Wood Elf Hobby Progress

The lead-up to Bendigo Besieged was a bit of a hurry for me. It probably shouldn't have been, but it turns out I was fighting some health issues that were affecting my energy levels, and it made a relatively small job feel like a major undertaking. I had decided to take Wood Elves into the tournament because I never really got a chance to use the 8th edition Wood Elf book. This is all well and good, but for all that I've had a Wood Elf army for nearly 30 years, it's generally not been my go-to force for most of that time. The army has suffered a fair bit of neglect, and it needed work.

I decided I wanted to use a Lord on Stag, as it was a comp bonus and worked OK with my silly Moonstone of the Hidden Ways plans. I had a model that I picked up second-hand at some point, but it wasn't painted - I had never used it before. I also decided to include Waywatchers. I had never used them before either, so they were obviously not painted either. And I wanted to use Wardancers, which I hadn't used since 5th edition... And their paint jobs reflected this.

I did hatch these plans weeks in advance, so there should have been time to deal with all of these issues, as well as sundry extra things like an extra Warhawk Rider. I dragged my feet a while, but eventually knuckled down and got most of what I needed done. There were some other things I might have added like a new BSB and even a more suitable Spellweaver, but I was running out of time and I got distracted near the end by doing some extra stuff for a friend's army at the last minute.

Anyway, these models have already appeared in my report of the tournament, but here are some better shots of them.

Yeah, his spear is bent. Not sure when that happened, but I'm worried the paint will immediately fall off if I bend it back. I'm not a big fan of this model. Wood Elves from this era in general seem to be covered in layers of nick-knacks and details, and if you're trying to use a relatively limited colour palette, you end up looking for endless variations of the same colours to try and pick things out. I prefer the older models. This guy in particular is not really posed well for a general - leaning forward, his face half-covered in a mask and leaning into his own shoulder.

He has like 5 layers of cloaks. Maybe it's a sign of rank or something. Who needs that many cloaks? The Stag is meant to have something different where the quiver is - another spear bundled up with stuff - but I don't think I have those things, so settled for a High Elf quiver I had lying around.

Again, I decided I preferred the older 5th edition Waywatchers to the newer 6th edition ones (I had both to choose from). I still found these guys a bit challenging in terms of covering all the details in different colours when I didn't want to use too wide a palette.

I remember seeing a Waywatcher in White Dwarf many years ago that had been painted with a variety of leaf colours on his cloak, like a shifting array through the seasons into reds and browns. It looked beautiful. Yeah, I didn't do that. Ain't nobody got time for that...

The Wardancers are not new paintjobs. In fact they're very old. These models were painted (and matt varnished) for a tournament back in 5th edition (or even earlier - some of them were probably painted in 4th ed). They had lost tons of paint, were based incorrectly for how I do things nowadays, and their painting lacked depth in terms of shading. Anyway, this was a quick revival effort involving washes, highlights and basing.

Here are a couple that haven't received the extra attention yet, just to show you the difference.

Anyway, this was a good project to step my Wood Elves closer to a usable army. Unfortunately there's a lot still needing attention (Wild Riders, Enternal Guard and Wildwood Rangers, just to highlight some big gaps). They may never get there... With the impending release of The Old World, who knows what things will look like in a few months?