Ulthuan

I'd always wanted to do a High Elf army since I started WHFB in 6th ed, but the basic spearmen and archers were so absolutely terrible that I couldn't. I picked up some of the wonderful Isle of Blood models, but very strongly disliked the huge blocks of basic infantry that ruled 8th edition. Recently, Mantic Games released their Kings of War:Vanguard game, which gave me the excuse to paint up a Wood Elf warband from mixed GW and Runewars Latari figures. While waiting for the rest of the group to finish their warbands, I kept eyeballing some Eternal Guard I'd primed green years ago and always thought would make excellent High Elf Spearmen, so I painted one up in blue and silver and white and it snowballed into a whole army. Not just a Vanguard warband, it is that at the moment, but in the process it turned into the High Elf army I've wanted for 20 years. I plan to build and ideally paint it into a 7th ed army with the option of using the figs for Kings of War if I ever meet any other players. My old gaming buddy lives a couple hours drive and has his old dwarves, and that was the flimsiest excuse I needed to drop hundreds of dollars on hundreds of plastic toys I'd most likely never field

I've played one game of Vanguard with them now (GREAT game, very Mordheim inspired!) and also have a unit of slightly converted archers built, a chariot painted that just needs basing, and a unit of Dragon Princes half assembled. Beyond that, all unbuilt and on sprue I have 3 complete sets of Isle of Blood, 20 additional Seaguard, a Lion Chariot, a dragon mage, a few mounted and dismounted mages and princes, a unit of Silver Helms, 2 eagles, plus my old isle of blood set and 2 bolt throwers, and a unit of shadow warriors on order. Originally I was going to use Eternal Guard as Spearmen, but will instead likely use converted DE Dreadspears as the newer plastics look very high-elven if you give them sea guard spears, remove the shield emblems and leave the helmet crests off. I've got some coming in that I'll give it a try on and if it doesn't work, I'll just go with the original plan of Eternal Guard

First up is the completed Vanguard Warband. Phone images look a little posterized, not sure if it's my phone settings or just how these colors appear with a slight blur



The warjack is my counts-as treeman, it makes more sense to me that High Elves would use an arcane construct than an ent, that would be uncivilised


The guys that started it all. In the full army they will get shields, in Vanguard they act as my citizen levies




Inaugural run of the warband in Vanguard, they lost, but they looked oh-so-pretty doing it


Hopefully more images to come, there need to break away to finish an Infinity army for a tournament in a couple weeks, and I've been sidelined by Vanguard terrain and objectives in the meantime

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http://s1153.photobucket.com/albums/p512/Rhelyk/

Welcome Rhelyk and thanks for sharing. It's great to read how the hobby virus can grab hold of you.

It is a great looking warband and start of an army you have there. The blue and silver is a very nice color scheme. I really like the eternal guard as spearmen. Never thought of doing that. I might just steal the idea if I ever need more spearmen The arcane construct as ent is a great and very fluffy addition. We can't be having all that nature stuff just walking around in an army after all.

I hadn't heard about Vanguard before. I'm definitely going to check it out. I enjoy Morheim, even though the rules sometimes feel a bit unbalanced or dated. And the options for models is a bit limited. So a newer game might be fun to look into.

Commiserations on the loss. But this is what being High Elf is all about. Fighting for the greater (elf) good and looking pretty while doing it.

The terrain you have looks great as well. Nice start of a lovely village. Are the houses scratch build?

Of course, feel free to share any other hobby photo's and projects here as well. I love seeing different miniature projects unfold and have a personal soft spot for terrain projects.

One thing about the dragon mage. You have enough bits in the kit to build both a mage and a prince. So if you don't glue the mage on to the dragon then you can swap between a dragon mage and a prince on dragon. The rider sits on tight enough to stay in place for the battle without issue.

Rod

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For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

Check my writing blog for stories on the Prince of Spires and other pieces of fiction.

Really nice looking warband you have there! I've been thinking about starting Vanguard to go along with KoW, but for now I am fully in the grips of mass unit battles. The EG look really nice, definitely better than the stock standard GW high elf spears, looking forwards to this expanding to a full army!

Also, I agree that the construct is a nice idea. I'm trying to get some old Cynwall Nova Constructs to count as shamblers, it makes absolute sense that Elves would have magical constructs fighting for them!

