Some High Elves. :3

I've been debating whether I wanted to post these... but I eventually convinced myself it couldn't hurt... I may cry though if you're mean. :3

These are the start of my new High Elf WHFB army, but most of the archers are also converted for Mordheim - most of them have those duel daggers from the Glade Guard boxed kit, as well as their heads. The Seaguard I like to field in Mordheim too, despite the insane cost to represent them, but only after the army is really well established and capable of taking a loss. I usually use the rules for human mercenaries, usually Reikland if I'm going to use a lot of archers. :3







Hope you like them... I went for a black and white theme, and use a lot of cold colors because I wanted them to look like they come from the mountains. Lots of White Lions on the way... but I'm interested in people's opinions. I've been painting them for so long I've lost all perspective - I just know I like them. :3

VERY COOL! I like the choice of colors; the black & orange/scarlet looks MUCH better than that blue GW seems SO attached to. EXCELLENT painting & basing. VERY WELL DONE!
Using the Reikland stats is a clever way of avoiding the "over powered" aspect of Elves that some folks find so annoying.

Thanks Nala. :3

I felt pretty much the same way about GW's colors... they certainly paint better than me, but I never really cared much for their colors - a bit too garish.

I just finished putting the shields, static grass and snow on a unit of 20 Seaguard... I'll take some pictures soon of them, along with a few of my Mordheim Elves. :3

Great stuff!

Do you have a sharp close-up of the female archers face? It looks fabulous!

I don't have a close up, but I'll try to get one... I'm still trying to figure out how to use this camera. I've read a few guides on taking pictures of miniature.... and insects, hehe... so I'll try to get a clearer one... and yeah, she's one of my favorites too. :3

More pictures. I'm going to just post links from now on, so I don't kill anyone's computer. First, the close up pictures of my androgynous looking archers Eliazar asked for. :3

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0141.jpg

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0144.jpg

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0149.jpg

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0152.jpg

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0169.jpg

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0173.jpg

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0176.jpg

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0178-1.jpg (froggy)

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v11/Milliardo/High%20Elves/DSCN0179.jpg (the complete unit)

I don't really like taking super close pictures like that, because all I can see are all the flaws I've made. The last picture is my favorite by far for that reason... I think that's the perfect distance for my level of painting right now. :3

In my opinion, the close-ups look just fine, nothing to hide there Especially as you are painting a whole army of them.

And these faces..! How do you do this? I am always glad to just somehow paint the eyes so it doesn't look as if the miniatures are squinting...

Oh, and I don't think the pics will kill a computer, so you can directly upload them and make viewing so much easier for all of us

Haha, thanks man. I do like the way the army is going so far, but god, this camera really changes the way they look. I've tried lots of different light and color settings, and the red still looks orange. I think it bothers me because I put a hell of a lot of time and patience into them, and what looks like a tiny, almost characterful mistake in 1:1 scale suddenly turns into this hideous aberration worthy of ritual suicide. :3

The faces for me are probably my most confident area - I love painting faces. I start over a Chaos Black undercoat, and apply a dark brown - usually Dark Flesh or Scorched Brown. From there, I go back and repaint the lips and the eyes black. This is essentially lip and eye liner, so I try to keep the shape accurate to the model underneath. After that, I carefully shape the brush on my fingernail, then place a skull white dot in the center of the eye, and try to gently pull it into a trapezoidal shape, being careful to leave some black showing around the edge... the lips I do pretty much the same with, except I use Red Gore or something colorful for the females. The men get the base brown mixed with dwarf flesh or something.
After the eye is dried, I dot it with black for a pupil... I usually cheat and try to put the dot closer to the top, bottom or the corner of the eye, in case I screw up and put too much on. As long as both pupils are looking in the same direction, this helps a lot - it's very hard to center a dot of black on something small.
After that, I generally start layering up the face color, mixing it with the last color to get a smoother transition (dwarf flesh/bronze flesh, elf flesh, bleached bone, skull white). The eye is shaped by pushing the color towards it, so the shape is defined by the brown around it rather than trying to paint a shape that small directly. :3

And that's why I get upset with why my camera doesn't work so well - I put way too much time into them to get little problems like that.

Anyway, I'll upload more pictures, and take your advice and just post the picture directly.

A picture of the army so far...


A Mordheim character, wielding a Owl. :3


Seaguard Champion


Seaguard Hornblower


Standard Bearer (Right Side)


Standard Bearer (Left Side)


Seaguard R&F 1


Seaguard R&F 2


Mordheim Swordself


Mordheim Swordself 2


Thanks for the comments so far you two. My next project will be an RBT and it's crew... so I'll see you in another year at this rate. >_>

Don't feel you can ONLY post finished pieces; WIP shot are both as welcome &, often, more enlightening [makes theft of ideas easier ] than photos of the completed minis...also adds an element of suspense.

I have notice the color distortion & fault emphasizing qualities of photos also. With the faults, this is mostly due to the larger than life thingy, but the color problem is another aspect of the contrary nature of my EVIL Camera from HELL.

Yes, the lightning problem is a bitch... I paint under a natural light bulb when most people should be sleeping, yet these pics are taken under plain old 60 watt lightbulbs... they don't really even feel like my models when I upload them to my computer.

