thoughts in the comments.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc

2020 Review and Preview

The Dark Elves Sorceress riding Dark Pegasus dominated
dominated the Workbench in January and February 2020

Unbelivable that this is my first post in 2020. Meanwhile it is already late in March and the world is running through a pandemic crisis. The lock down has also hit Germany and for the first time this year I feel that I came to a rest. So where I am now and what happened.
So far it was a busy year. I started 2020 going into parental leave. We had a nice and relaxed vacation in the first week of January before I started to introduce our little boy to his new day care. Unfortunately, work followed me on my heels. There was much to do and I had to care though I was officially absent for the whole month. This collapsed completly when our day care taker becomes ill and I had to take care for the boy and the job. Things did not get better in the following weeks. The February was dominated by a high work load in my research job and March was dominated by illness of one or more family members. The first day I felt healthy again was when writing these lines. But not everything was bad. We had also a lot of fun and good times and here and there was also some spare time for the hobby. As always when I am terrible busy I concentrate on painting miniatures to get my energy back rather than writing blog articles. Correction... Painting and... buying miniatures.

That´s what this blog article will be about what happened on my workbench and what awaits you later this year.


Tactica 2020

Meeting Aly Morrison at Tactica 2020 in Hamburg

On February 15th to 16th the Tactica Event in Hamburg, Germany took place. This yearly event is all about SciFi/ Fantasy and historical wargaming for hobby people all around europe. Knowing that Aly Morrison and the Perry Twins are regular guests of this events made it a must visit in my time schedule. As I am writing with Aly Morrison since a while about my Dark Elves project, meet him in person, talk about his design work and show him my painted Dark Elves was something I dreamed for a long time now. Additionally, there was a chance to meet a lot of my painting people and other people I know from my tabletop forums. I started my trip on saturday morning with a box full of grim and sinister Dark Elves and get on my way to Hamburg. And what should I say... It was brilliant and mind blowing!

After a first chat with forum people I met at the entrance and some purchases I met Aly in person. This meeting was truely my highlight of the weekend. Aly is a very nice, funny and communictive guy and we enjoyed a lot talking about the design of his Dark Elves range in the early 90s, all about Marauder miniatures and design and sculpting topics. Occasionally, I showed him and the Perry twins my painted miniatures. All three enjoyed my painting and I was happy to get a lot of positive feedback for it. We continued our conversation and all togehter we had a three hours talk through the whole afternoon partly accompanied by some other friends visiting us. Needless to say that now I have tons of information to support my Dark Elves project with interesting stories, design notes and insider information. Be sure to read some of it in my upcoming articles.


The lead pile
The lead pile has grown massively in the last months and thanks to some extraordinary gentlemen my collection has extended by some very special and rare miniatures. Impossible to go through all new stuff but I want to point out some miniatures and the people I have to thank! Due to privacy I shorten the names. You fantastic guys know yourself when reading. If you want to see your full name, let me know. 

Marauder Miniatures - Chaos Army

Marauder Miniatures Chaos Army

Inspired by Ernst W. and his awesome Chaos Army my heart was already weakend for this fantastic range of miniatures designed by Aly Morrison and Trish Carden. Thanks to Ernst I get in contact with Christian V. who sold my a small chaos force consisting of a Knight, a Warrior, a full regiment of Beastmen and Thugs and a Beastmaster with Hounds. Dozens Ebay Auctions later I had a full army consisting nearly of all miniatures made of this range. So far only 5 CD90 Chaos Dwarfs were missing. The picture shows most of the stuff but some of the miniatures are still in their acetone bath for stripping the old paint. Unfortunately, also some recasts sneaked into this beautiful collection. I have to check if I can use them or if I have to replace them by the original ones. There is still a lot of work to do the preparations. But, my mind is already working for a paint scheme and basing ideas. I am really looking forward in excitement to this future project.

Realm of Chaos

Unreleased penis-headed Beastmen

There was need to get the original Realm of Chaos Books for diving deeper into Warhammer 3rd Edition. These books were really two masterpieces Games Workshop built an empire on. There is so much creativity and inspiration in it influencing the path of this company until today. Thanks to Steve C. and his continous support I was able to create a small Chaos Warband consisting of mostly Slaanesh miniatures and some outstanding pieces of this old genius minature range. In this regard I am very proud to get the two unreleased Bob Olleys Penisheaded Beastmen from Jason L. It is never to late start collection the famous lead of the 80s.


