In the immortal words of Britney Spears, “Oops!... I Did It Again.” This time it wasn’t entirely a surprise. Unlike my usual approach to these articles, I don’t have a complete army ready to share already, instead I’m taking a more Jeff-like approach and intending to bring you with me on this journey. I don’t want this project to become all-consuming, so I’m intending to lean on the lessons from my previous armies.
Why
I mentioned in our yearly update that I’d been thinking about some Aeldari Corsairs. There’s a few models in the Aeldari range I’ve always really loved. The Wraithknight is one, the plane another (and I do love warhammer planes). So there’s been a constant niggle in my head about finding a way to get a small force of Aeldari together to mostly ally with other Aeldari players, but allow me to knock out a few of my favourite units. And, yeah, ok, a Wraithknight is not a small commitment, shush you.
So when GW produced the Corsair Kill Team, my brain started whirring. Could this be the “small band” I wanted? Why yes, yes it is! But I tucked that idea away, I was busy with other projects. Until the wonderful Mike Brooks wrote his damned book Voidscarred. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s really good. So I went to order a box and found they were out of print!
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| Image Credit: Black Library, used without permission for illustrative purposes only. |
This was a tragedy of the highest order. I quickly bought the last one I could find from the 3rd party retailers, then got a friend in Europe to grab me another. I figured beyond that if I needed more infantry I could kitbash some Guardians and Kabalites and mix them in with the Corsairs parts to bulk things out.
But everything changed when the fire nation attacked GW released Maelstrom. Just as I was starting to gather a little pirate force, suddenly they were producing brand new models and rules for Corsair armies! Why you do this to me GW?!?! And the problem with struggling to acquire something and leaping on any chance you get, then suddenly it’s all right there and available, is your mind doesn’t always change to the new reality and suddenly you’d ordered yourself a massive box of pirates and your friends have given you a birthday present and before you know it you’ve bought ~1,500pts of Eldar Pirates.
Then you get caught up preparing for a cool narrative campaign with your Imperial Knights and Imperial Guard for a few months, during which time new Guard models get released, and before you know it those pirates are lost at the back of the shelves for nearly a year. Fortunately Drew and Harvey have been scheming some pointy-eared schemes, and I want in, so my motivation has swung back to the space elves.
Making it my own
I’ll get into this more in later articles, but I had to start the army with a concept. What kind of pirates did I want to be? So, I thought about what aspect of Piracy appealed to me that I could really get behind. I mulled this over for quite a while. I consulted the great texts on piracy. I concurred that it isn't the looting or the cutlasses. It's not the grog or the scurvy. Or the scantily clad mermaids. In the end one single bit of piracy stood out to me, one single phrase that would become my waypoint for this army:
I decided that my group would be more akin to Rangers with a ship than swashbuckling loot hunters. They would be explorers, walkers of hidden paths and, because I wanted to make sure there were plenty of reasons for them to get into conflicts, protectors of nature and gamekeepers of the galaxy. This then gave me a theme to collect towards (expect plenty of Rangers in my pirate band) and directed me to think in terms of a kind of “Wood Elf” aesthetic for them.
Paint Scheme
So, “Wood Elf” theme established, I started to think about what that meant. Primarily greens and browns and other earthy colours. But I decided I wanted to avoid using Castellan Green as my primary colour because as much as I love that colour, that would be too similar to my Cadians and Imperial Knights. So I had a look at what alternative greens were available in spray format. The obvious option for me was Death Guard Green, as it was the only other “natural” looking green.
I already had a can kicking about, so I dragged out a poor old (more like ancient, all the way from the 3rd edition release box) Dark Eldar model, sprayed him up and started playing with options. With just one repaint I settled on a Death Guard Green base, with a Terminatus Stone highlight (Nurgling Green was just too similar) and an Athonian Camoshade wash.
With the base colour picked I then spent ages thinking about what other colours to mix in. I gave up on the Dark Eldar test model pretty quickly because it didn’t have the variety of shapes and materials the Corsairs have with their sweeping cloaks and tabards, their holsters and their soul stones.
So I turned to technology instead and grabbed a copy of the Impcat app. It’s a bit of a faff to use, relying on third party libraries to get GW models and colours, and doesn't yet have a Corsair model I could find, but I used an Autarch as a stand-in instead, as the closest thing I could find. I’ll spare you the full step-by-step and skip to the final scheme I settled on. The key take-away being that as silly as I find it to paint your helmet in a bright “shoot me” colour, it really did need something at the top to bring it all together and I settled on the cream.
I also threw the scheme onto a Ranger model too, since I intended to have many of them in my army and it’s important they look good too.
The final scheme then:
- Armour
- Base Death Guard Green
- Drybrush Terminatus Stone
- Wash Athonian Camoshade
- Cloth
- Base Castellan Green
- Drybrush Nurgling Green
- Wash Athonian Camoshade
- Helmet
- Base Wraithbone
- Drybrush Praxeti White
- Wash Watered-down Agrax Earthshade
- Webbing
- Base Thondia Brown
- Drybrush Golgfag Brown
- Wash Agrax Earthshade
- Weapons
- Base Dryad Bark
- Drybrush Sylvaneth Bark
- Wash Agrax Earthshade
- Silver
- Base Leadbelcher
- Wash Agrax Earthshade
- Wash Nuln Oil Gloss
- Drybrush Vallejo Air Steel
- Gold
- Base Retributor Armour
- Wash Agrax Earthshade
- Wash Agrax Earthshade Gloss
- Soulstones
- Base Retributor Armour
- Layer Spiritstone Red
- Eye Lenses
- Base Mephiston Red
With that all sorted, the last step was to test it all out on one of my actual Corsairs and hope it came out the way I wanted. This sounds silly, you should always do a test model, but I was weirdly reticent to “waste” one, even though the range has returned and I could easily get a replacement if I messed it up. I guess I’m already soaking up the feeling of how precious Aeldari lives are.
So there you have it. One Corsair. I’m pretty sure that’s the first Aeldari model I’ve ever painted. The official scheme has the armour details picked out in gold, but I’m happy with a slightly less showy look, the drybrush and wash doing plenty of work to pick out the details and make the armour look ornate anyway. Hopefully this should batch paint up fairly well, and although it’s certainly more faffy than I’d like it to be, it’s as quick as I can make it to a standard I find acceptable.
Onwards to the first complete unit!
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