Eldar Pirates & Scratchbuilt Grav Tanks - Progress

Ok, progress has been made, 5 Pirates are painted up and the grav tanks are taking shape. Prep on the other Pirates is nearly done and 3 more are sat on my desk and undercoated.

Some piccies

Grav tank 1

 Grav tank 2

 Both grav tanks will count as Vypers for use in 2nd edition rules, one armed with twin shuriken catapults and a missile launcher and the other armed with a scatter laser and shuriken cannon. They came together fairly well despite some problems getting the plastic from the headphones to glue securely, just some detailing to add like gemstones.

Pirates

The Dire Avenger is one of the squad leaders, the model on the right is a monopose plastic with Dark Eldar Reaver headswap, I think it's turned out pretty well.

The colours are pretty washed out but as usual there's no sun. I'm really happy with the paint scheme, super simple and quick to do, it gives them a nice dark look. These are finished but for markings (which I haven't decided on yet) and some flock grass basing.

I have 2 Warp Spiders which I've arranged in a trade, they'll be my first Aspect Warriors in the army. Fluff-wise I think I'll have to count their weapons as web guns or a means of delivering a paralysing toxin allowing the Pirates to take slaves during raids. The only other Aspect I could see fitting is Swooping Hawks, the fast attack style seems to work with Eldar pirates though I'd have to swap out the wings for some sort of jetpack.

Progress might be slowed this week due to Chico's Chaos Challenge, depends on whether I can get any of my Chaos Space Marines finished enough to paint.

RT-style Eldar Pirates - WIP

So one of the projects I've been working on this week is a small force of Eldar Pirates (Corsairs if you're that way inclined). I picked up some RT Eldar cheap on eBay and from a trade on the Oldhammer Forum to add to the couple of random Eldar I already had.

I like projects like this as I can keep them limited which means a) I'm more likely to finish them and b) They're nice and cheap. Other than whats shown below I'm waiting on another 5 including a Harlequin who'll be the Pirate Captain, a Dire Avenger who'll be a squad leader and 3 basic eldar with various weapons. That'll be the full army for now, though I'd like to add a scratchbuilt grav-scouter at some point. I'd been drawing a blank for what would work as a base until I saw Area23's great idea of using a mouse, genius! Just need to find an old one now...

Models
As usual I have to apologise for the terrible photos, this is England and the sun only ever seems to shine when I'm at work.

First is one of the horrible monopose Eldar guardians which I used as a test model. I cut the head off first and repositioned it, instantly making it look 1000x better. What the fuck GW are thinking when they make the staring straight forward poses I've no idea, a slight head turn makes the whole think look more natural. I've another of these which I'm going to do a headswap on using a Dark Eldar reaver head, should look pretty good I think.

 

A quick photo of my first scheme test model. I want something simple and quick so chose a dark purple for the bodies (a few layers of light drybrushing + a wash) and went for an ivory on the helmet and weapon. The ivory was a pain in the arse and I decided before I'd even finished I didn't like the flat solid effect of the ivory next to the purple/black. I'm going to try dark green next and use a similar style of painting to tie it together better.

So far the scheme for the armour is:

Black undercoat

Drybrush Liche Purple (one of my favourite paints) & black (1:1)

Drybrush Liche Purple

Light drybrush Liche Purple & white (3:1)

Very light drybrush Liche Purple & white (2:1)

Purple wash

I'm going to try Scaly Green (another of my favourite paints) for the weapons and helmet, orange for gems and eyes and maybe a light blue for hair and accessories.

 Random pirates ready for paint. I'm not sure what the middle one is supposed to be armed with, its pretty chunky.

 Heavy weapon crew.

 Heavy weapon thrown together from a couple of reaver jetbike parts and an eldar lascannony thing, still to be glued and based. I'm really happy with how it looks considering it's made from my tiny pile of Eldar bits.The older RT Eldar are much darker looking than the modern ones and as these are pirate a few bits of Dark Eldar style stuff should fit in ok.

 The Eldar champion (left) was missing it's left hand so I've bluetacked this weird claw thing I found in my bitsbox. I've no idea where it's come from, weirdly it looks like a fantasy power claw with bits of rope between the fingers but it fits pretty well and should blend in nicely once affixed properly. The right mini is an Eldar musician. I haven't found any special rules regarding musicians other than they can be added to guardian squads in the RT Eldar book. They seem to just be unit padding with no special effects from what I can tell. I'm going to treat him as a low level psyker who uses music to focus his powers, almost like a Noise Marine.

Rules

I don't really play any 40k at the minute, though I'm hoping to change that at some point. I'm going to build these with 2nd Edition in mind as anything can be adapted for RT without issue and I've no plans on playing any of the more modern versions (I'd need a lot more models for a start). The list will essentially be:

Pirate Hero + 4 Pirates (close combat equipped)
Pirate Champion + 5 Pirates (lasguns and shuriken catapults)
Support weapon & crew
Grav-scouter (using Vyper rules maybe)

Should easily be under 500pts from the 2nd Ed codex (atleast looking at the Battle Bible)

Assuming I don't get distracted (I've got 3 other projects ticking over on my desk) I'll hopefully have these painted up and finished within the next couple of weeks, more photos then!


EDIT: I couldn't resist looking for a mouse in my junk pile. I didn't find one but I found an old pair of headphone where one of the earpieces had stopped working...

Tank 1

Tank 2

 I kind of like them, but I'm not sure the general shape is Eldary enough.