Great Spined Dragon

The Great Spined Dragon

There is no collection complete without one of the most beautiful dragons Games Workshop ever created. Since I noticed this dragon the first time in the famous Dark Elves Army from Scott Goldstein aka Lion of Flanders I wanted this beast. For a long time it was on my list and I searched Ebay auctions and the market places to get one for a reasonable priece. End of last year I was successful and get this beautiful beast from a collector in Denmark. It is in a very good condition but need some love and some paint. I am still unsure in which army I will place it but I think it will be a pointy eared one.

4t Edition Dark Elves

Unreleased Dark Elves Sorceress II

Even if my 4th Edition Dark Elves range is nearly complete it sill misses some of the rare and unreleased miniatures. Two cruel and deadly ladys I am looking since ages are the two unreleased Sorceresses. In January around my birthday I put up a wanted list in the Oldhammer Trading Group on Facebook asking for these girls and promissing to paint them best I can and offering a special place in my heart and in my cabinet. And what to say, I was more than happy when Emiel S. offered me one of my holy grails. Even if Emiel is a good painter himself he never felt comfortable painting her. He is happy now that she is out of her dark box and in a new home by her unreleased friends where she will get the painting she deserves. I am very thankful for this awesome miniature and won´t dissapoint Emiel. She is already in preparation and in my schedule to get painted. Stay tuned.


The Workbench

In preparation

Beastlord Rakarth riding Black Dragon while preparation

A lot of miniatures have seen the workbench for getting their preparation in 2020. There were some Spearmen, the unreleased Sorceress and some others. But, after the Sorceress rode her Pegasus directly in my cabinet some space on my workbench was free for the next big monster. Therefore, I started to clean and build the Beastlord Rakarth and his Black Dragon. These old monster kits need a lot of love in terms of pinning and gap filling. Consequently, this kit still needs a lot of work to become ready for painting, Additionally, there is need for a proper base, which still makes me some headaches. It was planned to put him on a stairway with some broken obelisks. Unfortunately, the dragon pose does not work with my inital plan. We will see how I can solve these problems. With time comes a solution. Until then I clean more Spearmen and Crossbowmen and build bases for them. There are still tons of miniatures left which need my knife and sanding paper.


In painting

Pegasus work in progress

Even if there was no much progress on the blog, there was a lot of painting going on the last weeks and months. January and February were dominated by the Sorceress riding Dark Pegasus. She took a lot of time and luckily I was still in my parental leave in January. I wanted to finish her in time to be part of my showcase I showed to Aly in Hamburg. I finished her just in time but was not able to finish her banner pole and her banner. Both are still work in progress. Especially the banner is a really difficult one, as I am dislike the original one and wanted to optimize its design. It took a lot of drawings to get a proper result and now there is need to bring this a freehand on paper. I am still looking for the perfect motivation to get this banner done.

While shirking away from painting the banner I procrastinate in painting everything else which lies around unfinished on my workbench. In this regard three unfinished command crews crossed my way which was a good possibility to get some more banner and freehand excercise. I was able to finish the Command Crew for the Warriors in March. The article for them is following in the next weeks. Additionally, I started my work on the Command Crew for the Executioners... and one more trooper, needed to finish the first rank.    

There is also a third Command Crew, but these guys are from a really fast and sneaky regiment which makes it currently impossible to take pictures. But I stay tuned to get these guys in front of the camera.

So, that´s it for the moment. I hope you enjoyed the summary of the last weeks and months. I hope to finish some more articles in the next weeks. I am looking forward to show you the Warriors with their new Command Crew and also I have tons of pictures of the Sorceress and her Pegasus waiting to be shown. Stay tuned and stay healthy!!

