Dark Eldar Venom Reversed Engineered.....

Ok so going on the picture of the Home grown venom that I found,

I decided to reverse engineer it and make my own, now I've tried to find how the original chap is so that he can get the glory for the initial conversion but to no avail? So if you do find him lurking somewhere on the net let me know ;)

What you'll need:

1 Viper kit
1 Raider Kit

So I decided to start off with the rear of the model first I clipped off the side panels and marked out where I was going to cut them

So after a bit of chopping and what not I stuck the rear part togeather...

And decided to start work on the engine block, again I marked where I was going to cut

I then grabbed the first part of the viper I was going to work on, again marking where the cut was going to go

And after a bit of a dry fit it looked like the following, Now I've removed the runes as I figured that the dark eldar wouldn't really have them all over there transports its more of a eldar thing, but looking at the picture I did miss some!

a differant angle of the above

And a quick dryfit of the actual viper or whats left of it..

And with the meduim of blue-tac what its roughly going to look like..

Now I didn;t really want shuriken catapults on the model due to the fluff factor and I like little details like that as they give the model the "pop" factor, so again the place where the cuts are going to take place, i.e. a slither of plastic to be used as a filler for the underneath of the viper weapons area.

So this is where I'd gotten to so far.. (I decided to change the pilot later on rather than using the basic eldar guy)

close up of the engine block stuck to the rear of the model, I'd stuck some addational engine bits from the other floor part that I hadn't used as a filler so that the gap wasn't too much

and after ripping the upper torso and arms off the orginal guy I cut one of the crew at the waist and used the drivers arms and clipped the "handle bars" away from the control panel

After a bit more dry fitting I put some more engine parts to hide the gap and these would be visable if you looked at it straight on, kinda giving the impression of air inlet ports?

So I decided to take the plunge and stick it all togeather, by this point I'd clocked up about 2/3 hours worth of conversion time but most of that was sussing out how the other chap had done his and most of the time was spent on the engine detail

a differant angle from above, I'd also started sticking the first of the spikey bits on

and a shot showing the underneath,  now I used the new style flying base housing from the raider kit and used the gun shield to bulk up the main viper bit that joined the engine block, I then had to go into work which helped as I wanted the basic model to be nice and dry when I worked on the next parts

Ok so after a hardcore shift at work I decided to crack on with the rest of the venom, but I forgot to take pictures as I was going along (I was way too excited about getting it finished!)

so all thats changed on this picture is...

I've used the rudders from the raider kit to give it a bit more of a "dark eldar" feel.
put some spikey bits round the rear and along the front of the viper canopy.

Converted some splinter cannons from the heavy weapons and stuck normal rifle bits on the front, these are differant lengths but still look cool.

Put some chain bits on the side of the gunshield.

A couple of more blade's on on the rear so that it extends the point of the rear blades but decided to leave a gap, so that it kinda fits in with the theme from the bikes. and an addational pair of blades on top of the viper wings and where the raider bit meets bit the angle of the pictures you carn't really make them out?

and thats it one venom!

not overly complicated, but looking at this model I'd reduce the spacers between the engine block and the rear of the viper, also make the rudder blade a bit further apart rather than nearly touching at the front.

But I'll sort out those bits on the second one that I'm planning on doing, now one thing that I did notice when looking at the codex on the throne (as well all do don't deny it!) is that the venom can take two splinter cannons thats a whopping 12 shots hitting on 3's and always wounding on 4's very nice me thinks!

Anyhow, what do you think? what would you change? or is that plently enough conversion wise??

More Dark Eldar....

well its been a productive week to say the least!

I've managed to get the 2nd warrior squad done as well as the wyches,

so the second squad is armed the same as the first lot aka, blaster & cannon, this time the squad leader is armed with the agonizer whip rather than the power weapon for a bit of a change, I've painted them in the same technique as the previous unit but managed to get them done a little quicker now as I know what I'm doing with them, 

now with the wyches I wasn't too sure how to do them as they wear half armour, half kinky pvc...

so thats 2 10 man warrior squads and a 10 man/woman wyche squad, only the transports to sort out and a blantiant rip off of...

home grown venom

a superb conversion and really got me juices flowing so I picked up a raider and a viper to hack to bits, and just for good measure a squad of incubi to occupy it!

but before I sign off I'm gonna vent my anger....

I wanted to get hold of...

