Super Secret Project: Announced

The Super Secret Project was to assemble and paint a box of Eldar Guardians for Willbo's birthday!

Willbo used to play 40k years ago, but sold his Eldar army. Recently we had a long, drunken conversation about exactly what army he would build if he got back into it, and why that was unlikely. The main problem being that while he enjoyed the game, he didn't really like the whole building and painting part. So the joke was that I could build his army for him. He even told me that he wanted the Ulthwe craftworld.

When I was ordering my big pile of stuff from Maelstrom Games, it occurred to me that Willbo's birthday was just around the corner. So I decided to start his army for him!

10 Ulthwe Guardians with a heavy weapons platform. I went to the trouble of magnetising the guns on the heavy weapons platform so they can be easily swapped around. I also had to alter the hands of two of the guardians after I got the various gun arms muddled up and ended up with two guardians who couldn't hold their weapons.

Ulthwe are primarily black with bone (or yellow), so I just primed them all with black gesso. I wanted to keep the scheme fairly simple so it would be easy to replicate if the army ever got expanded, but I also wanted to make the armour different from the bodysuits. So I hit all the armour with a few layers of increasingly lighter grey, finished off with some light grey highlights. In the end it was a lot of work for not much gain, so next time I'll simplify that step.

The bone areas were just a couple of quick coats of Skull White to get a rough coverage, and then hit with a Griffon Sepia wash. It was the first time I'd used Griffon Sepia, and the results were fantastic.

I hit the rest of the model with a light wash of Badab Black, which toned down the contrast between the grey highlights a little (which was good). Where I had the occasional piece of cloth, the black wash really helped to make them look like cloth. I was very happy with that.

I went with a selection of colours for the soulstones and ended up getting the hang of it. I was pretty pleased with about 50%-75% of what I painted, including the large ones on the weapons platform.

This was the first time I'd done any basing. I just flocked the bases with some of Gale Force 9's Meadow Blend. I decided not to paint the base before I flocked it, partly because I was running out of time, and partly because I liked the black under the base - it makes the guardians look like they're running around at night.

I used a couple of transfers, but the two I used on the guardians didn't really look very good. I was happy with the one on the weapons platform though.

I would have liked to do some more detailed work on the different guns and do some touch ups on the Guardians, but they were in the mail a day late as it was. And since "better" is the enemy of "done", I decided they were good enough!