Lead Under The Bed
In 2015 my son was born. 2015 was also the last time I updated this blog. There has not been much painting since then, but I’m starting to feel the urge to produce something again.
Until that happens here is a blitzer I never got around to post back then.
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| Dark Elf Blitzer |
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| Dark Elf Blitzer |
Witch elves are what makes dark elf teams so cool. They are expensive to hire and break easily, but the amount of damage they can do to your opponent’s team more than makes up for this.
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| Witch Elf |
From a modelling point of view they are really interesting too. I’ve always fancied Jes Goodwin’s Eldar harlequins and I wanted my witch elves to look something like that.
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| Witch Elf |
For a very long time I was struggling to find a combination of parts that I was satisfied with and I decided to scratch my first attempts. In the end I decided to use a Marauder witch elf combined with the legs of a female eldar harlequin. Since the face of the Marauder witch wasn’t exactly up to Jes Goodwin standards I also used the face mask of the harlequin.
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| Witch Elf |
The result is a witch elf in an attacking position which suits this kind of player well, I think.
Latest addition to the team is a blitzer. I wanted him to resemble the old starplayer Tuern Redvenom so I used his face mask, copied his thigh guards and combined them with the torso of one of the original blitzers.
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| Dark Elf Blitzer |
I used this technique to create the thigh guards and it worked really well. The head and legs were donated by old wood elf wardancers.
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| Dark Elf Blitzer |
I think he looks both meaner and more dynamic than the original blitzer models which is the way I like my dark elves.
Next up is a witch elf I have been working on for some time now.
Next player up for my dark elf team is an assassin. The fact that this player can run around stabbing his opponents in the back without risking getting caught by the referee is enough to include one, but overall I don’t find this player very useful.
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| Dark Elf Assassin |
The assassin does provide for an interesting modelling project though and I had this idea in my head that I just had to try out. I ended up using the body of an elf wardancer called Eidyn because of the very cool fighting claw he has strapped to his right arm. The head was taken from an eldar scout wearing a scarf.
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| Dark Elf Assassin |
I green stuffed the skull on the shoulder pad as well as the towel hanging from his waist. I chose to paint the base ring green. Green is normally reserved for blockers, but since dark elves don’t have any I figured that it would work as well as any other color.
I’ve finally managed to finish a couple of the dark elves that I started working on last year. My plan is to do a complete “Jes Goodwin” dark elf team and this is of course just the start.
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| Dark Elf Runner |
I ended up painting the runner’s mohawk in two tones to make him stand out on the board. After all he is the star of the team, sort of.
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| Dark Elf Lineman |
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.