Please wait

Image not available

so rather than doing the smart thing and pre-ordering via the website I figured that I'd pick one up on Monday from my local shop but this wasn't to be as some gypsy thieving bastard decided to clear out the shop of all of the webway portals and if you have a gander on ebay at the moment they are going for the best part of £20!! frigging money grabbing dicks. Well I'll just make my own! ;)

anyway comments etc welcome as always,

Cheers Ant.

Dark Eldar Warrior Squad & some friends....

So after the test model I figured I'd better crack on with the actual army...

So this is the first unit of my Dark Eldar I also managed to make it onto the from of the Heresy forums with the step by step guide which I was quite chuffed with and been asked to do more step by step's which I'll be doing for Spencers next "Challange Ant"

Anyway onto the pictures... 

I've done the crystal chambers in a jade colour to break up the gun and to pratice painting that colour as Spencer has given me a really cool idea that I might just have to steal ;)

Unit leader with power weapon or agoniser depending how flush I'm feeling, I really like the sculpt of the head as it reminds me of a dire avenger

So the "friends" I finially got round to finishing the extra members of the noise marines to take them up to the fluffy 6 man squad and Lucius never tried him on the tabletop but always liked the model. 

So all I've got a little bit left for the chaos so shouldn't be long before it's finally finished off, I'll have to sit down and work out the points at some point but I must be approaching 4ish thousand!

Anyway time to crank out another unit of warriors... ;)

Dark Eldar Warrior Test model

Well it was going to happen as soon as I could get my grubby little hands on them!

So after sticking togeather all the bits and bobs that I've managed to get I decided to get a test model painted up, now I used to collect Dark Eldar a long long time ago and these where a nice dark purple, the Incubi I painted in a dark red and I remembered how cool they looked at the time, so I decided to follow the old school path and go really dark red,

Step 1

Spray black & when dry scab red as the first coat, now the trick with this point is don't worry about being too neat and getting the paint into all the creases and folds of the model (you'll see why later)

Step 2

Red gore over the armour nice harsh highlights on this bit...

Step 3

Blood red edging highlight I keep mine a little watery so that I could semi-blend

Step 4

Ink the armour with Badab Black, and once thats dry I started on the detail, Brassy Brass for the Brassy bits and chaos black and boltgun for the first coat of the normal metallics

Step 5

Highlight the brass bits with Brassy Brass & chain mail. Highlight the dark boltgun with chainmail, and I did the skin loin cloth with dwarf flesh highlighted with bleached bone

Step 6

Ink the non armour areas with Devlan mud and I decided to go for a desert themed base as I was getting bored of "normal" looking bases and the lightness of the base is a complete opposite to the darkness of the model so I think it suits it well.

I was tempted to go down the resin route with regards to bases but I'm still in two minds on that one, also I showed Spencer some pictures earlier via my phone and he's suggested painting the oval chamber thing near the rear of the gun in a differant colour, agree or disagree??

Anyhow hope you found the above useful and as always comments welcome,

Month end update... October.....

So yet another month creeps past like the ninja from Tenchu......

I've finally managed to get the last of my black orc's painted and spent a fair few days magnetising the whole of the army only to discover that 8th Ed warhammer isn't quite as good as I expected, reasons for this where...

The new horde rules, ok nice idea but when facing 18 ogres, 30 chaos warriors, 1 khornate champion and a alter of chaos in your first game for well over 2 years its not particularly entertaining from my side of the table...

High Elves, ok so they always strike first but the guy was getting rerolls due to his initiative being so high and promptly chomped through my army...

Maybe I need to get some more games in who knows, but hey at least the army is just about painted!!

So I've managed to get two of the Retribution ghost snipers done, really nice models just a shame that privateer press haven't done an alternative pose,

Pretty easy to do to be honest but look quite nice,

Then I managed to get the last of the Micro Armour done, 2 havocs and 10 BRDM'3 aka anti-tank units, I was kinda wondering how much I've actually got now since starting collecting back in September, the answer was a bloody lot!!

Over all its been fairly un-productive month painting wise, but I'm sure once I get the Emperors Children on the painting table that'll get my painting going again for some reason I enjoy painting 40K more than anything else??

talking about 40K I was having a rummage through some boxes and came across this little lot, not these are all thats left from my chaos warhammer army, back in the day when you could have daemons and warriors in the same list, but I figured that they would be best used in my 40K daemon army and so all I need to do is play a few games and see what the screamers and the herald on chariot are actually like!

So the "pledge" for October wasn't too bad scraping in by the skin of my teeth...

Bought  25
Painted  27

So +2, I've been keeping track of the "pledge" since Jan this year all I've got to do is suss out how to put an excel spreadsheet on this blog and you can have a good look at what I've achieved at the end of this year.