Tuesday 25 June 2013

The Ents March to War

It's been a long time since I've done any work on my Wood Elf army. Up until I started Skaven with the release of the Island of Blood box a couple of years ago, they were pretty much my only army as they were the only figures I took to Liverpool with me when I moved to university (at the time, 2006, they were still relatively new and powerful!) I have a decent collection of figures for them - all the figures from the current range were painted and playable, but I also had a bunch of 5th Edition figures from when I started collecting them. Even though I painted all the current range figures that I have, the actual collecting of the army stalled while I was at uni (with figure money being wholly requisitioned as beer money!) and so I never did collect everything that I wanted.

Even though I've been playing Wood Elves since the beginning of 6th Edition, 8th Edition has affected the Wood Elf army so drastically (more so than most other armies) that it's now essentially a completely different animal to what I was used to in 6th and 7th Edition. 8th Edition is still rather unfamiliar to me and I've played it so little that I'm basically back to Beginner level all over again. With Wood Elves creeping back onto my gaming radar, and with the advice I've been given as a result of recent games I've played, I'm now looking at revisiting my Wood Elves - the majority were painted several years ago (they're not my best and some aren't even painted at all) and since then I've seen so many brilliant examples of Wood Elf armies that mine are no longer really acceptable. I don't claim to be a brilliant painter, but I can do a much better job of them and as my favourite army, they deserve better! 

With my enthusiasm for my Wood Elves now rising again, it would be nice to update them with a fresh paintjob and some more figures to round out the collection. I've wanted to do an "alternative" colour scheme for a while, inspired by examples on Asrai.org, and really want a Winter themed army (in the end I plumped for painting the figures as a fairly standard green Summer army, but the thought of Winter Wood Elves was always in my mind).

The task of repainting my existing figures is still being debated (whether I change the colour scheme, simply improve on the existing colour scheme, or just leave the models completely as they are) but in the meantime, the new list I want to use requires that I build some more models - specifically, Treekin. 

I'm not a great fan of the GW models, so I made three of my own Treekin back when I first started playing Wood Elves in earnest through 7th Edition:

My three existing Treekin

Nowadays, in the cut and thrust of 8th Edition, three Treekin doesn't do the job so it's time to build three more!

Treekin in various states of completion
As you can see, the right hand model is essentially complete;
the centre and left hand models are still only armatures.

The new Treekin in the right of the above pictures has been half-built for at least a couple of years now, and has been sat languishing in a drawer along with my half-built Treeman. The two armatures accompanying the Treekin above have been put together over the last 24 hours or so, and I'll begin sculpting work on them during the rest of the week.

Even though he's not required in the list I intend to try out in my next game, I figured that while I was building Treekin I'd try and complete the half-built Treeman as well. This is the one big omission from my Wood Elf collection (everyone should have a Treeman, yet I don't...) so it was about time I finished him. With the chunks of Green Stuff I've had left over from putting the Treekin armatures together, I've made a bit of progress with the sculpting of the Treeman today and Sunday evening. His feet are a bit spindly and weedy-looking so I'm now in the process of adding small armatures to construct roots around, to give him "toes" and support the weight of the immense tree body!




2 comments:

  1. Looking forward to seeing the completed figure painted up.

    Regards,
    Matt

    ReplyDelete