Objective Secured: Dark eldar mandrake conversion

Saturday, 4 October 2014

Dark eldar mandrake conversion

I was commenting recently on a post by greggles over on feed you nerd and was talking about the different levels of painting and what the goals are when doing a piece or army.
I paint my space wolves to a high standard but I do take short cuts, such as using washes for the shading of the armour rather than line highlighting ect. I also concentrate more on the focal areas such as faces, wolf pelts ect that realy draw the eye. I find this necessary as I am quite a slow painter, but I also wanted to be able to field a fully painted army on the tabletop that followed a style and process throughout the army.
The problem with this approach to army painting is that it can sometimes stagnate and not really push the boundaries that are established when painting through an army. Of course one off projects can help to challenge this but I wanted to see how I could push myself on a consistent basis with an army, that used alot of skills amd colours I was not used to painting or even thinking about. This is where my current dark eldar carnival project came from. I really wanted something different to paint, that would help me with my progress, and the gorgeous DE modles really fitted the bill. Having a love for conversions I decided that not only would I push myself paint wise but also in the modelling dept. And thus my harlequin carnival - 'La Danse Macabre' was born.
For over a year now I have been working on this army. I have a project log over on the dark that I chronicled my progress (my first baby steps into blogging :) ) and the great community and feedback really helped me keep going. Anyway enough rambling from me, I just wanted to show my most recently painted unit, carnival mandrakes. They were done a couple of months ago, but I have not done any more on the dark kin since, and consider them the best minis I have painted to date. They show a nice contrast to the more gritty space wolves from my previous posts, and have really challenged the way I think about painting, from colour composition, wet blending, and line highlighting ect. I hope this all made some sense, and would love to hear how you all push yourselves in the hobby, and what projects helped/are helping you do that.