Unreleased Dark Riders - Part I

Unreleased Dark Riders - Part I

Today I want to show something very special which has been rarely seen. A full regiment of unreleased Dark Riders from the 4th Edition. These miniatures belong to some of the most rare ones from this Dark Elves range. But, somehow some of them sneaked on my workbench to complete my collection. For more than 1.5 years I have worked secretly on this regiment beside all my other Dark Elves stuff. As I have rarely seen these miniatures painted and never much more than the two trooper miniatures I wanted to be the first showing a whole regiment with full command. There is a lot to tell you about these miniatures, their history and painting them. Therefore, I will split their story in two articles dealing with the troopers in part I and the command crew in part II.

 

 

The Miniatures 

Dark Riders as shown in the 4th Edition Dark Elves Armybook

The unreleased Dark Riders are miniatures well known to every Dark Elf player of the 4th/5th Edition. Despite they were never released these miniatures were shown in the Eavy Metal section of the Dark Elves Armybook. They were shown there as single miniatures as well as in a group shot together with a Cold One Knight and the plastic Talisman Sorceress. And if this wasn´t enough, the latter picture was reused in the Beastiary of the 5th Edition released in October 1996 and was shown there on the back of the cover page. The Dark Elf players had to wait until 1998 for their Dark Riders but in form of alternative miniatures designed by Gary Morley and released as part of the Tears of Isha campaign. The unreleased versions never saw the light of the day.   

Dark Riders supporting a Dark Elf Sorceress in their fight against Chaos

The history of the unreleased Dark Riders
Two Dark Rider trooper miniatures were designed by Aly Morrison. I always thought both were prototypes designed very early in the 90, but propably I was wrong. I learned from Iain Aitken who owns some with their tabs that they are dated 1995.    

              Untreated Dark Rider miniatures, some with their tabs dating them 1995, kindly provided by Iain Aitken

Aly remembers that he designed them in 90s. They were casted, painted and pictured for their release with the miniature range but finally that never happend. For years we learned from the Collecting Cital Miniature Wiki: 

Rumour has it that they were dropped from the line because the torso on the rider figure is too short (although this is a commonplace failing of 4th edition GW cavalry models across the board).

Having the miniatures in my hands I can confirm that the torso is a bit short. From design side the miniatures look like a dark version of Alys Elyrion Reavers designed from him a couple of years earlier. 

They were also designed to fit on the same type of plastic horse from 1991. But, that generic horse was replaced by the Elven Horse designed by Trish Carden in 1995. I learned from a GW employee:

For the Dark Riders I think the issue was that the plastic horses were being changed and the riders didn't fit the new horses. But it was less expensive to sculpt and mold metal models than to remake the plastic tools. 

That makes sense, as the Elven Horse saw the light of the day with the Wood Elves release in May 1996. It was also used as basis for the later Dark Riders designed by Gary Morley in 1998. But I was also told that there there were problems with molds and castings of the Dark Riders. This was confirmed also by Aly. The miniatures pop up rarely on ebay and I know only a couple of collectors owning them. One set I was able to trace back as test castings which were  sold back in the days by the Mail Order when placing an order and when asking for something new. The fact that these miniatures are very very rare makes it more likely that casting problems were a key problem. Taken together, its is very likely that a combination of casting problems and the change of the plastic horse required a extensive revision of the miniatures and therefore they were hold back and were finally never released.

Collecting my own regiment of Dark Riders

I searched with more or less intensity for these miniatures for more than two decades. In December 2018 I spoted a set on Ebay sold in the US and after a sleepless night of bidding they became my own. Luckily, they weren´t that expensive as thought at the beginning. But because of the Ebay global shipping program and the fact that it does not allow combined shipping ended in shipping costs as high as the price for the riders. After a lot of asking around and negotiations I was able to use a US contact from a friend to receive the riders on national shipping costs. The contact fowarded them first to my friend and then further to me. After an odysee of shipping the riders finally arrived and I held them in my lucky hands in January 2019. The same year the same trader sold a second set. Suspicious, but the casting quality was good and even if these were recasts, they were good ones and the best I was able to get after all these years of searching.