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Prince Deral Lionbane, head of the House of Lionbane, Lord of Lionstone and Warden of Tor Charta

Luna, try not to beat them too hard. They are proud about their pseudo-glorious past and their present nothingness, you know.
-Elmoth, about Caledorians

Thanks guys! Terrain isn't mine, belongs to a shop I recently started going to while my normal FLGS is down for remodeling. Upper-right building looks scratch built but the bottom left house is resin and the right house and stone walls I recognize as Pegasus Hobbies prepainted terrain, also a couple GW walls and base of a tower as well. I'd like to get some of my own terrain done, but that'll wait until after the objectives are done, which needs to wait for Infinity to get done. I have WAY too much on my hobby docket #firstworldproblems

Vanguard itself is excellent and the game I pictured got a few of the regulars thinking about doing warbands. We played quite a bit of Mordheim back in the day and Vanguard is very much a spiritual successor. You can download the full rules from the Mantic website under their "free rules" subsection, and the full warbands lists as well, they have a total of 14 factions including analogs for all of the GW armies. The only thing not included in the free rules that you get in the hardbound rulebook is the campaign system and a lot more scenarios

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http://s1153.photobucket.com/albums/p512/Rhelyk/

Really crisp looking paint job, especially the white robes. The eternal guard look great with the right paint scheme, seem to fit in no problem. I was looking to do something similar somewhere down the line if I ever felt the urge to buy some new models, but it remains to be seen.

My only slight criticism is the construct. I love the idea behind it, makes total sense to have a waystone magical being kicking bum for the asur, but I think the paint job is missing something. It needs just a little more contrast or maybe some converting to the original model perhaps to make it fit the others in the warband, currently to my eyes it just looks rather jarring. Mind that could just be it being from a different model range.
Anyway, that's just my personal preference and the warband looks great, can't wait to see more!

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One foot in the hobby

Glad to see another general still mustering his army

I dare say blue-white Asrai look rather splendid. I get that HE classic spearmen kit looks ugly with all the square hands and clumsy postures, yet I find going out without sleeves just too uncivilized.

Jokes aside, I'm looking forward to read more for your exploits and see how that new army of yours will develop.

Olthannon - you are absolutely correct about the warjack/construct being too bland, but the Retribution warjack designs really resist any easy painting techniques. They have such large, round, featureless areas that it would take me much more effort to paint in detail than I'm willing to do to that figure. If he sees a lot of play I may go back and add...something... to it just to make it pop a bit, but it's going to stay with a mediocre paintjob until it proves itself otherwise worth it.

Lynve - funny you should mention the sleeves...

Didn't get much done on the elves this weekend, still finishing my Invincible Army for Infinity, but I did pick up some of the newer Dark Elf Dreadspears and did up the first of the regular spearmen. Model doesn't actually show the fair bit of work it took to get it to this level, something that's annoying and gratifying since it's SUPPOSED to look like a bog-standard infantryman. Shaved the emblem off the shield, filled the void in his helmet where the crest normally glues into, shaved some of the jagged edges down on the pauldrons into smoother edges, filled the chainmail undershirt on the shield arm, replaced the spear arm with a Lothern Sea Guard arm and spear and shaved off the rivets on the bottom hem of armor. The golden jewel on his helmet crest isn't supposed to be there at all, unfortunately the plastic putty I used to fill in his helmet had a void in it that expanded when I hit it with a hairdryer to dry the washes, but the bubble was so perfectly formed I just painted it gold and hit it with some black lining. Plan is to do 4 more to be the regular Kindred Talspears for Vanguard, not sure if I want to use the Dreadspear conversions or the Eternal Guard for my basic Spearmen units when I do the full army. The EG are much easier to build, but the Dreadspears are much easier to paint. I gots some thinking to do...

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http://s1153.photobucket.com/albums/p512/Rhelyk/

He looks great. You can't tell he started life as a DE spearman. I can imagine that the prospect of doing the modifications for a whole unit of 20-30 is a bit daunting. Start with 4 and take it from there I'd say.

Rod

_________________
For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

Check my writing blog for stories on the Prince of Spires and other pieces of fiction.

You could run a wash or a glaze over parts of the jack, that alone would make it pop a little

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Prince Deral Lionbane, head of the House of Lionbane, Lord of Lionstone and Warden of Tor Charta

Luna, try not to beat them too hard. They are proud about their pseudo-glorious past and their present nothingness, you know.
-Elmoth, about Caledorians

Welcome Rhelyk!



I really like them, especially the Champion. Regarding the construct, I can see it but I always felt Elementals would have worked well with High Elves. As for Dreadspear models, Botjer did some nice work:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=70764


The mark of a good conversion.

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A New Blog (Orcs and Goblins)
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Cavalry Prince Reloaded
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Now i want to change my spearmen, damn you
Using the body from DE spearmen and spear and head from lothern seaguard... i think you could create awesome models.

Amazing job on the spearmen. Even if he's just a core trooper, combine the lot of tchem and boom! you have an original looking unit much to envy of your oponent. I find the free-hand on the shield to be very solid looking. How many layers of white did you use to get a solid color?



