Painting Table: Swooping Hawks and Fire Dragons

After some waffling on my part last weekend, I decided to paint some Eldar. I'd continued my organizing binge, getting an old army box full of bits all cut out and organized. Some of these included about 1,000 points of Necrons and I was tempted to work on painting the mostly assembled Warriors. After some admonishment to stick with the Eldar from Ron and Chandler (before I decided to go to NOVA with my bugs), I got down to work. 

My first step was to pick the unit, and I opted for Swooping Hawks. I broke the wings off the already assembled models to make painting them easier. I was using old metal minis from 2nd edition, and a metal Baharroth, who will usually act as an Exarch. I started with a blue base of Caledor Sky from the airbrush.

I followed that up with a coat of Lothern Blue.

And finally Lothern blue mixed about 50/50 with white.

For the wings, I then added a dusting of white, particularly on the upper wings. I also did so on Baharroth's head feather and some the helms of the other Hawks at about a 60 degree angle. .

From here, I'm planning on doing a series of washes and line highlighting on the feathers, adding some color, working from purple at the base of the wings up to yellow/white at the top. Thinking sunset here, but almost exclusively on the edges, trying to give them an iridescent, shimmer look. The bodies will get some white edge highlights on the armor, with a dark blue wash for the body suit. The guns and equipment will then be painted in a bone, which I plan to be a unifying feature of the Alaitoc-ish paint scheme I'm planning.

I had some more time to paint, but not very good lighting - was asked to turn off the overhead light by my wife since it is quite bright and she was watching TV (as alluded to in my NOVA post - she's awesome so I'm not going to deny her request). Because of the lighting, I decided I would do some basecoating on other minis rather than strain to do detail work. I opted to go ahead and work with the Fire Dragons.

I didn't get any work in progress pics because of the light, but the above is the result of my base coat. I started with Naggaroth Night, then did a coat of Dark Reaper and then Dawnstone Grey, trying for about a 45 degree dusting. The end result is a little brighter than I wanted so I plan on varnishing the minis and then doing black and purple washes to lower the tone and bring out the purple a little more in the crevices.

My inspiration for these guys is this pic I found on the GW flickr. I have a good bit of work to get anywhere close to it though:

All that said, these bad boys are going to have to wait on the shelf until I power through most/all of my NOVA to do list.