As always I am happy to read your thoughts in the comments.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc

Dark Elf Warriors - Swordsmen I

Dark Elf Warriors - Swordsmen

Today I want to write about the simple troppers of the Dark Elves Army. But not about the plastic miniatures most of you will think about now. I want to write about the metal version of this regiment. I first came across these miniatures when noticing that one of the two displayed regiments of the Eavy Metal pages in the Armybook contain more than one monoposer. Several years later I read the story of these two miniatures on the Collecting Citadel Miniatures Wiki pages:

"While the metal Dark Elf Swordsmen look like prototypes for the single-pose plastic Swordsman, they were released and sold blistered by themselves in packs of 2. When originally released, single-pose plastic Swordsmen came in a box of 10 (without shields or waterslide transfers), this was later reduced to a box of 8, with added shields and transfers. Shield transfer 2 was apparently the only transfer sheet sold with the plastic swordsmen. The plastic Swordsman model may have originally been intended for use with the Talisman fantasy boardgame (like the single-pose plastic Beastman & Skaven models), but the Dark Elf character was dropped from the game prior to publication (rules for the Talisman Dark Elf character were published later in White Dwarf magazine)."


 
The History of the Dark Elf Swordsmen
Indeed these Warriors were some kind of prototypes. As their metal tab reveal these two miniatures were sculpted by Aly Morrison in 1993. Therefore, these were some of the first Dark Elfs designed by him while most of the miniature range was designed later in 1995. A few other miniatures also have a tab dated 1993 e.g. some Warriors with Repeating Crossbows, a Witch Elf and two Spearmen. The latter were of special interest here as both are conversions which based on the two Swordsmen. Therefore, Aly used the Swordsmen to design his first Spearmen in 1993. These two Spearmen were converted a second time in 1995.

                                                    Dark Elf Warriors and on their basis converted Spearmen


In contrast, the plastic Warrior was designed in 1994. Consequently, the metal version were produced first. A closer look on the plastic Warrior shows that his design based mainly on Swordman 1 but also shares some design elements from Swordman 2.

                                Dark Elf Warrior - Swordmen plastic version from 1994 in reference to the metal version from 1993


When the Dark Elfs were released in 1995 the metal versions of the Dark Elf Warriors were shown on the Eavy Metal pages painted in a Red/Blue colour scheme. A closer look revealed that the regiment consisted partly of metal and plastic Warriors. Only 5 to 6 metal miniatures can be spotted in the two ranks.

Dark Elves Warrior Regiment painted by the Eavy Metal Team

Additionally, the metal miniatures were listed in the catalogue pages of the first UK Dark Elves Armybooks with product codes DE6 and DE7.

Catalogue page from the Dark Elves Armybook (UK Version)

The cataloge pages seems to disappear in later printings of the UK Armybooks and were replaced by product pictures of an example army. To my knowledge the original catalogue pages were missing in Armybooks released in other languages. With the release of the Dark Elves Army only the plastic miniatures were featured in the White Dwarf and the metal versions were never catalogued in a European catalogue. Quite different in the US, here you can find the metal Swordsmen in the Warhammer catalogues from 1996 and 1997 as well as in the complete catalogues from 1997 and 1998 available under the product code 8510D. The Dark Elf Swordsmen were sold in blisters of two miniatures using this product code but sold less in Europe and the US due to the limited informtion and because of the cheaper plastic miniatures.   

My hunt for building a Swordsmen regiment
Today these metal Warriors were very rare and only appear from time to time on Ebay and the second hand market places. When I started to repaint my 4th Edition Dark Elves army I decieded to close the gaps in my collection. I saw the Dark Elf Swordsmen first in a polish market place, but had no chance to get these miniatures. However, after some time I found an Ebay auction from the US selling six of these guys. Two more Ebay auctions with 2 and 9 Swordsmen, both from Canada filled my ranks with 17 troopers. Finally, I added a command crew and my unit was completed with 20 Dark Elf Warriors in total.

Dark Elf Warrior - Swordmen regiment

I needed half a year to collect this regiment and in my experience, getting these miniatures only on the other side of the atlantic ocean confirmed that these Warriors were sold in Europe only in low numbers.


Painting the Swordsmen - A story of Try and Error
Painting the first Swordsmen was not easy. I wanted to continue with my purple/red colour scheme but had no idea how to distribute the colours on the miniature. With this question I started a journey on the long road of try and error. I know that most painters hide their failures and failed projects. Here you get an idea how it looks like when projects fail and how you learn by try and error.     
   