I'm actually not really comfortable posting much, probably because I have a huge ego and when I'm not praised to the heavens, I feel like I've done something wrong. X3 Also, when it comes to sharing modeling ideas, I can sometimes begin channeling Gollum, selfishly hording all my good ideas. I tend to have bursts of being terrifyingly outgoing, which makes people vaguely uncomfortable, followed by months and months of severe anti-social behavior. Good stuff! :3

That said, I do have these Silverhelms... I was originally going to turn them into Wild Kin, so I used the pauldrons and crests that come in the kit on the backs of their left hands, to simulate combination hand weapons/bucklers... then later, I decided to turn them into Chrace themed Dragon Princes. Now they've hit sort of a middle ground, and I'm using them to represent the nobility of a lost and hidden High Elf colony from Chrace in the Middle of the Vault Mountains... so their armor is lined with White Lion fur, and they have big chunky plaited braids with bits of iron chain woven in. They're now back to being Silverhelms, and I plan to run them as a mini-deathstar CR Bus, complete with BSB. Please pardon my crappy Greenstuff skills. :3

The Unit


And the rear...


This guy seems to be ordering someone to do something...


This one seems to be giving someone the bird...


In case I do want to make them into Dragon Princes, I used a Glade Guard Banner, and tried to convert the Spites into some young dragons (Drakes? Draglets?)


And there we are...

VERY, VERY NICE! I LOVE what you did with the GSing, especially the braided hair & those little Guys on the spear. WELL DONE!

When I started down the Road of Mini Madness, ALL the REALLY good painters seemed intent on taking their secrets to the Grave...it's only recently that this has happily change.

Thanks, my GS skill is still pretty new... but I really enjoy doing fur and hair, and I'm branching off from there.

Tonight I've gone a bit nuts with it... I've got about a dozen miniatures, mostly from Reaper I'm converting into High Elves for Mordheim and heroes for WHFB.

I turned Sigvald the Magnificent into a large, Greatsword wielding elf without a shield and furred shoulders pads, perfect to represent myself - I've got the magnificent hair, the magnificent height, and a pretty magnificent face, but I'm a few weeks on the Stairmaster short of the magnificent ass, which I've hidden somewhat with a waist sash and short sword. I just... I just couldn't walk around with my butt hanging out like that, let alone fight like that.

Right now I'm working on adding furred shoulder pads and pelts to most of them... I'm thinking about using the Middenheimer rules and their Wolf Pelt Hunt thing to represent White Lions. I'll try to get pictures of the unfinished models later while I'm still in an outgoing mood... you guys can of course speed this up by dumping lots of undeserved praise on me. Kitty-lion-elf feeds on it. :3

Well, my fellow insomniac, you've had a productive evening/morning/whatever. As a Goblin Guy I don't tend to think of things Elven, but the Middenheimers would fit the White Lion persona nicely...WOW an unshooty Band of Pointy Eared Ones, what a concept!
I LOVE the Reaper Elves especially Werner Klocke's scupts &, in particular, the Babes.

Werner Klocke is indeed one of my favorites. The guy must've raided my brain, and took one of my characters (this picture I drew in 96') I've been roleplaying, drawing and painting for the past 15 years, and put her into model form. I damn near passed out when I found her. I need to buy four more so I can covert her into carrying different sized swords, and put her on a horse. :3

COOL! I somehow missed seeing that one before now....matches the sketch nicely. W.K. does beautiful work & Babes ARE definitely his specialty. I think you've motivated me to go searching through the dusty corridors of the Vault of Pack Rattiness to see what WORKS of WONDER I have from Reaper...I LOVE these excuses to ignore my commission stuff; Thanks.

These look excellent!

Quote :

I do like the way the army is going so far, but
god, this camera really changes the way they look. I've tried lots of
different light and color settings, and the red still looks orange. I
think it bothers me because I put a hell of a lot of time and patience
into them, and what looks like a tiny, almost characterful mistake in
1:1 scale suddenly turns into this hideous aberration worthy of ritual
suicide. :3

Check out the sticky post about taking pictures of your minis here: https://boringmordheimforum.forumieren.com/tutorials-f18/tutorial-taking-photos-of-your-miniatures-by-hyun-t705.htm

It really helped me improve my pictures. One of the best things you can do is download Picasa ( http://picasa.google.com/ ) and use that to get the colors right. Usually you just have to load an image and hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button and it'll auto-fix all the colors and everything for you, but the options are there for tweaking it all yourself.

Ah thanks, Svenn!

We actually had that same topic posted at Ulthuan.net, but the link went dead... I read it a while ago, but had forgotten a lot of it, clearly. I think the main thing I was doing wrong was in using direct light - most of the minis in the photos above have two desk lamps pointed straight at them. X3 I've also changed the light setting to incandescent, and that seems to yield a more realistic tone. Thanks a bunch. :3

No problem.

And I highly suggest using Picasa. I greatly improved my base technique with some minor changes to camera settings and lighting, but Picasa really made them look great.