I second that. It's a simple step, yet the effects add a lot of depth to models while they don't take a lot of time to do properly.

Totally get that, well whatever you do with it I'm sure it'll look great.

If you don't mind me asking, what model is that which is the bareheaded swordsman with the Tiranoc shield?

Edit: Also forgot to say, I love that DE spearman with the new colours, looks great. Such a nice model and it'll look great ranked up.

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One foot in the hobby

Unless I'm very much mistaken, it's the GW plastic prince and noble kit. Lots of nice pieces in there.

Rod

_________________
For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

Check my writing blog for stories on the Prince of Spires and other pieces of fiction.

Rather foolishly perhaps, I'd been taking that kit based on the pictures on the GW store and assumed there wasn't much too it. Might pick that up at some point

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One foot in the hobby

The basic design of characters presented on the box can be quite misleading. It does give you some nice bits to utilize in your army. You can even cast some of the pieces to add some character to a whole unit. For example, I'm aiming to make casts of a fish-fin pauldron in order to emphasize the sea-theme of the army.

yup, just the base Noble kit. I've got the horse and rider built and ready for primer too, you get a LOT of pieces that they don't show in the pics. Same for the Mage kit, you get a lot of optional weapons and staves and arms to really build them up in multiple ways that aren't shown, great sets

4 More "dark" elf spearmen converted up, ready for primer once the weather cooperates. The freehanded rune on the first one looks OK, but I really don't want to do it for a whole unit or 2, so I've got some various nail-art decals on order, flowers and butterflies and birds and dragons, I'll need to compare them once they actually arrive and see what looks right.

As for the warjack, you guys will just have to take it on my word that I'm a better painter than photogragher and it looks OK in person, it's just really bland compared to the Elves next to it. Pictures are a bit overexposed and with a white background and I went much heavier on highlights and shadows for the High Elf models than the warjack. There is some shading I did with the airbrush and it does have an enamel wash in the recesses to separate the armor plates but the model just doesn't lend itself to the real deep darks that I used on the elves. The armor plates are just too large and too round and not broken up enough to use the same Armypainter Dark Tone wash, it gives this awful pooling effect on large plates that looks horrid, so I had to go a bit subtler with it. Maybe I'll take some pics of just the warjack on a different background when I get home tonight

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http://s1153.photobucket.com/albums/p512/Rhelyk/

I think perhaps because on the store its down as "dragon noble" so didn't want to buy it for just that model but if there's loads of customisation I definitely will try and find it on the cheap.

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One foot in the hobby

It's certainly worth picking up, I got it unboxed but still on sprue for $20 USD, it makes both a mounted and a foot model and I still have parts to convert a BSB out of a Sea Guard. Same for the mage kit, I picked it up from the same ebay seller and made the mistake of cutting the feet off the floating rocks to base him standing on the ground, only to realize a minute later that there's a separate piece for just regular feet and I didn't need to cut anything at all :/

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I've been trying to hunt it down but can only really see it on the GW website for 18 quid (23-24 dollars?) which is a tad excessive but I'll keep looking on wayland games etc to see who else might have it in stock.

Sorry to derail your thread!

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One foot in the hobby

Probably a "GW web exclusive" item. You should be able to have another shop (online or not) order it, the Dreadspears are GW web exclusives, but I was able to order them from an online store I've used in the past for 20% off and they had GW ship em directly to me. The store you choose just needs to have a GW mail order account (most stores do if they carry GW) and you might need to hit a minimum order or else pay for shipping

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Considering the fact that you get two complete characters out of the set plus a whole bunch of extra bits and pieces it's actually one of the cheaper GW hero kits. Though it does pay to watch ebay for a good deal. The kit itself contains body parts two make two hero figures. The customization options allow you to make pretty much all weapon options available to lords and heros (in bows, swords, lances, axes and so on) in the book. This means that if you can dig up some legs and torso bits then the other parts will let you make a lot of other hero models as well. And, if you play around with some insta mold and green stuff then you can easily cast those yourself.

Rod

_________________
For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

Check my writing blog for stories on the Prince of Spires and other pieces of fiction.

Been a couple weeks but I've not been completely idle. Infinity Imperial Army models got painted and I got 2nd place in the ITS tournament with them, pretty happy w/ that performance.Was supposed to go back to painting elves, but had some things pop up that made that difficult. Made a total of 5 High Elf Spearmen from the dreadspears (pictures below), the other 4 I also cut down the helmets to look more like a High Elf face opening, left side of the openings (as you look, model's right side) came out great but the right side (model's left0 are slightly dodgy. They still solve my biggest problem with the original Delf->Helf spearmen: the faceplate.