      
 
I wanted to paint the Warriors in red colours but I feared that painting all details in red makes them look like candy. As all my Dark Elfs of this army contain red and purple in different amounts, I had the idea to bring in more purple. Instead of focusing on one colour I balance both and painted them in equal amounts. It shows that, this does not work as purple and red were used here as saturated colours and therefore the eye does not find a focus. The result does not look harmonic and I knew that I had to change something. From the beginning the red colour was my favorite one. A second try followed in which I skipped the purple and replaced it by unsaturated blue in relation to the studio paint job. For the blue I took the same colour as I used for my bluish Cold Ones. The result looks better but also pale and finally not convincing. I wanted that these Dark Elf Warriors look more aggresively. I assumed that I had to paint the blue parts in red as well. But, this required to repaint the clothes for a third time adding a lot of paint to these parts. One guiding principle of my way of painting is that:

The miniature should look coloured, NOT painted!

This principle required a fine paint job with as less paint layers as possible. Now that I had already parts on this miniature which were repainted for one time makes it necessary to strip the paint of the miniature. Otherwise these parts would look smoother and with thicker colour as parts painted for one time only. Therefore, both miniatures went into the glass with acetone. I needed a new test miniature. I decided to paint the Champion, as he has less clothes which will allow to check how a miniature with red on most details will look like.

Painting the Dark Elf Warriors - Swordmen Champion
I used my already painted purple Dark Elf Champion as reference and swapped the purple to red tones and vice versa. I made one exception, the border of his chain mail which I painted also in red. The rest of the miniature is nearly identical with the other Champion. I added a nice freehand on his cloak for which I used a Dark Elf symbol of a star from the Dark Elves Armybook as reference. Finally, my redish colour scheme looked very good on this one and I get a lot of very positive feedback for this Champion. The result motivated me to transfer the colour scheme on the Warriors.

Painting the Warriors
I started by painting on many areas of both miniatures at the same time to get an idea if the coulour scheme works. My first impression was, that adding more red does not disturb the overall look. Then, I started to add more and more details, lights and shades. With that, I realized two problems on these miniatures. First, the swords get to much gold and second the Warrior with the feather on his helmet misses details to add some purple.

To avoid to much gold on the sword required to paint the triangle on the blade in a different colour. I saw two options, paint it also in red or in metal. Because I wanted to avoid to add more red, I choose the latter and repainted these areas in NMM silver. Consequently, the swords looked much more like the sword form the Champion what I liked very much.

The feather was the next difficult area to find a solution. I started to paint it also with a red ending and then decided to make a transition from black through purple to red. The result was really stunning and is one of the parts of these miniatures I like the most. I was really satisfied with the overall look of these two guys. But there was one thing left... the shields!

Finished Dark Elves Warriors - Swordsmen without shields

For the shields I wanted to show some kind of heraldy. As these Warriors will by the related to the General on Cold One I wanted them to carry a related symbol from him. Therefore, I wanted to add the dragon wings, but instead of a winged skull I wanted to add the winged gem. I had the option to give them black or red shields. Finally, I decieded to try the red ones, as this was much closer to the original one on the General. I started by painting the whole surface in red. The I painted the symbols completly free on the shields. Here I started with the golden gem socket which I put into the middle. Then I added the single fingers of the wings and finally the tail. Then I made the lines marking the skinny part of the wings. Here you can see the finished first sketch.

Freehand works on the shields - Initial sketch

To this sketch I added more and more details, light and shadows to seperate the symbol more and more from the background. Finally, I added a gold edge around the shield and add some scratches. Here I avoided to destroy to much of the symbol and placed them more in the periphery. In a last step I painted the backsides. I did not used glue to put the finished shields on the miniatures. Instead I used Patafix (some kind of Blu Tack). Here you can see the final result.

These two guys were a real challenge. They are wonderful miniatures full of details which makes it really hard to find a colour scheme allowing to show as much detail as possible. Even if it was a hard and long way I enjoyed painting these two miniatures. I like how the red work on the Champion and his two troopers and they share a really Roman look. What´s next?! Two finished means that there are only 15 left to complete the whole regiment. Additionally, I have to paint the standard bearer and the musician. But as the colour scheme is set now, it is only a matter of time to complete a first unit of 10 Warriors which will be extended step by step. I hope you like this guys and as well my research and this article. Let me know what you think and share your thoughts in the comment.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc