I’ve always loved dark elves. I’ve played them in local leagues, tournaments and on fumbbl and I’ve always preferred them to their lawful wood elf and high elf cousins.
For some reason I’ve never painted a team of these evil elves though I’ve owned the miniatures for ages and it was only recently that I found out why. More on that later.
It’s not that I didn’t try in the past. In the early days of Blood Bowl 3rd edition I ran a dark elf squad named the Purple Reign. I painted a blitzer and that was it. I enjoyed playing the team, but I didn’t enjoy painting the miniatures.
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| Dark Elf Blitzer |
Years later I tried again. This time I wanted to recreate the 2nd edition team the Naggaroth Nightwings. Again I failed.
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| Naggaroth Nightwings Blitzer |
The years passed and I forgot all about my beloved dark elves, but then the dark elf roster was changed as it was too similar to the high elf roster. One of the changes was the introduction of runners and though they are comparable to conventional throwers I still wanted to convert a miniature that would catch the feel of a fast elf dumping off the ball.
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| Dark Elf Runner |
The result was a converted 2nd edition dark elf thrower with his right hand repositioned and his legs removed and replaced by the legs of an old Warhammer wardancer. His head was kindly donated by a Marauder sea elf.
Still I didn’t get around to paint the team and it was only when I discovered axiom’s excellent dark elf Blood Bowl team that it became apparent to me that the reason was that I just didn’t like the miniatures. Normally I’m a huge fan of everything 2nd edition, but the dark elf miniatures just have so short legs that they would be better suited as chaos dwarves…
I never considered Gary Morley’s 3rd edition dark elf team as they are as ugly as everything else he sculpted and not in the same league as Jes Goodwin’s elf minitures that I loved to paint. How I wish that Jes had done the dark elves as well and not just Tuern Redvenom.
Like axiom I decided to take the dark path and try to create my own Jes Goodwin dark elf team. While axiom decided to base his team on the Jes Goodwin Blood Bowl elves I decided to take a different route. I rather liked the look of the uniform on the original miniatures, I just didn’t like the miniature’s anatomy. What I really wanted was a full squad of Tuern Redvenoms so I figured I would use the torsos of the original miniatures and combine them with some slender elf legs, much like I did on the runner.
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| Dark Elf Lineman |
What I’m planning to do is to create som static looking linemen and some positional players in more dynamic poses. The lineman above is based on a regular lineman with his legs replaced with ones of an old Warhammer wood elf champion. His head is from the same wardancer that donated legs to the runner. To finish him off I copied the thigh guards of Tuern Redvenom and glued them onto my new lineman. I’ll cover how to do this in a future blog post.
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| Dark Elf Linewoman |
The next model I completed was initially meant to be used as one of the witch elves, but in the end I decided that the miniature was too heavily armoured to represent an amour value 7 player. I removed Tuern’s head and replaced it with that of an elf cheerleader which resulted in one mean looking female dark elf. As dark elves traditionally make use of both male and female warriors in the same units I decided that she would end up being used as a linewoman.
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| Witch Elf |
I was now the owner of a headless cheerleader so it made sense to use the long sexy legs for one of the witch elves. Again I used the torso of a thrower, but this time I replaced the right hand with a fist of a Marauder witch elf who also donated her head to the good cause.
So that’s four out of sixteen done. Of course they still need to painted and I’ve decided to paint them black and yellow to represent the Ulthuan Renegades.