Even with the slight unevenness they still look much closer to High Elves than the original and weren't all that much more work. I used some floral decals for the shields, but there just isn't enough contrast, might add a symbol on top or at the very least outline the decals to make them pop. Happy with how they're turning out, I picked up 3 more boxes of Dreadspears and a box of Shadow Warriors, he's going to replace the wood elf as my gladestalker. I also repainted the Lothern shields white, just to differentiate them a bit more and make them closer to traditional paint schemes. Vanguard army is now more than complete, but full Kow/9th Age/7th Ed is just beginning

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I have to say, the dreadspears work way better as spearelves than anything else I've seen. Still think the models are far too heavily armored though, as they're only supposed to have light armor (compare with Archers or Empire State Troops. Or White Lions, who are supposed to have heavy armor!)

Really nice work though, looking forwards to seeing the whole unit

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Prince Deral Lionbane, head of the House of Lionbane, Lord of Lionstone and Warden of Tor Charta

Luna, try not to beat them too hard. They are proud about their pseudo-glorious past and their present nothingness, you know.
-Elmoth, about Caledorians

Yeah but thats a problem with GWs design itself, where they kept giving spearmen heavy armour in the models as the 4-5th edition rules but moved to a lightly armoured army later on.

Nice combination of DE spears and seaguard pieces indeed. Not sure if its been mentioned but that pattern on the shields is great. Are those the original DE spearmen shields? Umm one second.. Those are decals? They look nice anyway.

EDIT: ah i see helmets are from shadow warriors, arent they? i confused the seaguard on the back with more spearmen.

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The seaguard in the back are the same seaguard, I just repainted the shields white (they were blue before) to really differentiate them even more from the Spearmen.

The helmets are the actual dreadspear helmets with the forehead hole filled in w/ putty. With the newest ones, I carved the faceguard opening into a more traditional high-elf opening, just takes a couple vertical cuts with a sharp hobby knife where the "cheekbone" would be and some careful trimming to get it close to the face and chin. Luckily the wash covers much of the irregularities left in the face. The Spearman with the gold jewel on his crown is the original I posted a few days ago and he still has the original triangular faceguard opening of the Dreadspear helmets. With just these few cuts, the dark elf helmets look VERY much like high elf helmets

The shields are the dreadspear shields with the skull icon shaved away. The floral design is a decal meant for fingernail art, there are THOUSANDS of designs for very cheap on ebay and they're perfectly sized for shields. The one I used is a bright silver floral design, but I'm not 100% happy with it yet. It doesn't have enough contrast against the blue shield to really pop out, I may do another smaller decal on top of it or I may try to outline the floral designs w/ black ink

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http://s1153.photobucket.com/albums/p512/Rhelyk/

The conversions work very well. They're great looking HE warriors now. I like their expressions as well. They all share an angry grin which should make any opponent charging them think twice

I think the issue (for me) with the shields and decals is indeed the lack of contrast. Both between the shield and the decal. But perhaps also between the shield and the rest of the model. Somehow, the combination of light blue trim, light blue shield and decal blends together a bit too much.

Rod

_________________
For Nagarythe: Come to the dark side.
PS: Bring cookies!

Check out my plog
Painting progress, done/in progress/in box: 167/33/91

Check my writing blog for stories on the Prince of Spires and other pieces of fiction.

I really like those dreadspear conversions. I think the models would look great in an army from Nagarythe or one of the coastal realms because of their more marine feel in the armour design.

I find it really amusing you used nail decals for the shields because the look terrific! Might have to try that little tip as well

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One foot in the hobby

Work progresses on the project. Got the Swordmasters finished up, did them as a unit of 20 with an extra command so they can pslit into 2 units of 12 if I want to. Painting the first rank was fun, but decided to batch paint the next 3 ranks all at once which only took a couple afternoons, but was utterly mind numbing to do the same figure over and over and over again. Glad to have them finished up and out of the way





WIP of the chariot, needs some details and basing. Going ot paint up an Eternal Guardsman as the second crewman





and a few more units assembled and primed. A unit of 10 archers ready for paint. Always hated these figures, but using Eternal Guard heads solved the most egregious problem with them



Unit of Dragon Princes with the Noble is also ready for paint, hopefully get to them sometime this week



And the other 9 Shadow Warriors and another mage assembled and primed.



Need to convert the rest of the spearmen up and find the 2 Bolt Throwers I have hiding in my closet somewhere. 4 more Ellyrian Reavers were assembled earlier tonight, they'll get primed once the weather permits. No real timeframe for army completion, but also no deadline, so just slow and steady progress

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Another upload and what a satisfying one! The Swordmasters look astonishing as a unit but also each and every one of them is well done.
Will you be replacing that cut-off blades on top of the banners? They look fine as they are atm, don't get me wrong.


Congrats on not losing your sanity. Still it could have been worse. You could have been a Skaven/O&G player