I decided to take a break from my painting and movie watching, and broke out the camera to take some quick shots of the RBT I'm working on. I also took a few in progress pictures of the eyes of the crew - hopefully it'll make my explanation a little clearer.

RBT and assorted bits. Note the gun-rail site taken from a Chariot. I like to mount things like quivers, spears, shields and spites on extra bases... that way if a character picks up extra equipment in a campaign, I can put them in base contact to show they're carrying extra kit. They also make good unit filler if I'm short on models.


A picture showing the eyes and lips, before adding dwarf flesh. Also note the GS fur shoulders. :3


Same model, different angle. You can see the sword I gave him too.


The other crew member, looking to the left.


Milli the Barbarian. I left off Sigvald's buckler, and replaced the arm with an Elf Warrior arm. GS'ed the shoulder pads to cover the Slanneshi indentation. The GS on his head is difficult to see, but it's a 'Sun Wukong' Circlet. :3


Same model, different angle. I also gave him a sash with a belt and short sword. In WHFB, he'll be armed with a Greatweapon, and in Mordheim, he'll be armed with a sword and handweapon until I can get him a greatsword and the required skill to use it.


And the Noble leading my first 500 pts, armed perhaps with a Reaver Bow and two hand weapons. I gave her a hat. :3 I know elves don't wear human hats, but I like some of the old WHFRP art with Marienburg Sea Elves in pirate outfits. I'll paint it with a metallic rim, and claim it counts as a helmet... and if she picks up throwing knives, I'll claim she uses her hat like Oddjob. :3

All VERY COOL, but I LOVE the hat. From a Goblin's perspective ALL Elves are Odd Jobs.

Awesome! I, too, prefer your colours to GW's.

Nice work. The conversions are pretty stunning. I love the braids coming out from beneath the helmets.

Thanks for the comments guys. :3

No pictures tonight, but I am hard at work on the RBT crew and their warmachine. I wanted to ask a question though, and it might sound a little strange...

I've posted a few pictures from this army on other boards, and I was dismayed by the lack of comments - you guys have clearly been the most supportive and have asked the most questions. I have no complaints about this board, but I seem to have triggered something I didn't take into account... I've been getting private messages, and even one direct comment that basically boils down to "lawl, your models look like they have lipstick!" to which I reply, "That was kind of the point." and go on to make a comment about samurai warpaint. ... and then I either get dead air or some kind of homophobic comment.

I didn't even really think about it when I went to paint the army, and I'll be damned if I'm going to change it now, but I really didn't think it would trigger such a strange reaction... has my army weirded anyone here out? Am I alone in being disgusted by PM's like that, or the insinuation I'm making social commentary or attacking someone's comfort zone with a paint scheme? I think I'm just going to pull my thread from the other forum at this point... It's as hilarious to me as it is ridiculous.

I wouldn't pull your threads from the other forums. We are fortunate to have a high percentage of folks who actively contribute to the forum & approach the gaming & crafting with a sense of good fellowship. Many forums have more lurkers, but lurkers need inspiration like the rest of us.

Elves do have a rather ethereal quality that might suggest femininity...a lot of the Gals in the craft seem to be drawn to this aspect. I think you've captured the proper feel/character of the subject. I REALLY like your painting style & choice of colors. I often make depricating remarks about Elves, but this is kind of playing out my Goblin perspective. While Goblins & Babes are my favorites, the Pointy Eared Ones are GREAT FUN to paint up & are undoubtedly among the finest of minis available.

Should you get any TRULY objectionable PMs, please feel free to PM any of us Mods or Admin Tom; we'll sort it out. Maintaining the good fellowship nature of the Forum is vital to its continuation as a pleasant place to visit.

Ah, I didn't get any negative PM's from anyone here, but on those other forums. :3

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it boils down to is that I've never really seen elves as excessively masculine or macho... I can't stand that kind of thing myself, although I don't get on peoples cases about it. But I have to laugh at people who defend the image of elves as hardass manly men, and get upset by the plaited braids, skirts (It's a kilt) and hoop earrings on the White Lions. When it's pointed out that Vikings also had plaited braids and earrings, they're still upset because they're stuck with their petty modern sensibilities.

I'm a little bit bothered by the fact people get on peoples cases who choose to dress or act a certain way, because to me it implies they look down on women for doing those things... in other words, people who act flamboyant or feminine in some way are in someway inherently inferior.

I've always liked the elves because they've got muddled gender stereotypes, with narcissistic elven men who wear makeup, and elven princesses who can cut down a chaos lord while wearing heels.

I've probably got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about this issue... I'm 6'5, 250 lbs, lift weights, do martial arts, but I'm also narcissistic, have long hair that I actually brush, etc. I don't tend to run into any direct discrimination in real life because of the latter reasons... at least not from people who aren't in passing cars or in groups of 10+. The worst I get is I pick up nicknames like Fabio or Beastmaster. I find the subtlety implied threat of getting hit in the face repeatedly makes people a lot more polite, and I'm just not used to dealing with it from Warhammer people... It's a little disappointing I have to defend my own army, and I'm trying and failing to maintain a sense of humor about it. :3

Ah well, point made, stress relieved, thanks for listening, on with the show - I'm better now. :3