The preparation
Having a couple of Dark Rider miniatures in my hands I started putting them together in a regiment. My plan was to rebuild the Elyrion Reaver regiment shown above consisting of a command crew and four troopers. I started with preparing six plastic horses I had left in my collection. Then I created the whole basing scene. My idea was to show a broken high elves obelisk which spans diagonal across all bases. For the realization I used several gypsum parts which I casted using molds I made from plastic bitz.  

 

Preparation of plastic horses and their bases

For the four troopers I wanted to show every possible combination of the two leg and two torso parts. For that I started with the combination the Eavy Metal team used in 1995. The alternative version was used by the miniatures shown on the CCM wiki. I realized quickly that when reproducing the Eavy Metal build that I had problems placing the riders on the horses. This was less a problem when you change the horse type. Aly assured me that the riders were sculpted on top of these horses. But it looks like the horsebacks are slightly different so that the riders do not fit properly when the horse was changed. If you take a close look on the Eavy Metal ones you can spot this problem in a gap between rider and horse. I decided to remove patially the plastic saddle to make the riders fit on their horses without a gap. But then the torso does not fit any longer because the cloak hits the horseback and makes a gap between leg part and torso. 

 

 

Trying to make the riders fit on their horses results in a gap between the rider parts

It hurts me to make changes to these valuable miniatures but there was need for some Greenstuff to fix the problem. I decided to fill the gap and to extend the body a bit. This solved the problem with the gap and also I enlarged the miniature to a size comparable to the other mounted Dark Elves of the range. In a first step I added some putty to create the right space between the parts. The putty was then cut back and the cloth with drapery was sculpted above. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the finished conversions.

 

Dark Riders with (left) and without (right) gap filling between torso and legs

 

However, the procedure was approved by Aly and with his blessing I continued the project this way.
 

Painting of the Dark Riders

The problem of Dark Riders is that they are predominantly dark guys riding black horses. That means painting them is a story about fifty shades of black. In contrast to the Eavy Metal version I decided for a black and purple colour scheme to make them appear even much more darker. The painting of the amazing miniatures itself was not that excited. I painted them in their single parts to reach all areas of the miniatures. I always started to paint the faces and skin parts. Then, the more boring black and purple part started. At least when I had finished the inside of the cloak and the clothes and saddle of the leg part I glued both parts together and continued the work on one miniatures. Painting some red gems, golden skulls and the weapons were some highly appreciated alternations to all the blacks and purples. Here you can see each Trooper in different work in progress stages but in chonological order.

 

I painted the riders first, the horses second and finally the base. The horses were the most terrible and most boring part. First I had to say that I dislike painting horses very much. A horse, thats four legs, inside parts of legs and a lot of areas which are difficult to handle when using my blending technique.... and then there is also this much hair of mane and tail which needs correct light reflections! Taken together,  that´s the reason I had not painted any cavalery since ages. Doing all this in black explains why I need more than a year to finish this unit and why a lot of other things were painted during this time. However, one evening in the first week of 2020 I did my last brush stroke on the last of the the four Troopers and glued this last rider on the back of his horse. It was an amazing moment to see these four rareties finished in front of me. But there was still the command crew missing which would make this regiment much more exciting.

Probably you have already calculated that I needed another 10 months until this Dark Rider regiment was finished. Well, I took a break after all this black... No not really from the black but from the riders. I went straight forward in January and painted a Sorceress riding a Black Pegasus which was a very similar colour scheme.Then several other limited and rare beauties went over my workbench and if you followed this blog you already have seen my latest outputs. But, from time to time I returned to the work on this regiment until I concentrated on finishing their command crew this fall. But, that´s a different story and if you have enjoyed my teaser picture at the beginning of this article you will keep an eye open for the next part of this series.

I hopy you enjoyed the Dark Rider story so far. Please let me know what you think and write your thoughts in the comments.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc