The Ancient Kin – An Elf Project

Continued work on the Phoenix Guard. They get white helmets with colourful embellishments to match my other High Elves, so they may easily be mixed in as part of the same unit, or be designated as unit leaders/ lead-mooks/ sergeants.

Switching back over to the darker side of the project again, I’ve got an assassin from Mantic. He’s listed as a Dark Elf assassin, purchased during the Dungeon Saga Kickstarter. He could be an opponent or a character.

Although the mini will be part of my Dark Elf collection, I’ll paint the mini with the same skin tone as my High Elves. This will hint that he is not of Drow/ Dark Elf heritage, and the skin will match with the first Mantic Elves that I painted.

This was a fairly quick paint job. Started on 14 Dec 18. Basic black cloth, leather armour and a couple of spot colours. I used the same red and teal as I used in the previous Dark Elves, the Witches.

I’ve come back to the third of the three Witches I started earlier. I couldn’t get the skin tone where I wanted it on this one before. That’s ok, as they were a bit of an experiment anyway. I’ve tried to take this one more towards the palid skin I did on the one of the first two this time.

This meant a bit more layering and glazing of my skin colours, as well a few glazed of the purple wash to try and smooth out the contrast.

Adding in colour to the hair, boots, tabard etc… still not entirely done with the skin though…

The next Dark Elf up is Red Vanielle – The Dark Beloved. The mini is an Elf Assassin from Red Box Games If you don’t know them, they do true scale 28mm minis, definitely check them out!

I had started this mini before the Witch Elves, but then wasn’t sure how to proceed on the skin. Hence the Dark Elves previously done ?

The skin at this stage:

• White Spray primer
• GW Codex Grey
• GW Hybrid Purple Ink (really old!)

I started work on the skin tone… but only on the legs for some reason.  I’m not really sure what I’m thinking, I’m never confident enough that I can replicate the exact same effect later. This usually isn’t a problem across multiple minis, but if I end up with diffferent colours across one mini… ?

Glazing with a mix of:

• Codex Grey
• Hybrid Purple Ink
• Shadow Black Ink (just a touch)

in order to build shadow.

Then highlighting with

• Codex Grey
• GW Bleached Bone

The mix is about 3:1 but adjusted on the fly…

Results:

I decided that the skin was a little too pale, so I thought about adding a little extra cooour. This thought was reinforced by @horati0nosebl0wer too. So I added a couple of glazes of a blue.

• GW Asurmen Blue Wash

This was applied thin, mixed with water. It was applied carefully in the shadows and where skin was adjacent to clothing/ hair/ metal.

Moving on to the garments adorning the mini… I hesitate to call it armour!

The Black is the same as used on the Dark Elf Witches. The leather is:

• Vallejo German Camo Brown base
• GW Brown Ink wash
• GW Snakebite Leather 1st Highlight
• Vallejo Khaki 2nd Highlight

The leather was applied to the bodice and thong, as well as most of the straps around the arms and legs.

The red cord (I imaging it would be used as a garotte) was fairly simple:

• GW Mechrite Red base
• GW Brown Ink

thats it!